Re: [Harp-L] Rostropovich and practice

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> My point is that there is such a thing as innate musical talent.  An hour's
> practice for a talented person is worth ten or a hundred hours for someone
> like me.  Both practice and talent are required to become a good musician
> but individual differences can vastly alter the proportions!

I completely agree.

However, while innate talent should be highly rated on the list of one's 
qualities, I think it is still a little overrated, or at least a little 
dangerous.

Let me come at this from a few different angles.

First, I believe that our special gifts can tend to limit us, if we're not 
careful.  If, for instance, you hit the ground running as a harmonica 
player, as many of here did, you find yourself soaking up skills at a 
ridiculous rate of speed.  The longer it comes easy to you, the worse it 
can be when you finally reach the limits of easy.

I was an excellent math student until I hit high school, when I got a 
teacher who wanted to teach hard stuff.  Well, I hadn't ever encountered 
math that was hard.  Instead of getting the point that some stuff was hard 
to learn, I completely turned off to math.  I mean, it stopped existing for 
me.  It took to being in my 40's before I asked myself Why on earth didn't 
I just work hard at that point?  And I finally had to come to the 
conclusion that if you're used to something being easy, it is highly likely 
that you will decide that you have reached your limit and it is at least as 
likely that you are wrong.

An old pal of mine, a brilliant guitarist with a genius for short 
circuiting himself in life, phoned me a few years back all excited because 
someone had opened a pool hall in his neighborhood and he had become 
obsessed with learning pool.  He'd play for hours after work, he'd read 
books, study videos.  I love acquiring new skills myself, so I was excited 
for him.  Then one day, maybe a year or so in, I asked him how the pool 
thing was going and he said, "Oh, I don't do that anymore.  I reached my 
absolute limit, I can guarantee you that I'm never going to get any better 
at it, so why bother."

I was dying to say "Schmuck!  You just reached the limit of where it was 
easy, where it took just enough effort to get better and not too much."  He 
was a grown man, making his own decisions, so I held my tongue.  But - and 
here's where I suspect I'll get an argument - I think that the great thing, 
especially as you get older, is to identify the skills you want to learn 
that are hard to learn, and then develop a strategy to learn them.

Where this gets really exciting to me is that while most of us on this list 
have become skilled at playing harmonica, all of us, without exception, 
either have or will hit limits to what comes easy.  Or at least sort of easy.

And it's the way you recover from the shock of discovering these limits 
that predict if you're going to go further.  Some common reactions include:
        1. This is as good as I'm going to get.
        2. This is as good as I want to get.
        3. Wow, that hurt.  Now how do I keep getting better at this?

The answer to number 3, for me anyway, is keep practicing every day, keep 
inventing new ways to practice, and you'll have breakthroughs and some of 
them will be enormous.  But I really wanted to keep getting better, even 
after my first harmonica career was over.

And as I've gotten older I have only become more intrigued by the notion 
that there's always incredible new vistas of harp stuff to learn, great 
breakthroughs to be had that open up whole new ways to make a harmonica 
feel good to me and to people who are listening.

Vern had a family to support, which limited the amount of time he could put 
into breaking through as a guitar player.  (I heard him play guitar at a 
party at Mike Polesky's and I hope he knows he's a good guitar player.)

But I think of Bill Evans, a stunning piano player if anybody ever was.  He 
said that when he was a teenager he had lots of peers for whom jazz piano 
came much more easily than it came for him.  He said that those kids just 
kind of soaked up everything, while he had to work very, very hard to get 
good.  He said something like that he had to learn what all the ropes and 
levers did first.  (It's extremely likely that I have mentioned this before 
on Harp-l, when I was posting alot.)

Vern's a really talented and accomplished musician and inventor, and if in 
the days when he had all the time in the world he had wanted to be an 
extrordinary guitarist he would have not been able to stop himself from 
putting in the time it would have taken, no matter where it stopped being easy.

The very important message here is really for players who have just started 
out or are perhaps feeling intimidated by harp players who do amazing 
things, or are wondering if they are 'talented.'  Yes, there is such a 
thing as talent, but in most if not all cases, talent is trumped by your 
desire to do great things and your willingness to put in the hard time when 
you hit the limits of what comes easy.

Ken