Time is a strange thing
You live your life and don’t notice it
Then suddenly it’s all you can feel.
—Richard Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier, 1910
Sweet as my own milk
But salt as my own tears.
—George Benjamin and Martin Crimp, Written on Skin, 2012
I’m at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden watching Der Rosenkavalier. If, like me until recently, you’ve not heard of it, it’s a comic but melancholic opera written in 1910 by Richard Strauss. This evening’s performance started at six, and it’s now nine thirty; we’re in the third act. My eyes are starting to blur. Don’t get me wrong—the performance is wonderful, I’ve got an amazing seat in the stalls, the orchestra is as stirring as you’d expect from this world-class group of musicians—but it’s a long opera. I’m tired. Then I guiltily reprimand myself. I’m tired? What must it be like to sing it?
A few hours earlier I popped backstage to say hi to the bass operatic singer Matthew Rose, who is playing Baron Ochs. He was in makeup, having a latex bald head fitted and colored to match his skin. On top of it went a wig, and on top of that, a hat. You can imagine your head would get rather warm, and that’s before going onstage. Ochs is a swaggering, cynical, and crude member of the Vienna elite; he’s a central figure in the opera and sings through all three acts. Rose told me the role is a monster, and he didn’t mean the man’s character. “There are a few Wagner roles that are as demanding, but this is probably as hard as anything I’ll do. This is the Everest of opera. This is the ultimate.”
I’m far from being an opera expert, but I know I like it, and I know why. In addition to the straightforward enjoyment of getting wrapped up in a great story, it’s the thrill and the privilege of seeing people performing at the peak of human ability. It took me a long time to realize that, but it’s why seeing the opera (or the ballet) in real life is so moving: you’re experiencing the achievement up close, almost sharing it; you’re with someone who has learned to use their entire body as a musical instrument. As a biologist, and as someone who can’t sing, that is powerfully impressive. But until meeting Rose, I hadn’t appreciated just how difficult it is to perform opera. You have to have absolute control over the production of sound. That means your breathing, how the shape of the larynx affects vibrato and the sound of words and vowels, how your chest voice (the lower end of your register) merges and interacts with your head voice (the upper end). But that’s not all.
“You have to be able to perform in different languages, you have to be able to learn complicated music in a foreign language, you have to be musical with it, you have to watch a conductor, you have to be onstage with other people,” Rose says, and I’m starting to feel exhausted just thinking about it. “It’s amazing the number of things you have to be able to do at once at an unbelievably high level. Simon Rattle says being an opera singer is the hardest job in the world. Singers get a hard time, but what they have to do, it’s the hardest skill set of any job anywhere.”
Their job is to faithfully re-create someone else’s music. It might be Verdi or Wagner, but someone else has determined what they want to do with the opera, and the singer has to transmit that, not interpret it. In pop music, the singer is letting his or her emotions come through and it’s okay to lose control—that’s what moves us, when we hear the emotions breaking through in the voice. But in opera, the emotions come from the composer; control is absolute. Plus you have to sing without a microphone. As much as I love pop singers, they simply couldn’t make themselves heard in an opera venue over the sound of a full orchestra without a mic. Opera is full on. Technically, it is more complex than acting, because singing is more complex than speaking. And in theater, the actor is in control of time, and spontaneity can be played with, cues can be adjusted. “In opera there isn’t that elasticity of time. You have rehearsed it all with the conductor, so spontaneity in opera is largely faked,” says John Fulljames, director of opera at the Royal Danish Theatre.
I suppose that because opera is something I could never possibly come close to performing in, those who do so carry some sort of aura, an almost magical talent. It’s the same with anyone with an extraordinary voice. She has a marvelous gift, we say. He has God-given talent, we say. To put it scientifically, we assume there is a strong genetic component to excellence at singing. But here I am with Matthew Rose, a Grammy Award–winning singer—let’s ask him.
“I really believe that ninety percent of what I’m able to do is because of my training. Language skills, musical skills—I don’t think that can be genetic.”
