Talent, Culture and Character

My anonymous commentor left a brilliant observation on my post On Musical Talent. Here is the basic argument:

Innate musical talent is undeniably a prerequisite for greatness. It's a requirement but one of many. Let's say that in any group of 10,000 people in the world, there is one person with the innate ability of Bach. (The plethora of painting geniuses in Renaissance Florence shows that this number is unlikely to be much bigger.) The likelihood of Bach is less than one in 1 billion (to restrict ourselves to 1000 years of Western music and assuming that Bach is the greatest and that the total population over 1000 years of Western history is over one billion, which must be the case), not one in 10,000. So assuming all these variables are independent (a big if, I know), we need to explain the remaining 1/100,000 likelihood. I think the rest is culture and character. 

If talent is evenly distributed by genetics (not sure it is, but just for the sake of argument), then why doesn't every city have the artistic flourishing of Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BC? Names to note: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripedes. Or of 15th century Florence? Names: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Machiavelli, Brunelleschi (who designed the Duomo). Or 16th century London? Names: John Dowland, William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake, Christopher Marlowe, William Byrd and Thomas Morley. And of course, 18th century Germany and Austria. This flourishing was less concentrated with Bach in Leipzig and Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in Vienna.

There are brief periods of intense flourishing surrounded by dull stretches of mediocrity. Some factors are undoubtedly historic. Wars, revolutions and social unrest undoubtedly drain resources and redirect talent away from the arts and humanities. But the role of culture and character also seems to be important. Some cultures seem to produce more art than others. Some kinds of character seem to produce more arts than others. The role of patronage also seems crucial. The society must be prosperous enough to support artists and must value the arts highly enough to support them. In Athens the whole population went to see the plays just as in Leipzig, the whole congregation heard Bach's cantatas. My commentator's assertion that a faculty of hard work and an intense curiosity both played a role is also correct.

I also think that artists compete with one another and learn from one another, which is why we get communities of artists that because of mutual influence produce more interesting work than they would have if they worked in isolation.

Well, this could go on and on, but I'll close here with this:

Talent vs Vision

I think we can separate these two things, which might clarify some puzzling observations like how the heck did he manage a career? Some people have a natural ability in music: this can be both physical and mental. Some people have great hands: nimble, fast, accurate and flexible. Some people have a great ear and auditory memory. We think of Mozart and his ability to hear a complex nine-minute-long piece and recall it well enough to write down in notation. We think of people who can sight-sing or sight-read virtually anything. This is all talent. Rare enough, but still it does not always produce artistry. Why? Because vision is something else.

It is what I am calling artistic vision that is behind real creativity and expression. Now I find myself at a bit of a loss to describe it! When I was in my teens I suddenly awoke to music. I say suddenly, but it probably took a few years. I started 'seeing' (by which I mean hearing) something unique in music. At first I heard it mostly in pop music (by which I mean the Beatles), but then I discovered classical music and the vision became complete. It is hard to describe, but I have an icon. There used to be a photo of me, age 18 or 19, leaning out of my living room window, holding the Archiv recording of the Bach B minor Mass. This was a large box made of a kind of stiffened canvas with three LPs inside. It almost looked, from a distance, like a stone tablet. And that's the icon. I looked like Moses, coming down from the mountain with the Commandments on a stone tablet. Let me hasten to say that I did not feel like Moses. This is just a symbol. But to me, that piece of music, exemplified in that nifty box, was Truth. Musical Truth, sure, but Truth nonetheless. Truth as opposed to illusion, as opposed to bullshit. If you say, whaddayamean? Well, just listen to it!

There is nothing religious about the vision I had--it was musical, not theological. I could have picked any of a dozen or so different examples with no religious connotation. Such as this:

It doesn't have to be slow, quiet or solemn either:

It just has to have that indescribable extasis that, for me, is only present in music. Others may find it in visual art, or literature, or dance or religion or wherever.

The tragedy of music is that you need not only talent and vision, you also need luck, ambition and a business sense. Well, that's not the tragedy! The tragedy is that the world of professional music tends to be dominated by those with a little bit of talent, hardly any vision and a whole lot of ambition, business sense and luck. Actually, the tragedy is for the listeners, isn't it?