« Dormouse Clicks | Main | Legal Guide for Bloggers »

Prodigies

From Slate: would a genius like Mozart fail to thrive in today's hostile market? [Link]

There is no question that Mozart's youthful creativity was an amazing feat—a feat spurred on in part by his receptive cultural surroundings and, as Solomon points out, by his own avid receptivity to influence. But the wonder, certainly to a modern sensibility, is also that young Mozart thrived despite an early bombardment of demands and deadlines that sound as though they could well have waylaid, or worn out, a lesser genius. Being too plugged in to dominant cultural forces, of course, is a problem that contemporary classical music prodigies can only dream about having, as The New Yorker's astute music critic Alex Ross noted in a wistful blog entry not long after Jay Greenberg (who calls himself Bluejay) enjoyed a rare taste of the pop spotlight on 60 Minutes last fall. Cautioning that "the social and cultural pressures for a modern American classical prodigy are so unlike those faced by Mozart that no comparison is possible," Ross ventured a grim verdict anyway: "Then the market demanded such a talent; now, the market is hostile."

But perhaps it's worth considering whether there might be an upside to the pessimistic portrait of prodigies marginalized in a crass culture. It's true enough that a reward-filled market can be a great goad to achievement. But public demand and the clamor of competition can also be a distraction, eroding the near obsessive concentration that prodigious achievement of any kind seems to require. Creative isolation and independence are the truly rare commodities in our era of instant communication and information overload, and it may be that there's no need to pity boys like Bluejay, cut off from their "emo-listening, hip-hop-dancing, ironically 'American Idol'-analyzing classmates," as Ross put it in a New Yorker column. On the contrary, what is crucial is to find distance from an e-world of indiscriminate input. You might say young classical prodigies are liberated to listen to the voices of past musical heroes in their own heads. Meanwhile, Greenberg has harnessed the information age for his purposes: With a computer, he's his own transcriber, master not just of melodies but of the means of production.

jon posted this at 3:17 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky