On Musical Genius

Many of the composers whose music we study and hear are referred to as musical geniuses. I did a Google search for “music genius” and got 142 million results (EDIT: Just searched again in Jan 2019, and got 545 million results), which suggests that a lot of people use this expression. But what does it mean? And if we do not regard ourselves as musical geniuses, can we aspire to become great (or even good) composers?

In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir’s wrote: “One is not born a genius; one becomes a genius.” 

[On a side note, the continuation of de Beauvoir's sentence is, “and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.” Sexism, as it applies to music composition has long been, and continues to be an issue. Here are links to two blog posts I wrote on this topic: No Great Women Composers? (1); and No Great Women Composers? (2)]

The idea that one can become a genius is empowering because it suggests that some people can reach this lofty status if they wish to do so and if they work very hard and very intelligently, but before going further, it would be useful to explore the meaning of this term

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What does it mean, exactly?

The term “genius” is is widely used, but lacks a precise, widely-accepted definition. 

Wikipedia tells us that “the question of whether the notion itself has any real meaning has long been a subject of debate” (Genius. (n.d.). Retrieved 13 Jan. 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius). When someone refers to a composer (or anyone) as a genius, we "kind of" know what they mean, but we do not know exactly what they mean. Perhaps they regard the composer as being very smart, but since we are talking about a composer and not, say, a theoretical physicist (like Einstein), how are we to know how smart they were?

One understanding of genius relates to intelligence, and specifically to someone of exceptional intelligence. But "intelligence" is a similarly-imprecise concept; IQ tests are designed to measure it, but, as this article tells us,  the validity of IQ tests has been challenged by many. And besides, if we call Bach a genius, it seems unlikely that we do so because we believe Bach would have scored extremely highly on an IQ test (although one can speculate about this possibility); we are presumably referring to his musical genius. But what does "musical genius" mean?

Possibly it means that we are impressed by the great quantity of well-crafted music Bach wrote, and that we find his music profoundly moving, on a level that few have been able to match in musical history. If you have studied counterpoint and tried writing a fugue, you know how difficult it can be to write a good one; if you analyze Bach fugues after having tried writing them, you will almost certainly be blown away by how inventive, and beautiful they are. You might therefore conclude that Bach was extraordinarily clever, and, on that basis alone, label him as a musical genius.

I don’t have a problem with someone holding Bach (or Palestrina, Beethoven, Bartok, The Beatles, Miles Davis, Burt Bacharach, Kanye West, etc.) in such high regard — the more I learn about music, the more impressed I am by the achievements of great musicians in all genres — but I’m just not sure that we all mean the same thing when we call composers geniuses; as stated earlier, the term lacks a precise, generally-agreed-upon definition.

So why do people persist on using this term? My guess, at least as it is used in music, is that it is a way of accounting for qualities that the writer/teacher/blowhard-in-a-bar/etc. is otherwise unable to account for. Perhaps, when we call a composer a genius, we are saying, “I can’t imagine ever having the skill to produce music that is so profoundly moving (or so darned clever, or so vexingly incomprehensible, etc.), and therefore Palestrina (or Charlie Parker, Keith Jarrett, Mozart, Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles, R. Kelly, etc.) was a genius, and you and I are not. Or at least I are not!”

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Becoming a genius, in 4 E-Z Steps! 

1. Work hard (practice). Now work harder!
2. Work smart. Don't work hard on stupid things.
3. Be smart. 
4. Find a supportive environment.

Okay, the "4 E-Z Steps" towards genius-hood is tongue-in-cheek, but, whether we regard individuals a musical geniuses or not, mastery of music has always been the result of hard work for extended periods (usually decades), with good teachers, familial/community support, AND above-average intelligence as well. This is an idea suggested by psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD, in a Psychology Today article entitled: Attaining musical genius: Is practice enough? (17 June 2008). He writes:

“While Mozart may have required lots and lots of practice to produce his great works, his high intellect may have also contributed to his musical genius,”

Possibly your reaction to this  quote is to say (or think), "NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!"

Kaufman cites a 2007 article by J. Ruthsatz, D. Detterman, W.S. Griscom, and B.A. Cirullo, Becoming an expert in the musical domain: It takes more than just practice, whose conclusion may be neatly summarized as follows:

Musical achievement = general intelligence + domain-specific skills + practice

In other words, practice is an essential ingredient, but so are intelligence and "domain-specific" skills. Which you probably knew…

Here's another quote by someone who supports and neatly summarizes this view: 

“I was intrigued by this term "genius", because as far as I can see it is completely useless,” said Phil Grabsky, director of a feature-length documentary, In Search of Mozart. “What the characters we sometimes call geniuses have in common is drive and determination, often good parenting, and the fact that they are products of the social conditions of their time,' he said. 'All of this was true for Mozart. His talent wasn't simply a gift from God, it was the result of tremendously hard work.” (Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/jan/01/arts.music)

…To which I would add, yes, it wasn't "simply a gift from God," but Mozart's talent wasn't just the result of "tremendously hard work" either; not everyone who trains diligently for, say, 10,000 hours, ends up producing work of comparable quality to Mozart's.

