Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  1158 John von Rhein likened Lang Lang to Liberace in his review “Bend the rules, but don’t break the bond,” Chicago Tribune, August 18, 2002.

  1159 For Anthony Tommasini’s caustic review of Lang Lang’s performance, see “A showman revs up the classical genre,” New York Times, November 10, 2003.

  1160 The favorable comment by Anthony Tommasini about Lang Lang comes from a 2008 review, “Views back (and forward) on an outdoor stage,” New York Times, July 17, 2008.

  1161 Popular books promoting the ten-thousand-hours hypothesis include Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (2008); Daniel Coyle , The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born, It’s Grown (2009); and Geoff Colvin, Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (2010).

  1162 For the ten-thousand-hours study and follow-ups, see K. Anders Ericsson, R. T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-Romer, “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance,” Psychological Review 100 (1993); K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokel, “The making of an expert,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2007; and K. Anders Ericsson, Roy W. Roring, and Kiruthiga Nandagopal, “Giftedness and evidence for reproducibly superior performance,” High Ability Studies 18, no. 1 (June 2007).

  1163 For the study finding that practice time matters more than talent, see Michael J. A. Howe, Jane W. Davidson, and John A. Sloboda, “Innate talents: Reality or myth?,” Behavioural & Brain Sciences 21, no. 3 (June 1998).

  1164 The quotation from David Brooks comes from his article “Genius: The modern view,“ New York Times, May 1, 2009.

  1165 The quotation from Leopold Auer (“Practice three hours a day if you are any good . . .”) was recalled by his protégé Joseph Szigeti on page 4 of Szigeti on the Violin (1979).

  1166 For the original marshmallow study and follow-up reports, see Walter Mischel, E. B. Ebbesen, and A. R. Zeiss, “Cognitive and attentional mechanisms in delay of gratification,” Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 21, no. 2 (February 1972); Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, and Philip K. Peake, “The nature of adolescent competencies predicted by preschool delay of gratification,” Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 54, no. 4 (1988); and Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, and Philip K. Peake, “Predicting adolescent cognitive and self-regulatory competencies from preschool delay of gratification: Identifying diagnostic conditions,” Developmental Psychology 26, no. 6 (1990). Recent articles on Mischel’s current work include Susan Kenney’s “A marshmallow and a song,” General Music Today 22, no. 2 (January 2009); and Jonah Lehrer’s “Don’t! The secret of self-control,” New Yorker, May 18, 2009.

  1167 The dramatic difference in SAT scores between children who could delay gratification and those who could not was reported in Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, and Philip K. Peake, “Predicting adolescent cognitive and self-regulatory competencies from preschool delay of gratification: Identifying diagnostic conditions,” Developmental Psychology 26, no. 6 (1990); and noted in Jonah Lehrer, “Don’t! The secret of self-control,” New Yorker, May 18, 2009.

  1168 The quotation from Angela L. Duckworth occurs in Jonah Lehrer, “Don’t! The secret of self-control,” New Yorker, May 18, 2009; see also Angela L. Duckworth and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents,” Psychological Science 16, no. 12 (December 2005).

  1169 Ellen Winner refers to the “commonsense myth” that giftedness is “entirely inborn,” and the “psychologists’ myth” that “giftedness is entirely a matter of hard work” on page 308 of Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (1996).

  1170 The quotation from Edward Rothstein (“The contemporary attack on genius . . .”) comes from his article “Connections: myths about genius,” New York Times, January 5, 2002.

  1171 The quotation from Yehudi Menuhin (“Maturity, in music and in life, has to be earned by living”) occurs on page 22 of his biography Unfinished Journey (1977), as cited on page 44 of Claude Kenneson, Musical Prodigies: Perilous Journeys, Remarkable Lives (1993).

  1172 The quotation from Gabriel Kahane comes from my interview with him in 2010.

  1173 This passage is based on my experience attending Marc Yu’s New York debut in 2007, my interview with Chloe and Marc Yu that year, and subsequent communications.

  1174 A substantial body of research supports the hypothesis that tonal languages such as Chinese enhance musicality in young children; see, e.g., Diana Deutsch et al., “Absolute pitch among students in an American music conservatory: Association with tone language fluency,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 125, no. 4 (April 2009); and Ryan J. Giuliano et al., “Native experience with a tone language enhances pitch discrimination and the timing of neural responses to pitch change,” Frontiers in Psychology 2, no. 146 (August 2011). The observation about typical Chinese hand shape comes from my interview with Veda Kaplinsky.

  1175 The quotation from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (“One cannot be exceptional and normal at the same time”) occurs on page 177 of Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1996).

  1176 All quotations from Robert Blocker come from my interview with him in 2010.

  1177 This passage is based on my interview with May Armstrong in 2010.

  1178 Charles Hamlen told me the story about the tour of Los Alamos in 2007.

  1179 The quotation from the English journalist (“His playing was so cultured . . .”) comes from Stephen Moss, “At three he was reading the Wall Street Journal,” Guardian, November 10, 2005.

