• • •
Several recent books hark back to the adage that practice makes perfect, setting the workload for mastery at ten thousand hours. The number is extrapolated from the observation by the Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson that by twenty, the top violinists at Berlin’s Academy of Music had practiced an average of ten thousand hours over a decade, approximately twenty-five hundred hours more than the next most accomplished group. Skills and perhaps neurosystems develop through drilling. Recent surveys in which people were ranked for talent and then followed for practice time showed that practice time mattered more than talent. David Brooks wrote in the New York Times, “The primary trait is not some mysterious genius. It’s the ability to develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine. We construct ourselves through behavior.”
There is, without question, considerable truth in this idea; if this were not the case, education would be futile, and experience would be a waste of time. I’d much rather go up in a plane with a pilot who’s been flying for a decade than with one who’s on his maiden flight, and no one chooses to eat anyone’s first soufflé. But the sanctification of ten thousand hours as the basis for achievement has a Horatio Alger–like sentimentality to it. Leopold Auer, the last century’s great violin pedagogue, used to tell pupils, “Practice three hours a day if you are any good, four if you are a little stupid. If you need more than that—stop. You should try another profession.”
The inclination to practice assiduously may itself be inborn, and nourishing it may be at least as important as nourishing basic talent. The Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel developed the so-called marshmallow test in the 1960s. A child between four and six years old was sequestered with a marshmallow and told that he could eat it right away, or he could wait fifteen minutes and get an extra marshmallow. The children who could wait went on to have SAT scores, on average, 210 points higher than those of the children who could not. More recently, Angela Lee Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, gave high schoolers the choice between a dollar right away and two dollars in a week, and once more, those who could delay gratification had much higher levels of academic achievement, regardless of IQ. “Intelligence is really important,” she said, “but it’s still not as important as self-control.”
Ellen Winner, who studies genius, has delineated a struggle between the “commonsense myth” that giftedness is innate and the “psychologists’ myth” that giftedness is accrued through labor and study. The critic Edward Rothstein wrote, “The contemporary attack on genius is itself a mythology, an attempt to grasp the ungraspable by diminishing it, reducing it.” Rothstein suggests that those who emphasize the role of sheer labor listen to Bach and Beethoven and try on the idea that they could have composed such music with sufficient effort. Veda Kaplinsky jokingly compared the question to what she’d once heard a psychiatrist say about sex in a marriage: “If the sex is good, it’s ten percent. If it’s bad, it’s ninety percent.” She explained, “If the talent is there, it’s ten percent of the package. If the talent is not there, it becomes ninety percent, because they can’t overcome the lack of it. But just having talent is really a very minor part of what is necessary in order to make it in music.”
Musicians often talked to me about whether you achieve brilliance on the violin by practicing for hours every day, or by reading Shakespeare, learning physics, and falling in love. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin said, “Maturity, in music and in life, has to be earned by living.” The composer and performer Gabriel Kahane said, “There is always a Korean girl who has been locked in the basement practicing for longer than you have. You can’t win that game.” But more profoundly, normal life in these contexts is a euphemism for a richer life. Single-minded devotion to an instrument builds proficiency—but music embraces experience.
• • •
When I said that I was writing about prodigies, people kept mentioning a seven-year-old pianist named Marc Yu, who had appeared on Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres, and Oprah. I was invited to his New York debut, a recital in the Park Avenue apartment of a Shanghai socialite. Marc had just turned eight, but his small stature made him look about six. He would solemnly lisp the name of his next selection, play it with incongruous power and musicality, then spin around to look at his dazzling mother, Chloe, to see how he’d done.
Because Marc’s legs were short, a little platform had been set up with extenders that allowed him to control the pedals. As he was playing a Chopin nocturne, the contraption shifted, and the pedals ceased to respond. Chloe crawled into the tight space below her son’s pumping legs and began trying to realign the device. Marc didn’t miss a note. Chloe couldn’t make the thing work, so she kept lifting it and slamming it back down. It was so incongruous: the little boy intent on his fingering, and the stunning woman in her gown crouched noisily at his feet, the melodies pouring forth. It was as though Marc and Chloe were in a dialogue that the rest of us had stumbled on, a private interaction that could, ironically, take place only with an audience.
Well after the recital had ended and long past the bedtime of most eight-year-olds, Marc announced that he had learned the Emperor Concerto, and he played it for a few of us, counting out long silences for the orchestral passages, so he could come in exactly on cue. He brimmed with impatient, eager bravado, much as my eight-year-old niece does when she wants me to admire her swimming. As Marc made conversation with adults who were fascinated by him but not much interested in what he had to say, I guessed that his relationship with his mother might be the only one in which he is not anomalous.
Chloe Yu was born in Macao and came to the United States to study when she was seventeen. She married at twenty-five, and Marc was born a year later, in Pasadena. From that day, Chloe played the piano to him. “He didn’t start to speak until after he turned two,” Chloe recalled. “I was worried. Then he started speaking, English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and a little bit of Shanghainese as well. I was so relieved!” When Marc was almost three, he picked out a few tunes on the piano with two fingers; in a year, he had surpassed Chloe’s ability to teach him. At five, he added the cello to his regimen. “Soon he asked for more instruments,” Chloe recalled. “I said, ‘That’s it, Marc. Be realistic. Two is enough.’”
