Excert from The Talent Code Every journey begins with questions, and here are three: How does a penniless Russian tennis club with one indoor court create more top-twenty women players than the entireUnited States?How does a humble storefront music school in Dallas,Texas, produce Jessica Simpson, Demi Lovato, and a succes- sion of pop music phenoms?How does a poor, scantily educated British family in a remote village turn out three world-class writers?Talent hotbeds are mysterious places, and the most myste- rious thing about them is that they bloom without warning. The first baseball players from the tiny island of the Dominican Republic arrived in the major leagues in the 1950s; they now account for one in nine big-league players. The first South Korean woman golfer won a Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tournament in 1998; now there are forty- five on the LP GA Tour, including eight of the top twenty money winners. In 1991 there was only one Chinese entry in the Van Cliburn piano competition; the most recent competi- tion featured eight, a proportional leap reflected in top sym- phony orchestras around the world.Media coverage tends to treat each hotbed as a singular phenomenon, but in truth they are all part of a larger, older pattern. Consider the composers of nineteenth-century Vienna, the writers of Shakespearean England, or the artists of the Italian Renaissance, during which the sleepy city of Florence, population 70,000, suddenly produced an explosion of genius that has never been seen before or since. In each case, the identical questions echo: Where does this extraordinary talent come from? How does it grow?The answer could begin with a remarkable piece of video showing a freckle-faced thirteen-year-old girl named Clarissa. Clarissa (not her real name) was part of a study by Australian music psychologists Gary McPherson and James Renwick that tracked her progress at the clarinet for several years. Officially, the videos title is shorterclarissa3.mov, but it should have been called The Girl Who Did a Months Worth of Practice in Six Minutes.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 09:22:45 +0000
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