Where does greatness come from? By Daniel Levitin

Music as a case study

Some people have a biological predisposition toward particular professions. Genes can make us tall (think basketball) or lightweight (think jockey); give us the proper ratio between slow- and fast-twitch muscle fibers for sprinting versus long distance running. This applies to musicianship as well. There may also be a cluster of genes that work together to create the component skills that one must have to become a successful musician: good eye-hand coordination, muscle control, motor control, tenacity, patience, memory for certain kinds of structures and patterns, a sense of rhythm and timing. To be a good musician, one must have these things. Some of these, and related skills, are involved in becoming a great anything, especially determination, self-confidence, and patience.
We know that, on average, successful people have had many more failures than unsuccessful people. This seems counterintuitive. How could successful people have failed more often than everyone else? Failure is unavoidable and sometimes happens randomly. It’s what you do after the failure that is important. Successful people have a stick-to-it-iveness. They don’t quit. From the president of FedEx to the novelist Jerzy Kosiński, from van Gogh to Bill Clinton to Fleetwood Mac, successful people have had many, many failures, but they learn from them and keep going. This quality might be partly innate, but environmental factors must also play a role.
The best guess that scientists currently have about the role of genes and the environment in complex cognitive behaviors is that each is responsible for about fifty percent of the story. Genes may transmit a propensity to be patient, to have good eye-hand coordination, or to be passionate, but certain life events—life events in the broadest sense, meaning not just your conscious experiences and memories, but the food you ate and the food your mother ate while you were in her womb—can influence whether a genetic propensity will be realized or not.
Early life traumas, such as the loss of a parent, or physical and emotional abuse, are only the obvious examples of environmental influences causing a genetic predisposition to become either heightened or suppressed. Because of this interaction, we can only make predictions about human behavior at the level of a population, not an individual. In other words, if you know that someone has a genetic predisposition toward criminal behavior, you can’t make any predictions about whether he will end up in jail in the next five years. On the other hand, knowing that a hundred people have this predisposition, we can predict that some percentage of them will probably wind up in jail; we simply don’t know which ones. And some will never get into any trouble at all.
The same applies to musical genes we may find someday. All we can say is that a group of people with those genes is more likely to produce expert musicians, but we cannot know which individuals will become the experts. This, however, assumes that we’ll be able to identify the genetic correlates of musical expertise, and that we can agree on what constitutes musical expertise. Musical expertise has to be about more than strict technique. Music listening and enjoyment, musical memory, and how engaged with music a person is are also aspects of a musical mind and a musical personality. We should take as inclusive an approach as possible without identifying musicality, so as not to exclude those who, while musical in the broad sense, are perhaps not so in a narrow, technical sense. Many of our greatest musical minds weren’t considered experts in a technical sense. Irving Berlin, one of the most successful composers of the twentieth century, was a lousy instrumentalist and could barely play the piano.
Even among the elite, top-tier musicians, there is more to being a musician than having excellent technique. Both Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz are widely regarded as two of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, but they made mistakes—little technical mistakes—surprisingly often. A wrong note, a rushed note, a note that wasn’t fingered properly. But as one critic wrote, “Rubinstein makes mistakes on some of his records, but I’ll take those interpretations that are filled with passion over the twenty-two-year-old technical wizard who can play the notes, but can’t convey the meaning.”
What most of us turn to music for is an emotional experience. We aren’t studying the performance for wrong notes, and so long as they don’t jar us out of our reverie, most of us don’t notice them. So much of the research on musical expertise has looked for accomplishment in the wrong place, in the facility of fingers rather than the expressiveness of emotion.
Even the most uptight and analytic among us expect to be moved by Shakespeare and Bach. We can marvel at the craft these geniuses have mastered, a facility with language or with notes, but ultimately that facility must be brought into service for a different type of communication. Jazz fans, for example, are especially demanding of their post-big-band-era heroes, starting with the Miles Davis/John Coltrane/Bill Evans era. We say of lesser jazz musicians who appear detached from their true selves and from emotion that their playing is nothing more than “shucking and jiving,” attempts to please the audience through musical obsequies rather than through soul.
The pianist Alfred Brendel says he doesn’t think about notes when he’s onstage; he thinks about creating an experience. Stevie Wonder told me that when he’s performing, he tries to get into the same frame of mind and “frame of heart” that he was in when he wrote the song; he tries to capture the same feelings and sentiment, and that helps him to deliver the performance. What this means in terms of how he sings or plays differently is something no one knows. From a neuroscientific perspective, though, this makes perfect sense. Remembering music involves setting the neurons that were originally active in the perception of a piece of music back to their original state—reactivating their particular pattern of connectivity, and getting the firing rates as close as possible to their original levels.
If music serves to convey feelings through the interaction of physical gestures and sound, the musician needs his brain state to match the emotional state he is trying to express. Although the studies haven’t been performed yet, I’m willing to bet that when B.B. King was playing the blues and when he was feeling the blues, the neural signatures were very similar. And as listeners, there is every reason to believe that some of our brain states will match those of the musicians we are listening to. In what is a recurring theme of your brain on music, even those of us who lack explicit training in music theory and performance have musical brains, and are expert listeners.
KINGSMITH.