→ If this topic interests you, you might enjoy this blog post: "Talent? Skill? What's the Difference?"

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Do you have to be a genius to understand how great music works?

Here's some good news: You do not need to be a genius to understand how great compositions work; you just have to make a concerted effort to do so, which develops analytical skills. Indeed, this is one of the core objectives of most music theory courses. Not understanding how a composition works may be the result of not having worked sufficiently to do so, or not having developed the skills to do so, rather than being caused by the composition operating on a plane so high that it defies understanding by ordinary mortals. That said, I'm pretty sure that some composers in the 1950's set out to deliberately write music so complex that it challenged the comprehension of ordinary mortals, but that's a topic for a different day.

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Do you have to be a genius to compose great music? 

Aside from the fact that the term "musical genius" does not have a generally-agreed-upon meaning (or even, if you agree with the Grabsky quote above, it has no meaning), I see it as a problematic term in that it can discourage those who do not see themselves as geniuses from attempting to develop their compositional skills. "Great music was composed by musical geniuses," you might think; "so what chance do I have of ever writing great music, if I am not a genius?"

If such a thought has ever crossed your mind, it might help to be aware of this:

Great composers wrote a lot of not-great music on their way to writing great music. The learning curve for mastery of composition is steep, and every great composer that ever lived took years to develop their "greatness," and it will be no different for you.

"Ah, but what of Mozart," you may ask; "didn't he write great music when he was four, or five, or six?" Answers: No, and no, and no. I discussed this at greater length in "Talent, Skill; What's the Difference?" (apologies for two plugs in one blog post!), but to summarize, although Mozart was indeed a clever and talented youngster, I'm not sure anyone regards music he wrote in the first 17 years of his life as great. Greatness came later. Former New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg went so far as to call Mozart a late bloomer (i'm paraphrasing; he actually wrote that Mozart "developed late"), arguing that few of Mozart's early works, elegant as they are, have the personality, concentration, and richness that entered his music after 1781" [the year he turned 25]. (Lives of the Great Composers, Part 2, p. 103).

It is nevertheless true that some composers —notably Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Saint-Saëns— manifested great compositional talent early. However, even these composers took years to master compositional craft, albeit fewer years than most other composers (including Mozart) took.

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To summarize, "musical genius" is a much-used term, but one whose meaning is not clear, making it problematic to know what exactly people mean when they use this term. It can also be a daunting concept if your goal is to become a better composer, and you are reasonably confident that you are not a musical genius. My suggestion is to not allow yourself to be discouraged by terms like this, and focus instead on becoming the best composer you can become, which, as always,  is done through a combination of hard work, long hours of regular practice, using and developing your intelligence, studying the music of composers you admire in an effort to understand what makes it great, and finding a nurturing environment in which to do this, be it school, a group of friends with similar interests, or retreating to nature in order to compose and study music.

In any great composer's development, not very good music preceded okay music, which preceded pretty-good music, which preceded good music, which preceded great music. I cannot promise that you will write great music, but I can promise that your compositional skills will improve if you stick with it, and it is entirely possible that you have it in you to write great music one day!

"Composers Who Couldn't Finish What They Started"

Wow.  It's been a long time, but here goes:  An attempt to resume regular blogging.

I was motivated to write something after reading a blog post entitled: "Top 5 Composers Who Couldn't Finish What They Started."

Having started, but not finished, several blog entries over the past 8+ months, I thought I could certainly relate to this topic, but it turned out to be not quite as advertised.

The blog's title is probably deliberately provocative — being unable to finish what one started is usually a criticism, but the fact that this was presented as a "top 5" list suggested to me the possibility that it might be about composers who were so spectacularly bad at finishing what they started that they became famous for it, or it was possibly about some "top" composers (whatever that means) that struggled with completing works at times.

I doubted it would be the former — how could composers have achieved greatness if they were chronic procrastinators? — and hoped it would be the latter, because compositional struggles are a familiar experience to me, and I find it reassuring to read that even great composers can experience them.

But it was neither.

Instead it was one of those "top [any number] lists" that are rampant on the Internet these days, usually consisting of a numbered slideshow of pics with pithy descriptions/explanations for each. Some are clever, some are amusing, some are contentious, but this one was simply annoying.

The first thing you see in the blog entry is a graphic with these words: "UNFINISHED SYMPHONIES — Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler, Elgar"

Okay, that's four names… Four is pretty close to five, but didn't the blog title promise five?  And those guys finished LOTS of works… Why is the anonymous blogger claiming they "couldn't finish what they started?"

Moving on, here is the text accompanying the first slide:

This week on Exploring Music we've discovered quite a few famous composers who left great works incomplete. Click on to discover our top 5 composers who didn't get the chance to finish what they started.

Whoah! Didn't get the chance? What the heck does that mean? Bullies stole their pens and manuscript paper? They were abducted by composer-hating street gangs and forcibly prevented from completing compositions? The U.S. military played deafening rock music outside their compounds 24/7, thus making composition extremely difficult? Zombies ate their brains?

