white people are too good at making music, we need affirmative action in orchestras!
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So you think any random pale-skinned kid living in a trailer park with an alcoholic single-mother where he's only ever exposed to old rock and hip-hop music has a better chance of growing up to play orchestral violin than a dark skinned girl who's the third child of a well-paid Judge and a College professor that take her out to see the symphony, operas, and plays on a regular basis?
Both genetics and environmental factors make a difference in an individual's life, but acting like genetics are primarily determinative is just as much a lame excuse for losers to stay losers as "systemic racism" is. Ability to play an instrument well is a factor of how much you practice and what access to quality training and equipment you have. Which style of music you prefer is a function of individual tastes born of familiarity, exposure, and societal pressures and fads.
Exceptions do not make the rule.
What he just described isn't an exception. It's called "nature vs. nurture."
No they don't. They disprove the rule.
Men are generally stronger than women. The fact that some of the strongest women are stronger than some of the weakest men doesn't undermine the overall trend.
And the overall trend doesn't mean squat to a weak man or a strong woman.
But certain weak men cling to the trend as though other men's strength has anything to do with them.
I think one could argue that each individual has a genetic limit on intelligence and athletics. Why wouldn't you also believe there are genetic limits to musical talent?
Not any one instrument, but musical talent in general.
Maybe the trailer park kid turns out to be Eminem.
Just because he doesn't play the violin doesn't mean he doesn't have musical talent.
I never said anything about generic "musical talent" because there's no such thing. The article is about the Orchestra specifically. My point is that which genre an individual chooses to perform is unrelated to how well they play.
"Talent" is a false concept that people who haven't put thousands of hours of effort into something use to excuse themselves from not being as good as the person who put in more work. It's the same as someone who doesn't study saying the kid that's spending four hours every night studying is "just smart".
Besides, what is or isn't "good music" is purely a matter of personal taste. An untrained person's enjoyment of music has almost nothing to do with how technically difficult performing that music is. The vast majority of performers in an orchestra spend most of the time playing very simple parts that aren't challenging at all.
The whole "but genetics" argument is an excuse. You don't even need 10 fully formed fingers to play a lot of orchestral parts. Most people don't simply because they just don't want to, and there's nothing wrong with that. Dragging any concept of race or genetics into it is asinine.
“The vast majority of performers.... simple parts that aren’t challenging at all.”
Lol. You have no idea what you are talking about. Only people who cannot play music would ever say something that stupid. Every piece of music is challenging if you are paying attention. The quest for perfection is the drive and frustration for all of us orchestral musicians.
Only a person who's not very good at any instrument would say "every piece is challenging". Obviously you've never seen a French Horn score that's literally just the same pitch whole note for the entire song.
If you don't know that some passages are more difficult to perform well then others, you haven't spent very long learning your instrument.
So, what happens when 2 people put in the exact same amount of time and effort and 1 person is better than the other? What would you say makes one person better than the other?
What about when one person puts in far less time and is still better than someone who puts in more time? Are you saying that does not happen?
Are you saying everyone is a blank slate and there are no differences in any of us at all?
If you're 6 feet tall and have long arms, are you going to have an easier time playing the stand up base than a 4 foot tall person? Or the trombone?
What about if you're taller and have a larger lung capacity. You're saying someone small with a smaller lung capacity will be able to hold the notes just as long?
To say that our differences mean nothing is dismissive. Just like when you look at physical sports (football, MMA, etc) your genes make a difference.
I also am skeptical that you think everyone has the exact same intelligence level. There are many well documented IQ research experiments that suggest otherwise. This is tangential to musical talent because site reading is often involved and if your brain is slower, you will be slower to site read and likely make more mistakes.
You've started with an imaginary situation, and then asked me to explain it to you. You're the one who made it up, I don't have to defend it. I'm saying there's no such thing. Find me two people that are perfectly identical in time and effort in reality and I'll analyze the difference critically. Otherwise, it's an irrelevant hypothetical.
Then you put words in my mouth regarding the vague concept of "intelligence". Playing violin takes a certain level of intellectual effort sure, but lets not pretend it's the same as nuclear physics or something. Honestly, the intellectual work in college is often what forces otherwise musically capable people out of college music programs. There's very little relationship between ability to play an instrument and ability to recall the date ranges during which specific composers lived.
Also, if you're actively sight reading an orchestral piece on performance day, then you clearly haven't practiced as much as the next guy. Besides, music isn't like chemistry. Ability to perfectly follow instructions is less important than imparting emotional content in your interpretation. Only non-musicians think getting all the notes perfectly the same as written is the important part. The "soul" of music is all about the deviations. Holding a note just a touch longer, playing it just a touch sharp or flat, playing accelerando, adding a light trill or vibrato...
Otherwise we wouldn't need any musicians or directors. We could just type it all into a computer and let it run.
Yes but music is also a cultural expression and has an origin, traditional history and performance discipline. Classical music is "white" music regardless of who plays it. My only beef is that they feel entitled to it while telling whites that listening to rap is appropriating black culture. It only ever flows in one direction with the left.
"White" is a term racists use to either erase or lay claim to thousands of individual cultures.
What culture does a German from the late 1700s to early 1800s (Beethoven) have in common with a Russian born 100 years later (Rachmaninoff), or an Italian composer born 100 years earlier (Caldara)?
For that matter, who has more "culture" in common, a white orchestral violin player from an upper middle class family and a white rapper from the trailer park, or that same violin player and a black violin player from a similar socio-economic background?
