In the business of performing old music, the industry is
relying on youth as never before. While symphony ticket sales are stagnant and
classical album sales are plunging, talented teens are filling concert halls
and putting CDs on the charts. The past few decades have seen more and more
orchestras and record companies in the U.S. turning to youngsters to lift their
sales. This trend is being seen in other industries too, such as in Indian
TV shows featuring young musical talents. Indeed, today's swelling crop of
prodigies reflects neither a sudden surge in talent among kids nor an
improvement in teaching techniques. Instead, it reflects industry-specific
economics, pure and simple.
So, who exactly is a child prodigy? In psychology, the term
child prodigy is defined as a person
under the age of ten who produces meaningful output in some domain to the level
of an adult expert performer. Wikipedia maintains a dynamic list of child
prodigies covering the past four centuries who rose to prominence in various disciplines
spanning mathematics, music, science, sports, etc. It features luminaries such
as Mozart, Rabindranath, Ramanujan, von Neumann, as well as Ted Kaczynski, the
“Unabomber”.
Ever wondered what happened to those wunderkinds from
decades ago? Surely many of the prodigies on the Wikipedia list had reached the
pinnacle of success in their respective domain. However, to paraphrase T.S.
Eliot, the careers of most tend to end not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Consider the most prestigious award in the US for
scientifically gifted high school students, the Westinghouse Science Talent
Search, called the Super Bowl of science by one American president. Since its
inception in 1942 and until 1994, the search recognized more than 2,000
precocious teenagers as finalists. But just 1 per cent ended up making the
National Academy of Sciences, and just eight have won Nobel Prizes. Of course,
these odds are better than 1 in 1000 (of non-prodigious individuals) making the
list of Nobel laureates. Yet for every successful prodigy, there are many
dozens who fall far short of their potential.
To be a prodigy in music, for example, is to be a mimic, to
reproduce what you hear from grown-up musicians. Yet only rarely do child
musical prodigies manage to make the necessary transition from mimicry to
creating a style of their own. The “prodigy midlife crisis,” as it has been
called, proves fatal to all but a handful of would-be Mozarts. Early
acquisition of skills — which is often what we mean by precocity — may thus be
a misleading indicator of later success.
Precociousness is a slipperier subject than we ordinarily
think. The notion of precociousness as an early form of adult achievement is
much of the problem. Often the benefits of earlier mastery are overstated such
as in the case of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Famously, Wolfgang Mozart started to compose music at age
four; by six, he was traveling around Europe to give special performances with
his father, Leopold; and went on to produce hundreds of highly regarded works
before his death at the ripe early age of thirty-five.
Upon first glance, Wolfgang definitely supports the
explanation that “talent” is genetic and not learned. However, if we take a
closer look, we will find some very striking details that we may not have
thought about before.
Leopold Mozart was a famous composer and performer in his
own right. He was also a very
controlling parent who put Wolfgang in an intensive training program of music
study starting at age three. Leopold was well qualified for this role as he was
considered one of the most highly accomplished and sought-after teachers. He also had a deep interest in how music is
taught to children. In a way, Leopold was an 18th-century equivalent of a
little league father.
Wolfgang’s early compositions have raised several questions
upon close scrutiny by many scholars. These manuscripts are not written in
Wolfgang’s own hand. It seems Leopold always
wanted to “correct” them before anyone else saw the compositions. It’s also
interesting to note that Leopold stopped composing himself at about the same
time he began teaching Wolfgang.
There are a few cases where some of Wolfgang’s compositions
are not original. In fact, the first
four piano concertos written by him at the age of eleven do not contain any
original music. They were put together using works by other composers. The next
three works composed by the age of sixteen also do not contain any original
music. They are simply arrangements of
works by Johann Christian Bach with whom Mozart happened to be studying with at
the time in London. What these early works really represent are pieces by
someone being trained as a composer by the usual methods of copying, arranging,
and imitating the works of others.
The Piano Concerto No. 9, composed at the age of
twenty-one, is considered Wolfgang Mozart’s first real masterpiece. This is
still considered an early age, but we must remember that by this time, Wolfgang
had been through eighteen years of gruelingly difficult, expert training.
Think about this for a minute. If there was any magical talent that Wolfgang
was born with, it still did not help him to produce his first masterpiece very
quickly or easily. Contrary to the pervading myth, Mozart did not write music
in his head as perfectly and completely as you might have originally thought!
Today’s surviving manuscripts show that he was constantly revising, rewriting,
crossing out, and reworking many sections of his music over time.
Mozart was the same as any of us but underwent intense
training (or focused practice) at a very early age. This is not something most of us do in our
childhood.
The other way to look at precocity is of course to work
backward — to look at adult geniuses and see what they were like as kids. A
number of studies have taken this approach and uncovered a similar pattern. A
study of 200 highly accomplished adults found that just 34 percent had been
considered in any way precocious as children. The list of historical geniuses
who had been notably undistinguished as children is rather long and includes
Copernicus, Rembrandt, Bach, Newton, Beethoven, Kant, and Leonardo Da Vinci.
Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the
world. As it turns out, the skill of
being a child prodigy is qualitatively different from the “skill” of being a
creative genius. What holds the prodigies back is their lack of
originality. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the
admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall or on Zee TV
and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes
perfect, but it doesn't make new.
Research reveals that the more we practice, the more we
become entrenched – trapped in familiar ways of thinking. On the other hand,
the passion that drives one to practice for hours is discovered through natural
curiosity or nurtured through early enjoyable experiences with an activity or
many activities. If that passion is appropriately channelized, there may be
sparks of geniuses. Evidence shows that creative contributions depend on the
breadth, not just depth, of our knowledge and experience.
Relative to typical scientists, Nobel Prize winners are
twenty-two times more likely to perform as actors, dancers or magicians; twelve
times more likely to write poetry, plays or novels; seven times more likely to
dabble in arts and crafts; and twice as likely to play an instrument or compose
music. "The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music is
the driving force behind this intuition," Albert Einstein reflected. His
mother enrolled him in violin lessons when he was five, but he wasn't
intrigued. His love of music only blossomed as a teenager, after he stopped
taking lessons and stumbled upon Mozart's sonatas. "Love is a better
teacher than a sense of duty," he said.
Our romanticized view of precociousness matters. When
certain kids are singled out as gifted or talented, it creates an environment
that may be subtly discouraging to those who are just average. And we will
never know how many kids, who might have been great achievers had they been
encouraged and not discouraged from joining the fray, might have ended up as
being very successful several years down the road.
The wisdom of wanting to provide learning environments
suited to different paces of achievement is often overwhelmed by our
irresistible desire to look at precociousness as a prediction. Predictions from
childhood about adult performance can only be made based on relatively fixed
traits. Unfortunately, many of the things that really matter in predicting
adult success are not fixed at all. And once we begin to concede the importance
of these kinds of non-intellectual, highly variable traits, we have to give up
our fascination of precociousness.
Consider the story of two buildings. One is built ahead of
schedule, and one is being built in New York City and comes in two years late
and several million dollars over budget. Does anyone really care, ten years
down the road, which building was built early and which building was built
late? But, somehow, when it comes to children we feel the other way, that we
get obsessed with schedules. If you want to know whether a ten-year-old
musician will be a good musician when they’re twenty-one, you should wait until
they’re twenty-one. It is impossible to predict which course a life will take.