Chloe gave up the master’s degree she’d been working on. She had divorced Marc’s father, but because she had no money, she and Marc ended up living with her ex-in-laws, who gave them a room over the garage. Marc’s grandparents did not approve of his “excessive” devotion to the piano. “His grandmother loves him a lot,” Chloe said. “But she just wanted him to be a normal five-year-old.” When Marc was in preschool, Chloe felt he was ready to perform and contacted local retirement facilities and hospitals and offered free recitals so Marc could do so without pressure. Soon the papers were writing about this young genius. “When I began to understand how talented he is, I was so excited!” Chloe said. “And also so afraid!”
At six, Marc won a fellowship for gifted youth that covered the down payment on a Steinway. By the time Marc was eight, he and Chloe were flying to China bimonthly so that Marc could study with Dr. Minduo Li. Chloe explained that whereas her son’s American teachers gave him broad interpretive ideas to explore freely, Dr. Li taught Marc measure by measure. “In the future, Marc will be telling people, ‘I’m American-born, but trained in China.’ China will love him for that.” I asked Marc whether he found it difficult traveling so far for his lessons. “Well, fortunately, I don’t have vestigial somnolence,” he said. I raised my eyebrow. “You know—jet lag,” he apologized.
Marc was being homeschooled to accommodate his performance and practice schedule. “After a huge breakfast, he’s sleepy,” Chloe said. “So, we schedule something less intense—work on technique, maybe do homework. In the late morning, he has a nap, and then he’ll do something that will use his brain, learn new material. It’s all about time management. He should be just in third grade, but he’s ahead in all subjects.” Marc was doing col
lege prep work and taking an SAT class. Chloe serves as his manager and reviews concert invitations with him. “I consult my boss first,” Chloe said. Marc looked at her with an expression of frank incredulity. “I’m your boss?” he asked. Later Chloe said, “If he changes his mind and wants to become a mathematician, I’d accept it. Maybe initially I would be upset because we have spent so much time on this—it would be just like breaking up with your boyfriend. It’s not easy, right?” Marc said reassuringly, “I like piano. It’s what I’m going to do.” Chloe smiled. “Right now, yes. But you can never tell. You’re only eight.”
To play as Marc does requires an extraordinary level of concentration. Marc said, “How much I practice depends on my mood. Like if I really want to accomplish something or it’s before a concert, I would say six to eight hours per day. But if I’m not really in the mood to practice, maybe four to five hours. I was interested in composing, but I’ve decided I need to focus.” His playing has required equal discipline from Chloe. I asked her whether she thought about her old ambitions. She smiled and held out her arms to Marc. “This is my work,” she said. When I visited them in LA, Chloe had just remarried, and Marc had played at the wedding banquet. Chloe refused to move into a house with her new husband, however, because she thought it would interfere with practicing with Marc; instead, they live a few streets apart. I was reminded of couples with disabled children who are split by the unusual needs of their sons and daughters.
Children like to have heroes, and Marc’s is Lang Lang. After reading a story in the Los Angeles Times magazine in which Marc declared his admiration, Lang Lang got in touch. “I admire Lang Guoren a lot,” Chloe said. “I don’t want to hear the word pushy used about me. But I want to be strong for Marc the way he was strong for Lang Lang.” A few years later, Lang Lang arranged for Marc to perform with him at the Royal Albert Hall. I attended the concert, and when we all met afterward, I was struck by Lang Lang’s avuncular gentleness with his protégé; I had never seen him so vulnerable.
I asked Chloe what she thought about the ten thousand hours. “It’s more about nurture, I believe, than nature,” Chloe said. “Marc’s father had no interest in music, so the nature came from my side. The nurture came from me, too.” She has strong views on American parenting. “In America, every kid has to be well rounded. They have ten different activities, and they never excel at any of them. Americans want everyone to have the same life; it’s a cult of the average. This is wonderful for disabled children, who get things they would never have otherwise, but it’s a disaster for gifted children. Why should Marc spend his life learning sports he’s not interested in when he has this superb gift that gives him so much joy?”
Back in California, I asked Marc what he thought of a normal childhood. “I already have a normal childhood,” he said. “Do you want to see my room? It’s messy, but you can come anyway.” So I went upstairs with him. He showed me a yellow, remote-controlled helicopter that his father had sent from China. The bookshelves were crammed with Dr. Seuss, Jumanji, and The Wind in the Willows, but also Moby-Dick; with Sesame Street videos and also a series of DVDs called The Music of Prague, The Music of Venice, and so on. We sat on the floor and he showed me his favorite Gary Larson cartoons, and then we played the board game Mouse Trap. He had a pair of rubber thumb-tips with lights inside, which he used for a magic trick that made it look as though the light he put in his mouth traveled right down to come out of his behind.
