In my case, "talent" has always been driven by "deep desire" of the kind that makes the long hard work it takes to get to a certain goal *enjoyable*.

I was also deeply influenced by being placed immediately as a child into the situation that there would be some kind of recital in front of people to work towards. Again, something cultivated the deep desire for that applause at an early age.

As far as that phrase, "God-given talent" goes, I remember a time when I was very young and this fantastic music would play in my head and thrill me. Especially in the morning when first waking up, before getting out of bed, but it would occur at other times as well. When I got older, I found out that my mother had played recordings, classical and jazz, while she was pregnant with me, almost daily in the afternoons when she would sit and knit. She told me that she could feel me "dancing" in the womb and that I especially liked some of Mozart's works.

I still love Mozart to this day.

Today, I try to teach my students how to view the art and science of practicing as something FUN. If they can get that, rapid advancement seems to come hand in hand with it.

I tell the student to *always* make whatever they have to play sound as much like *MUSIC PERFORMANCE* as they can. Not like droll repeated excercises, but strive to make every single note you ever play sound, "Musical". To get that across, we work with the dynamics, the counting and the phrasing at the same time as the learning of the mechanical aspects.

Stan Getz once said, "I never played a note I didn't like." That's a deep thought if ever there was one. Some folks may think he was being egotistical, but what I heard was that he was always striving to make the music make sense to the senses. The end result of that was what he said, he "never played a note he didn't LIKE" -- Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong had that gift, where every performance of anything was a unique and powerful presentation in which every note *made sense*. I have found it to be a very intense mental concentration wherein the mind is placed in a state where there is "nothing else but the performance" from beginning to end. No distractions. it is also an exhausting situation, at least for me.

One last observation:

Many times I've been confronted, either after and sometimes during a performance, by that person who says, "You're very talented. -- I took piano lessons but I was never very good." etc. etc.

After years of that, I started telling the truth to these kinds of folks. That what I do did not come easily, although it appeared to come quickly due to the "child prodigy" aspect of seeing and hearing someone who grasped these things at an earlier age than the average, but the truth of the matter is that while others were simply more interested in other things than music, while they were typically engaged in the more social aspects of life, sports, dating, movies, etc. -- I was more likely to be at home practicing my ass off. No, they don't like to hear that, but since when does anybody really like to hear truth?


Flamesuit on,


--Mac