Re: 10,000 hours

[Toby G <carpet8@mac.com>]

Yes, this is pretty controversial in some circles.  I can assure you, as a 
composer and musician, that symphonies do not pop into most musicians' 
heads 
as they did for Mozart.  He was a gifted keyboardist and I'm sure that 
took 
a lot of practice but there are things that I believe people are born 
with. 
I think a musician can get up to those skill/intuition levels with lots of 
hard work but Mozart obviously had quite a head start and something 
special 
was going on there.

I think that possibly a good analogy would be that of comedians.  I knew 
even when I was in grade school there were folks that had their brains 
wired 
in such a way as to have funny things just pop out of their mouths.  I'm 
sure there were children who are now funny adults who needed to be funny 
in 
order to get attention as youths also.


\t


I don't know of any 'chops' that Eno has besides being a great 
conceptualist.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Art Simon" <simart@gmail.com>
To: "Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com" 
<loopers-delight@loopers-delight.com>
Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 12:29 AM
Subject: OT: 10,000 hours


>I just read Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers", and it makes a
> convincing argument that there really is no such thing as a prodigy,
> and it takes at least 10,000 hours of practice to become great,
> whether you are talking about music or computer programming. The
> author cites the examples of the Beatles and Mozart. I was having a
> hard time trying to come up with musical counter examples, maybe Tod
> Dockstader? Even "anti-musicians" like Alvin Lucier and Brian Eno
> certainly put in the time developing their chops. I'm pretty convinced
> that there really is something to this, and that practice is the most
> important part of developing as a musician or a composer.
>
> I'm curious if anyone else has heard this hypothesis and might have an 
> opinion.
> -- 
> Art Simon
> simart@gmail.com
> myspace [dot] com/artsimon
>
>