Is musicality nature or nurture? Yes.

Music appears to be both learned and innate. The equipment is all there at birth, but it's only partially assembled. You learn music the way you learn eating with a fork: practice, practice, practice. The more practice time you put in, the better you are at it. Practicing for most musicians of my acquaintance mostly consists of small, chunked fragments of music, repeated and repeated and repeated. Neurons that fire together, wire together; you play that diminished scale lick or whatever over and over until the algorithm gets physically encoded in the brain. The process of efflorescence and pruning that produces music is like gardening: it takes time, a certain amount of stability, a lot of attention.

The more time I spend with music and musicians, the more convinced I am that there are no geniuses. There are masters, the way there are T'ai Chi masters. But nobody's born a master, any more than anyone is born knowing T'ai Chi. Music is a set of human skills whose mastery require the tight focusing of your scarce attentional resources. Master musicians the world over have one thing in common: they practice devoutly and hard, every day, day in and day out, though the specific form practice takes varies widely across cultures. As with prodigies in math and sports and so on, 'miraculous' musical skills inevitably turn out to be the result of hours and hours and hours of repetitive labor. Coltrane and Monk were 'geniuses' because they felt compelled to spend their every waking moment studying and practicing jazz, and they were fortunately able to eke out a living doing so. There's a certain obsessive-compulsive quality to both men that you see in so many great scientists and authors and zen monks: a withdrawal from the world, voluntarily or under duress, to focus attention like a laser on one particular pursuit: bebop, or relativity, or chanting mantras, or whatever.

I believe music consists of memes that at this point are self-replicating entities in their own right, residing in our collective heads the way computer viruses reside on the Internet and biological viruses reside in our bodies. What makes a person a 'musician' is entirely a matter of circumstances. Every neurologically ordinary human is born with the capacity to make and understand music. In some human cultures, musical activity is broadly encouraged: big swaths of Africa and the Caribbean, parts of America. In others, it's broadly discouraged: Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, parts of America. Encouragement plus free time plus lively musical culture plus a certain amount of obsessive-compulsive disorder often yields: musician.

If you were to draw a graph of my happiness and the percentage of my time I spent on music, there would be a simple one-to-one correspondence over pretty much the course of my entire life. Here's the whole story of my relationship to my late father: he always kept a lot of musical instruments around the house, fun ones, groovy Casio synths and accordions and strange percussion thingies. It would have never occurred to me to play or even express a vocal interest in these things in Dad's presence. I did some furtive exploration of them when no one was around, but would have just about died of embarassment if anyone had heard me.

musicality in my family

Dad

An avid classical music buff with floor-to-ceiling shelves of opera CDs, etc. He was an on-and-off amateur pianist and accordion player, and was always supportive of my musical ambitions. He bought me some incredible jazz albums - the Duke Ellington Orchestra 1946-47 collection, Miles Davis and Gil Evans' Porgy And Bess, and so on. It's too bad he never got to hear any of my bands or theater music, he would have dug 'em.

Mom

An enthusiastic listener to classic Motown, Bach, Steve Reich, drone-intensive music from Asia and India, and tough female blues singers.

Ralph

An enthusiastic listener to tough blues singers of all descriptions, and a classic rock buff. It was thanks to my stepfather that I had the incomparable privilege of growing up in a household with the complete Beatles on CD.

Giovanna

Shared my dad's tastes in highbrow European art music, but also had an inexplicable fondness for terrible Italian synth pop.

Molly

Hip to Björk, the Wu-Tang Clan, Cesaria Evora, Elizabeth Cotten and countless other esoteric pleasures years before I was. Call her to find out what the kids will be listening to next month. In high school, she played in the Vestpocket Psalm, to this day the only hardcore punk band I can tolerate. Molly was years ahead of the drone-rock curve with invented tritone-heavy alternate guitar tunings and odd time signatures. This band also included Leo Ferguson, the last drummer for the Poma-Swank and a really dope musician all the way around. Molly is currently too shy to do much performing, which is too bad as she's a great singer, most recently with PSwank in my wedding ceremony.

The assorted stepsiblings

Laura was a very capable classical flautist in her youth. Kenneth played solid cello in school and is a tremendous rock bassist, with many years in the NYC club scene under his belt. I discovered the Grateful Dead from his vinyl copies of Blues For Allah and What A Long Strange Trip It's Been. Dan has played clarinet, guitar, banjo and doubtless other things and is a veritable scholar of the history of punk.

The assorted grandparents

Mama Kramer was an active folk dancer as a young woman. When, in her late eighties, she came to hear my then funk band Mud Luscious, she went out on the floor and got her groove on. Grandma Hein possessed an alto sax, though she never played it in my lifetime. Apparently she and Grandpa had the exquisitely good taste to be into Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys - my dad had a CD of The Tiffany Transcriptions Volume One tucked in among the operas.

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top