  1180 The quotation from Daniel Singal (“The problem is not the pursuit of equality but the bias against excellence that has accompanied it”) comes from his article “The other crisis in American education,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1991.

  1181 John Cloud’s characterization of the No Child Left Behind Act as “radically egalitarian” comes from his article “Are we failing our geniuses?,” Time, August 16, 2007.

  1182 For the Templeton report, see Nicolas Colangelo, A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students (2004).

  1183 The finding that 80 percent of gifted subjects constantly monitored their behavior to conform to the norms of less gifted children is reported on page 14 of Maureen Neihart et al., The Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children (2002); the finding that 90 percent of subjects did not want to be identified as a “brain” comes from B. Bradford Brown and Laurence Steinberg, “Academic achievement and social acceptance: Skirting the ‘brain-nerd’ connection,” Education Digest 55, no. 7 (1990).

  1184 Miraca Gross presents the findings of her study of sixty gifted students in Australia in Exceptionally Gifted Children (1993); her subjects’ satisfaction with radical academic acceleration is discussed on pages 26–27.

  1185 The quotations from Norbert Wiener (“the suffering which grows from belonging half to the adult world and half to the world of the children about him” and “. . . I was not so much a mixture of child and man . . .”) occur on pages 117–18 and 106–7 of his autobiography, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1953). From pages 117–18: “Every child, in gaining emotional security, believes in the values of the world around him, and thus starts by being, not a revolutionary, but an utter conservative. He wishes to believe that his elders, on whom he is dependent for the arrangement and control of the world in which he lives, are all wise and good. When he discovers that they are not, he faces the necessity of loneliness and of forming his own judgment of a world that he can no longer fully trust. The prodigy shares this experience with every child, but added to it is the suffering which grows from belonging half to the adult world and half to the world of the children around him.”

  From Ex-Prodigy, 1186–7: “My life was sharply divided between the sphere of the student and that of the child. I was not so much a mixture of child and man as wholly a child for purposes of companionship and nearly completely a man for purposes of study. Both my playmates and the college stude
nts were aware of this. My playmates accepted me as a child with them, although I might have been a slightly incomprehensible child, while my fellow students were willing to allow me to participate in their bull sessions if I wasn’t too loud and too insistent.”

  See also Wiener’s sequel, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (1956).

  1187 This passage is based on my interviews with Joshua Bell and Shirley Bell in 2007 and subsequent communications. Other profiles of and interviews with Joshua Bell include Adam Sweeting’s “In tune with today: Adam Sweeting meets violinist Joshua Bell,” Gramophone, December 1998; James Oestreich, “The violin odyssey of an all-American boy,” New York Times, August 31, 1998; and Laurie Niles, “Violinist.com interview with Joshua Bell,” Violinist, October 7, 2009.

  1188 Meadowmount School of Music website: http://www.meadowmount.com.

  1189 For an extensive history of sound recording, see David L. Morton Jr., Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology (2006). Digital reproductions of Thomas Edison’s papers documenting the invention of the phonograph can be found on the Rutgers University website http://edison.rutgers.edu/docsamp.htm.

  1190 This passage is based on my interviews with Conrad Tao and Mingfang Ting in 2010.

  1191 This passage is based on my interviews with Sylvester, Stephanie, and Christian Sands in 2010 and subsequent communication.

  1192 The jazzman’s term for this sort of exchange is trading fours. Oscar Peterson’s and Christian’s performances may be seen on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYpoWD1qmEA.

  1193 Paul Potts’s performance can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA; and Jackie Evancho’s at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ar0r02FZng.

  1194 This passage is based on my interviews with Nico Muhly, Bunny Harvey, and Frank Muhly in 2010–12, and on subsequent communications; see also Rebecca Mead, “Eerily composed: Nico Muhly’s sonic magic,” New Yorker, February 11, 2008.

  1195 Grace Episcopal Church in Providence invites anyone who enjoys singing to participate in their choirs; see http://www.gracechurchprovidence.org/music-at-grace/choral-music/.

  1196 See Alfred Louis Kroeber, Configurations of Culture Growth (1944), page 9: “In short, though the Principia could have been produced only by a genius like Newton and are the true expression of his personality, it is nevertheless clear that the existence of a certain body of science was needed before his genius could be touched off to realize itself in the Principia.”

  1197 The quotation from Isaac Newton comes from a letter he wrote to Robert Hooke, February 15, 1676, and occurs on page 231 of The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 3 (1961): “What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.”

  1198 See Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (1851). I came to this via Harold Bloom, who ran with the idea in How to Read and Why (2000). From Bloom’s introduction: “We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure. I am not exactly an erotics-of-reading purveyor, and a pleasurable difficulty seems to me a plausible definition of the Sublime, but a higher pleasure remains the reader’s quest. There is a reader’s Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call ‘falling in love.’ I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”

  1199 See Essays of Schopenhauer (1897), page 153: “What makes a man so very curious, as may be seen in the way he will spy into other people’s affairs, is boredom, a condition which is diametrically opposed to suffering;—though envy also often helps in creating curiosity.”