Then we went downstairs, and Marc sat on a phone book on the piano bench so his hands would be high enough to play comfortably. He squirmed for a minute, said, “No, it’s not right,” pulled one page from the phone book, sat down again, and launched into Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu, which he imbued with a quality of nuanced yearning that seemed almost inconceivable in someone with a shelf of Cookie Monster videos. “You see?” Chloe said to me. “He’s not a normal child. Why should he have a normal childhood?”
• • •
Classical music is largely a meritocracy, which makes it a fit route to social mobility for industrious people isolated by geography, nationality, or poverty. For many years, the prodigies were mostly Jews from Eastern Europe; now, the field is dominated by East Asians. Gary Graffman, himself one of the Jewish prodigies, has only six students, all of them Chinese. The general theory about the Asian dominance of classical music is that it reflects a sheer numbers game. “There are more than three hundred thousand children in China learning instruments,” Graffman said. “If you see a child in Chengdu who is not carrying a violin case, it means he’s studying the piano.” Chinese and other tonal languages reinforce hearing acuity in infants and toddlers, and typical Chinese hands, with broad palms and generous spaces between the fingers, are especially well suited to the piano. Discipline and competitiveness are deeply valued and constantly reinforced in many Asian cultures. Because the study of Western music was not allowed in China during the Cultural Revolution, it took on the allure of a forbidden pleasure.
Many Westerners, meanwhile, are leery of “tiger mother” stereotypes. But the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “One cannot be exceptional and normal at the same time.” The question of when to specialize receives very different answers from place to place; European students narrow their fields of study much earlier than American, and Asians focus earlier still. If music is a language, then to have an intuitive hold on its grammar and produce it without an accent requires training from a tender age. Graffman said, “You can take up the piano or the violin at sixteen and learn to play rather well, but you’ll be too late to become a first-rate soloist.” Early specialization requires sacrifices. “Upper-class parents want their children to have arts, athletics, and community service,” said Robert Blocker, dean of the Yale School of Music. “But it’s very distracting for someone who really wants to be a musician. Profound achievement is usually the result of early identification and specialization.”
If the gamble pays off, the sacrifices are easier to live with. When Lang Lang told me he was reconciled with his upbringing, I thought of the people who, long after the fact, were glad that their parents had encouraged them to undergo limb-lengthening—of how what looks like abuse in the present does not necessarily seem so once it’s been completed successfully. On the other hand, how many children have loathed practicing the piano and then, as adults, bemoaned that their parents let them quit taking lessons? The danger is that being pushed toward early specialization can leave children believing that they have only one way to succeed. “It’s irresponsible not to have a plan B,” Karen Monroe said. Prodigies who don’t make it will have worked insanely hard on something that can no longer sustain them, after having neglected skills needed to pursue any other kind of life. Blocker addressed a meeting in Korea for parents who hoped to send their children to Western music schools. After explaining the admissions process, he put down his notes and said, “I think it’s really unfortunate that all of you came in here today. Many of you will send your children to another country at age twelve, thirteen, fourteen. One parent will come and the family will be divided. The students who go through this so young are vacant by the time they reach us. It’s not that there’s an absence of feeling and longing and intellect and music in there; it’s that they could not be nurtured by touch or a family meal.” There followed a stony silence.
• • •
If Chloe Yu scorned the idea of a normal childhood, May Armstrong simply had to bow to the reality that no such thing could be achieved with her son, Kit, born in 1992. Chloe, who believes in the dominance of nurture, may be said to have pushed her son toward his prowess; May, on the other hand, seems to have been compelled by hers into an alarming inevitability. Kit could count at fifteen months; May taught him addition and subtraction at two, and he worked out multiplication and division for himself. While digging in the garden, he explained the principle of leverage to his mother. By three, he was asking questions to which the answer was the theory of relativity. May, an ec
onomist, was frankly bemused. “A child of that ability can teach himself,” she said. “A mother wants to be protective, but he was so capable that he didn’t need protection. I can’t say that was easy.”
May had left Taiwan at twenty-two to study in the United States and spent holidays by herself; Kit’s father was never in their lives. “I knew what loneliness was all about, and I thought he needed a hobby he could enjoy on his own,” she said. So she started him on piano lessons when he was five, even though she had no interest in music. At his first lesson, Kit watched the teacher reading music, and when he came home, he made his own staff paper and began to compose without an instrument: the written language of music had come to him whole. May bought a used piano, and Kit sat at it all day. He could hear something once on the radio and play it back.
May enrolled him in school. “The other mothers said they wanted their kids to grow up in kindergarten,” she said. “I wanted mine to grow down. His teachers said he let other children push him around, so I went in one day and saw another child snatch a toy away from him. I told him he should stand up for himself, and he said, ‘That kid will be bored in two minutes, and then I can play with it again. Why start a fight?’ So he was wise, already. What did I have to teach this kid? But he always seemed happy, and that was what I wanted most for him. He used to look in the mirror and burst out laughing.”
By the end of second grade, Kit had completed high school math; at nine, he was ready to start college. May speculated that Utah would be a clean, safe place for a nine-year-old to start his undergraduate education, so they went there. “The other students often thought it was strange that he was there,” May said, “but Kit never did.” His piano skills, meanwhile, had advanced enough so that he had been taken on by management.
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