Sadly, the topic turned out to be considerably less dramatic, of course; it lists five "top" composers who died before completing a particular composition. For what it's worth, I doubt there was ever a composer who didn't leave behind at least some unfinished work — sometimes, in the course of composing a work, we abandon huge chunks of music, perhaps because we decide it's not good enough, or it doesn't go in the direction we (or the commissioner) wished — but, by the logic of the blog post, this would apparently make us all "composers who couldn't finish what they started."

Beethoven, incidentally, is not on the list even though he is thought to have been working on a tenth symphony when he died.  And I like to think of him as a "top" composer.  An enterprising musicologist (Barry Cooper) has even gone so far as to "complete" (i.e., compose) Beethoven's Symphony No. 10 based on Beethoven's sketches, although it cannot be proven that these various sketches were actually intended for his 10th symphony, or, if some were, that Beethoven wouldn't have rejected them, because frankly, Cooper's "completed" work sounds pretty lame (there are recorded versions of this on YouTube, if you would like to judge for yourself).  But I digress…

Did you know that about 150 of Mozart's surviving works are incomplete (roughly a quarter of his total count of surviving works)? And yet, Mozart is also not on the list, even though he was working on his Requiem Mass in D minor (K. 626) at the time of his death (some portions had been completed, but others were fragments or sketches). He too was a "top" composer, according to many (but not Glenn Gould, Maria Callas, or Frederick Delius… Read more about his detractors in this entertaining blog post, if interested!).

There were probably many composers (perhaps most?) who died while composing something, and this may or may not be interesting — in the case of Mozart it has engendered considerable mythology (aided greatly by the play and movie, Amadeus) — but it seems a pretty silly exercise to select the "top 5" composers for whom this applied.

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Okay, here we go… In case you're wondering, the blog post lists the following composers' unfinished works:

     5. Mahler / Symphony No. 10 (the accompanying text cites Schoenberg, but misspells his name);
     4. Sibelius / Symphony No. 8;
     3. Elgar / Symphony No. 3;
     2. Bruckner / Symphony No. 9; and
     1. Schubert. No specific symphony of Schubert's is cited, but here is the entire accompanying text:

Schubert composed not one, but three unfinished symphonies. Perhaps because of his battle with syphilis and his diminishing sanity, Schubert is the most famous composer of incomplete symphonies!

La!  Let's just dance merrily on Schubert's grave while dismissing him as a syphilitic crazy man!

For what it's worth, syphilis has been proposed as the most likely cause of Schubert's death, while mercury poisoning (a common treatment for syphilis at the time) has also been suggested, but, to the best of my knowledge, we do not know the actual cause of his tragic and untimely demise (age 31); his death certificate indicates typhoid fever as the cause.

The reference to Schubert's "diminishing sanity" seems a cheap shot; there are reports of the composer drifting in and out of lucidity in his final days, as illness overtook him, but it seems flippant to characterize this as "diminishing sanity." From multiple accounts, the final stages of his illness came relatively swiftly. A friend, Josef von Spaun, wrote:

"I found him ill in bed although his condition did not seem to me at all serious. He corrected my copy in bed and was glad to see me and said, 'there is really nothing the matter with me, I'm so exhausted I feel as if I were going to fall through the bed'. He was cared for most affectionately by a charming thirteen-year-old sister whom he praised very highly to me. I left him without any anxiety at all and it came as a thunderbolt when, a few days later, I heard of his death."

More to the point, Schubert wrote his 8^th symphony in B minor, the "unfinished," six years before his death and wrote many other works in the intervening years, so it seems unlikely that "diminishing sanity" or "his battles with syphilis" were the causes of there being only two completed movements to this magnificent work.

Some have suggested that his 8^th symphony is complete as is, a two-movement symphony, but this seems unlikely to me. He had composed most of a third movement (scherzo and trio) in short score, although very little had been orchestrated; since no previous symphony had ever finished with a scherzo movement, it seems likely that his original plan was to add a fourth and final movement, typical of classical symphonies. My best guess as to why it was never finished is that, after completing what are arguably the best two symphonic movements he would ever write, he realized that the scherzo paled by comparison, and so he set it aside while other compositional work overtook him. Possibly he intended to finish it one day, but we may never know this for sure.

Further muddying the waters is the fact that Schubert gave the manuscript to his friend, Anselm Hüttenbrenner, in his capacity as representative to the Graz Musical Society, for whom the work was written. "However, Hüttenbrenner did not show the score to the society at that time, nor did he reveal the existence of the manuscript after Schubert died in 1828, but kept it a secret for another 37 years. In 1865, when he [Hüttenbrenner] was 76 (three years before his death), Hüttenbrenner finally showed it to the conductor Johann von Herbeck, who conducted the extant two movements on 17 December 1865" (this quote from Wikipedia article, "Unfinished Symphony").

Some friend!

But enough ranting about someone else's blog post! I'm actually glad I read it, because it spurred me to write my first blog entry in eight and a half months, and I am hopeful that a more regular blogging habit will ensue.

I may write about procrastination one day, since I am rather good at it, but not just yet…