  1200 The quotation from Margaret Mead (“There is in America an appalling waste of first-rate talents . . .”) is condensed from a passage on page 213 of her essay “The gifted child in the American culture of today,” Journal of Teacher Education 5, no. 3 (1954), as cited on page 51 of Jan Davidson, Bob Davidson, and Laura Vanderkam, Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds (2004).

  In full: “. . . there is in America today an appalling waste of first-rate talents, while the slightly superior people just because they do have to work hard to get straight A’s, are forgiven. Meanwhile the parents of gifted children are terrorized with behests to bring their children up to be normal happy human beings, and told horror stories about infant prodigies who go mad at twenty. In American psychology the theory of ‘special gifts’ competes and loses before two more congenial theories, (1) the theory of a general superiority factor, which makes you into an all-round superior person, in sports as well as in scholarship, in business or in music, or, (2) the specially gifted who are penalized by accusations of neuroses, and interpretations which make all special interests in childhood and adolescence into symptoms of trauma or psychological morbidity. Under these conditions it is not surprising that, as an English critic has acutely remarked, ‘The United States has more promising young people who fizzle out than any other country.’ First efforts, if they are recognized at all, are tailored into normal success terms, given prizes, published, exhibited prematurely, and forgotten.

  “This is admittedly a grim picture—a startlingly grim picture especially when one realizes that parents all over the world dream of making it possible for their children to be born in America, the country where there are the resources and the freedoms necessary for the good life.

  “What Can We Do?

  “What as educators can we do about the situation, about recognizing and fostering those special, hereditary, discontinuous, incredible gifts which once in many centuries produce a Shakespeare, an Einstein, or a Leonardo da Vinci, an Abraham Lincoln or a St. Thomas Aquinas, and without whom a society, no matter how rich and industrious will stagnate in the end? In the first place, we have the culture with us the minute we have stated the difficulty, for as Americans, ‘the possible we do at once; the impossible takes a little bit longer.’ Furthermore as Americans, we feel a moral obligation to remedy our defects. If it is true that we are at present lamentably poor in fostering genius, then it is obvious that we had better recognize what the obstacles are and proceed to clear them away. So that the clearer the facing of the number of culturally regular myths about the desirability of normalcy, the undesirability of skipping stages—especially if those stages are places where one can be miserable as one’s predecessors have been miserable—the better. But such recognition is only a first step, because most of what a wise teacher or counselor tells the parents of a gifted child is true, culturally speaking. The culture tries to make the child with a gift into a one-sided person, to penalize him at every turn, to cause him trouble in making friends, and to create conditions conducive to the development of a neurosis. Neither teachers, the parents of other children, nor the child’s peers will tolerate the Wunderkind.”

  1201 The quotation from Rhonda Garelick (“crisis in admiration”) comes from a personal communication, 2011.

  1202 This passage is based on my interviews with Jeffrey, Martha, and Gabriel Kahane in 2009 and 2010. Gabriel Kahane maintains a professional website, where one can listen to and download Craigslistleider, at http://www.gabrielkahane.com. For another profile of Gabriel, see Steve Smith’s article “A singer-songwriter ignores musical boundaries,” New York Times, April 26, 2009.

  1203 The characterization of Gabriel Kahane as a “highbrow polymath” comes from Nate Chinen, “Gabriel Kahane, Where Are the Arms,” New York Times, September 19, 2011.

  1204 The quo
tation from Goethe’s mother (“Air, fire, water and earth . . .”) occurs on page 153 of Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (1976). Bettelheim’s version is condensed from the original. Here is a different translation of the passage in its entirety, from pages 269–70 of BettinaVon Arnim’s book Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child (1839): “Air, fire, water and earth I represented to him as beautiful princesses and all, that happened in the whole of nature, received a signification, in which I soon believed myself, more firmly than my auditor, and when we had imagined to ourselves, streets between the constellations, and that we should once inhabit stars, and what great spirits we should meet there above, then there was no one so eager for the hour of narration with the children as I was, nay I was curious in the highest degree, about the further progress of our little imaginative tales, and an invitation, which robbed me of such an evening, was always vexatious to me. There I sat, and there he soon devoured me, with his great black eyes; and when the fate of any favourite did not turn out exactly according to his notion, I saw how the passionate veins swelled upon his forehead and how he choked his tears.—He often caught me up, and said, before I had taken the turn in my tale: ‘Mother, the princess won’t marry the nasty tailor, even if he does slay the giant, will she?’—When I made a stop and put off the catastrophe to the next evening, I might be sure, that during that time, he had put everything in right order and so, my imagination, when it could reach no further, was often supplied by his; and when the next evening, guiding the reins of fate according to his design, I said: ‘You have guessed it, so it happened,’ he became all fire and flame, and one could hear his little heart beat under his collar.”

  IX: Rape

  1205 The Stigma Inc. website (http://www.stigmatized.org) is no longer online; an archived version can be viewed at http://web.archive.org/web/20070901030454/www.stigmatized.org/about.htm.

  1206 Rape as property theft is discussed in the entry “Sexual assault” in Encyclopedia of Rape, edited by Merrill D. Smith (2004), pages 224–25.