In any given skill or art, which is more important — natural talent or practice?
It’s not an either/or, of course. You need both. If you have a great natural affinity for music but don’t put the necessary time and effort into focusing and training and increasing those innate abilities, you can only go so far. On the flip side, if you are truly tone deaf — and I have some friends who are — no amount of singing practice is going to ever fully compensate for that.
Still, I know people who insist that talent is everything. For instance, I know writing teachers who tell their brand new, beginning students, wide-eyed with joy and excitement, that since they unfortunately lack talent for writing – or else they wouldn’t be in an intro course – there is nothing, really, that can be done about that, and their writing can never hope to be anything more than mediocre. And for most students, their artistic lights are thus neatly snuffed out, immediately and permanently, except for the truly driven few who respond with an appropriate “Fuck you!” and drop the class. [This is also a neat pedagogical dodge, by the way: since the students by this definition don’t have the necessary talent, their failure to make any significant progress in the course can’t be ascribed to the teacher’s weaknesses or failures.]
On the other hand, Malcolm Gladwell has argued that regardless of our degree of natural talent, all we need is 10,000 hours of serious practice to become an expert or master performer in a given field — an assertion that has garnered many detractors, as you might imagine.
But such arguments are reductive because they leave out a third necessary element. As far back as 400 BCE, Isocrates (and then Plato, and Cicero, and Quintilian after him) argued that even considerable natural talent, honed through rigorous and extended practice, is insufficient to become truly proficient in a given productive art, that we need an equally strong foundation in a third element — theory — to reach our full potential.
I think here about my own musical evolution, for instance. There is strong natural talent in my corner: my parents met at Juilliard School of Music, for crying out loud, so music is in my DNA. And I mean that literally, that I inherited genes for musical intelligence from my parents, a natural affinity for music that was supported by a rich, nurturing environment of music when I was very young. There was *always* music playing in our house, and my father indicated how important music was with every fiber of his being. I also have long, spatulate fingers, excellent fine motor skills, strong hand-eye coordination, a good sense of rhythm, an ear that lets me sing harmonies on the fly, etc.
But my innate affinity and talent for music has also been focused and honed through 45 years of practice, sometimes very rigorous and even tedious practice — running scales and arpeggios, doing fingerboard gymnastics, so to speak, playing the same songs over and over, breaking these songs down into their subparts and playing *them* over and over, sometimes working out the fingerings at a glacially slow pace to get them down, struggling to coordinate my playing with my singing, practicing until my hands cramped and it felt like my fingertips were bleeding, listening to the same eight measures of a song over and over and over again trying to figure out the guitar player’s solo, etc.
But what launched my musical development into an entirely new dimension was taking a musical theory course as an undergraduate at SUNY Stony Brook. I had been learning chord theory — how progressions of differing chords work to structure pop songs — slowly, unconsciously, by osmosis, so to speak, from all the music I had been listening to growing up. And I had been learning it more explicitly from my father and from Bob S., my first guitar teacher, who taught me how to “spell” chords, how to do the math that creates major and minor chords, 6ths, major 7ths, minor 7ths, dominant 7ths, even ethereal things like 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths, suspended, diminished, and augmented chords. I learned about relative minors, about how C major 6th and A minor 7, for example, have the exact same notes but start in different places, which both blew my mind and doubled my composing options, how chord progressions in jazz and pop often fell into very predictable patterns with names like I - IV - V, II - V - I, and I - VI - II - V, and so on. What I learned at Stony Brook was how well I already knew these things, how advanced my theoretical knowledge of music already was compared to other people’s, how comfortable and facile I was with it, and how I could start using this knowledge explicitly to write my own original music. Studying musical theory gave me the math and the vocabulary with which to make manifest the musical ideas in my head, gave me conscious control and options to pursue when my intuition ran out.
I feel compelled to note here that one of the reasons my mother left Juilliard before earning her degree was that she was unable to pass the required music theory course, even with my father’s considerable tutoring. Generally speaking, theory is complicated stuff, abstract and slippery, and it can be hard to grasp for some.
But if you are serious about becoming a musician or songwriter or any other kind of artist, I implore you to immerse yourself in the theory of your art -- musical theory, color theory, design theory, etc. Take a class or find a good website and teach yourself. Talent is not enough. Neither is practice. If you want to reach your full potential, you need theory, too.
[Special thanks here to my friend, Dr. Terry Papillon, Academic Dean and Professor of Classical Languages at Sewanee: The University of the South, for educating me about the Isocratean triad.]