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Narratives of Mozart as a magical genius grind my gears. I firmly believe that "talent" is not innate. It's the product of means, motive and opportunity. Even in Mozart's case. https://twitter.com/StevenIsserlis/status/1335175565440131078
Mozart was from a musical family with a berserk stage dad who drove the kid mercilessly to develop his abilities from a young age. That had the benefit of making for an incredible musical imagination, but also crippled him in non-musical aspects of his life.
There are some broad overlaps between the story of young Mozart and young Michael Jackson (except MJ carried extra burdens of poverty, race, etc). Child prodigies are masses of psychic scar tissue.
I want music students to understand that they can be as good as their resources (financial and emotional) will bear, but past a certain point you have to make some sacrifices and tradeoffs.
Even if you have all the money and family support in the world, constraints still exist. Time you spend in the practice room is time you don't spend interacting with other humans.
Same is true for people who are inhumanly good at anything, not just music: star athletes, brilliant mathematicians and scientists, and so on. They are usually severely underdeveloped outside their area of specialty.
I want us to be clear that we can make more Mozarts by concentrating resources and applying pressure; we should also ask whether this is a good idea or not.
I look like an extremely talented person in many ways, and I am, but that is due to a peculiar combination of great privilege in some areas and severe personal deficiencies in others.
I write well because I've been encouraged to do so, and because I find other methods of human connection to be stressful or impossible. This has benefited me in academic settings but is not much help in social ones.
I mean, I can function. I have a wife and kids and friends. But my relationships have been full of struggle. That's the cost of being able to write effortlessly.
I know a lot of even more highly-strung show ponies than myself, people who are way more "talented" than me and who are way more limited as humans.
I used to want to be a "genius" until I got to know some geniuses, and, yikes.
Every day I force my 7yo to sit at the piano and practice. I don't make him do much, 30 minutes a day, doing it most days. This is not going to be enough to make a world-class concert pianist. That's okay. I want him to have friends, play Minecraft, do other 7yo things.