There is no hard tie between culture and skin color. It's just ridiculous to say that all Irish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Armenian, German, Swedish, Australian, and Canadian people share a culture. Much less to say that they all have equal claim to the individual musical expressions of people with no relation to them that lived hundreds of years ago in countries thousands of miles away from their own just because of some vague physical similarity.
Ah, but those European composers DO share a culture, a musical one. It may not be Whiteness, but it is definitely musical. What does Beethoven have to do with Rachmaninov? LOL, everything. Beethoven affected all music written after him.
There is a definite, undeniable, lineage of shared musical culture that weaves its way from the earliest known music to the music of today. What is usually considered the best and highest form of music is a derivative of European culture. There certainly have been composers of other races, but they have jumped on this European musical culture train to express their ideas.
You're just espousing opinions as fact. What's considered the "best" music by the most pale-skinned people is crap like Justin Bieber.
To say that all music from the majority of the entire continent of Europe over the course of several hundred years represents a singular culture is just a very pompous, faux-intellectual way of saying "all white people are the same".
Many notable composers of orchestral music never heard Beethoven. It wasn't like today when a single artist can easily be heard by the entire world. Many works have had to be altered from their original forms because different areas and eras didn't even use the same temperament much less the same instrumentation and layout. Modern orchestral music has been homogenized for convenience giving the false impression of greater similarity than actually existed in the original works.
We're talking about thousands of disparate groups that didn't speak the same languages, practice the same religions, and were often at war with one another. To call all of that one "European culture" erases history and cultures rather than preserves them.
Its not ridiculous to say European heritage or Western heritage nor is skin color the determining factor of racial and ethnic distinctions. You seem to have a naive view of heritage and culture which is not consistent with conventional views.
Conventional views are exactly the problem. If the topic is history then modern reinterpretation doesn't actually change the past no matter how many people you get to agree to it. You can't just toss the individual cultures of people that didn't even speak the same language into a blender and say it's all the same just because they kind of have a vaguely similar skin tone.
Most of the people you're wrapping together under the blanket of "European heritage" were at various points in history literally killing each other over cultural differences. A significant portion of the earliest European settlers in North America came here specifically because they were being persecuted in their homelands over cultural differences.
Even under the European Union, no one in Europe would seriously make the argument that there's no cultural difference between the many different European nations. Ignoring that reality in favor of some mythical "white culture" is the practice of race baiting academicians that have more interest in denigrating anyone with pale skin than in actually understanding the intricacies of history and culture..
Anyone who's ever played an instrument or a sport has been told that talent is not enough.
Hard work, practice AND talent is what makes greatness.
A talented person who never practices won't be great. And a person who has 0 talent and works hard might be mediocre but not great. A person of average talent and above average work ethic will probably be great. An extremely talented person with below-average work ethic will probably be good
THIS.
This exactly.
This applies to literally everything in life. You're lucky if you're talented. You're lucky if you have a high work ethic. And if you're really, really lucky, you have both.
Define talent without using ephemeral concepts.
One's natural ability and potential
Both of those are ephemeral concepts. There is no way to objectively quantify either in an empirical way.
It’s not just about practice and training. I’m a professional classical musician and I can assure you that the number of people who make a career in this field is very small compared to the people who didn’t make it. In college, we all had great equipment, access to the same teachers, and put in hours of work with rare exceptions.
The reality is that some people are just better at it than others despite effort. For me, I was good from the start and music just made sense. I worked extremely hard and I continued my work because I was seeing progress. Some people chip away at it for hours and years and NEVER get better. They pour their lives into it with nothing to show for it.
There are exceptions of course in terms of race. Most orchestras are mainly White with many Asians and very few Blacks. The auditions are blind because we need the best sounding people. No one cares what category they fall in. When you have to play with people, it’s what they bring to the table that matters. There’s nothing worse than playing with someone who can’t play in tune or has terrible rhythm. All it takes is one weak player to make an orchestra suffer, especially a wind player.
I believe it's a mistake for you to assume that all the people who didn't make it tried as hard as you do. Personally I find the very concept insulting. I feel no need to pretend that I tried just as hard at playing sports as the people who are good at it. I feel no need to spare the feelings of those who HAVEN'T worked as hard as I on something by allowing them to claim that my abilities are the result of winning some specious genetic lottery rather than as the result of me just working harder to get good at it than they did.
You can't compare someone who spends all of their free time living and breathing their instrument to someone who simply spends the same amount of time in the practice room or at rehearsal but doesn't give it a second thought outside of that time.
I have never met someone who was better than me at anything that they didn't also clearly try harder at. I'm comfortable admitting that I'm not as good because I didn't work as hard. Crying about "talent" is just a form of sour grapes for those who have decided they don't want to work harder than they already are.
If someone works hard enough to get to the point of comparing a second chair to a first chair in a highly paid professional orchestra, sure small genetic advantages may begin to eclipse level of effort, but when it comes to a college student dropping out of orchestra vs one who sticks with it, that IS a separation in level of effort, and frankly, I'd be curious to see which student spent more time drinking at parties and which spent more time playing their instrument alone in their room while no one was watching.
Apparently you don't drive. Where I live, everyone who wants to take a driving exam has to attend driving lessons, everyone attending the same number and the same kind of lessons. Yet some people pass the driving exam in the first try, and some fail ten times.
There is a huge chasm between "took the same number of lessons" and "worked just as hard at getting better".
Some people put in extra effort. Those who don't dismiss the extra effort as "talent".