I have thought some over the years about what makes some people music composers and others not. Obviously some sort of interest in music is a prerequesite, but is interest or ability in music truly innate? It is certainly assumed to be by many people. We love to use the word "talented" to describe someone who is good at something most people aren't good at. But supposedly - it is at least an urban myth - it rankled Michael Jordan a bit when people referred to him as talented at basketball, because what he certainly had was a great work ethic. Even knowing that, I believe most people would assume that Jordan was somehow predisposed to be good at basketball, and his work ethic is what made him great. And we all probably know people who seem so uncoordinated that no matter how much they were to practice, they would have no hope as basketball players.

These observations make it tempting to believe a certain amount of ability in specific areas such as athletics, mathematics, and music is innate. I am not so sure, however. I, for example, am a very committed amateur musician. I play several instruments and am a composer. But I hesitate to assume that any of this is due to "innate" ability. Why? Because I have very strong evidence to the contrary. I have a tape of a friend and myself playing clarinet and saxophone together in the sixth grade, when we had both been playing about a year. It is one of the most horrifying sounds you can imagine - we are close to a half-tone off in pitch, and we are clearly oblivious to this.

Ability to hear differences in pitch, then, clearly is at least partly learned, because I learned it, after being hopeless at it early in my music career. What about composition, though?

Music has always seemed to me very much like a language. If they are analagous, then all speaking humans are composers, because we rapidly composed new sentences every time we speak. Some of these may require editing to become more coherent, but in general we are able to get our point across quite well. Why should music be any different? Notes can be thought of as words, and we already use the term, "musical phrase," and music has a grammar, a syntax, which varies among cultures as do languages. In my mind the main difference is that language is an essential part of the social human experience, so it is important for our language ability to develop at a very early age. Music can be important in many cultures as well, never so much as language. So, those people who are interested in music usually develop their ability in it later than language. But as we can learn a second language later in life, we can learn the language of music too.

Everyone has interests, and things they are good at. I always wondered though, which comes first? Although interests and skills are clearly overlapping, are they congruent? Did I pursue extensive training in music and become good at it because I was interested in it, or was I interested in it because I was already good at it? I tend to think the former.

Was Mozart a born composer? It certainly seems that way. He was already composing by the time he was six. But would he have become a great composer had he had limited exposure to music in his infancy to toddlerhood? My theory is that naturally, our brains are all a little bit different in how they develop in utero, and strengths and weaknesses are probably there early on and affect our later choices. But from the moment of developmental differentiation in the embryo, our environment has an influence, and it becomes impossible to truly distinguish genetic differences from developed ones (although as we learn more and more about human genetics some differences will become clearer). Our experience affects brain development, which further directs our experiences. All the fMRIs in the world won't be able to tell us what in the brain was there to begin with, and what has developed as a result of our experience.

So my belief is that people in general are born with the same basic tool set, and the vast majority of people could compose music if they are set off in that direction early on. Humans universally understand the rules of language, and respond to music. If you can write a sentence, you can compose music.

As a postscript, a mathematics professor I know believes exactly the same thing about mathematics. In fact he would probably argue that mathematics is more fundamental to human existence than music, and thus mathematical ability can be taught more universally than musical ability. There are a host of reasons that it has become a point of pride with people (mostly Americans?) to be bad at math, that are beyond the scope of this blog (as are the consequences of this). It's OK to be bad at music or sports, too. No one is proud of being unable to read or write however. Is this because language really is fundamentally different from these other skills? It's tempting to say so, but I'm still not entirely sure.

(go on to Part 2)

Labels: brain, humans, music