I’ve always been slow on the uptake to new news, in general, and in jazz in particular. In college, I subscribed to Jazziz because a coffee shop had some promotion going for the Jazziz blend and a reduced-price subscription. So, in the scheme of things, I suppose I’m not too late to the party and am happy to send along the following link to the non-weekend-edition listeners out there. NPR has a good jazz blog.
May 5, 2009
David Brooks writes on the science of genius in his recent NY Times column. Brooks notes that the modern research (into what exact question, I’m not sure, but edging on the creation of genius) shows that practice, rather than the “divine spark,” makes perfect.
The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.
While genes probably do spurt or clog our ear for music, actual excellence results from a more egalitarian source: one’s fine-tuned automatization of the brain.
By practicing in this way, performers delay the automatizing process. The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.
David Brooks draws a democratic conclusion: we do not live in a world in which a select few are “hard wired” for greatness; rather, the brain is “phenomenally plastic” and a pattern of behavior, not fate, spurs what folks call genius.
One could interestingly pair Brooks’ column with Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety. In his book, de Botton argues that because we live in a society wherein anyone can ostensibly achieve superior status, we tend to feel unhappy and anxious about the rung on which we stand in the social ladder. In the book, there is more about that ladder, democratic society, sources of status, and so on. Brooks’ observation of genius, though, seems surely to add to de Botton’s brand of anxiety. Now: That I am not a Mozart is my fault, for not hitting the practice rooms enough.
But anxious practice was not what came to mind immediately after reading Brooks’ column. Wynton Marsalis did. From some in the jazz world, the trumpeter has caught flack for being too perfect–all technique and no soul. I don’t fully agree with the criticism; he has been wrongly dismissive of today’s jazz, but I think he injects something apart from scales into his traditionalist repertoire.
In any event, the notion of genius as practice raises some old questions in the arts. What about improvisation, gut instinct, and aesthetics? This is an old conundrum–you have to practice to perfect your craft in order to deconstruct and expand it. A young sax player will learn that Coltrane could play every scale backwards, and a young artist will learn that Pollock painted forms before splashes. But what is genius in art? The practice seems to be a require dues payment to genius, but not the thing itself.