Well, that told me. Of course, Rose and all professional musicians have worked incredibly hard to get where they are. And despite the blithe “he has an amazing gift” way of describing people with talent, it’s also popular to ascribe expertise to practice, as the infamous 10,000 hours theory (see below) holds. Can both explanations be right? My aim now is to explore what we know about how people reach the peaks of singing ability. What does it take to become an opera singer of the caliber that gets gigs at Covent Garden? I’ll speak to singers and teachers but also to geneticists, because when talking to Rose I felt that his insistence on training over genetics comes from an understandable need to acknowledge the amount of hard work he’s put in, especially for the role he’s currently working on, but it is also somehow his way of expressing modesty in his talent. Anyone could do it, he virtually says. Well, I couldn’t.
• • •
Rose says he was not born into a particularly musical family. “My mum actually has a beautiful singing voice, and retrospectively now she loves music,” he says. Music was only “around” at home and he was at a school where music only “existed.” But he did enter the school choir from the age of seven. “That was a major influence in what I do and there was a lovely music teacher at school who was another major influence. So I was always singing but I never really took it seriously all the way through my teenage years.”
What he did take seriously was first swimming, then golf. His dream was to be a professional golfer, and I think it’s instructive that he switched, after a while, to singing. We’ll see later how important it is that children try different things so they can get a feel for what they like and what they are good at. “Thank God I didn’t do golf,” he says. “I’d be selling Mars bars or something by now.”
When he was around seventeen, a new music teacher at school suggested Rose should think about singing as a job. Rose calls it a job, not a career, much less a “calling.” “Obviously I had a natural voice, and some musicality, and when I was at university I was made aware of what it could be.” He then “luckily” got a place at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and he attributes much of his subsequent success as a singer to the training he received there. “Basically I started from scratch when I went there and had five years of unbelievable training. It was an amazing environment to learn the tools necessary for this trade.”
He says he didn’t know much about opera. “I went there; I could sing three or four notes. I had no clue about anything.”
The competition for places is intense, and the caliber of the students is extraordinarily high, so I’m not sure how much luck was involved in him getting into the world-renowned music school. Lang Lang, one of the world’s most famous pianists, was in the same year. At Curtis the training is vocational, and perhaps this is why Rose views what he does as merely a job. Perhaps it’s just that I see singers as having this aura of talent—or maybe I was half expecting a stereotypical diva, occupying some higher plane of artistic existence. Anyway, at Curtis the singers performed five operas a year, so classes were always about training toward the performances. “It was completely vocational training,” says Rose, “which is unprecedented in the world. It’s like being a footballer—you’ve got to get out there and do it, sitting around learning about it in a classroom doesn’t really help.”
If this isn’t concerted, targeted, deliberate practice, I don’t know what is. It gets to the heart of the debate about expertise, so let’s look at the evidence, some of which we touched upon in Chapter 1.
On one side there are the environmentalists. These are the people who argue that practice, and particularly what is called deliberate practice—focused, dedicated practice with targets and improvement goals—is the most important factor in the development of expertise. They are led by Anders Ericsson, who says: “No matter what role genetic endowment may play in the achievements of ‘gifted’ people, the main gift that these people have is the same one we all have—the adaptability of the human brain and body, which they have taken advantage of more than the rest of us.”1
The writer Malcolm Gladwell took a 1993 paper by Ericsson and colleagues 2 and from it developed the “10,000 hours rule,” the idea that it takes that amount of time to become an expert in something. Ericsson took issue with simplifying his research into a “rule,”3 and has complained that Gladwell didn’t even mention that it is deliberate practice that is important, not just any old practice.4 However, the meme was too good, and it took off.
On the other side are those who give space to innate talent—who allow that some people are genetically gifted. They look at the evidence and see that expertise is best explained by a mixture of genetic and environmental factors. Their framework for expertise—and let’s face it, it’s not going to compete well on the meme front with 10,000 hours—is called the multifactorial gene-environment interaction model, or MGIM.5 In a nutshell it recognizes that practice can’t explain achievement and accepts that both genetic and nongenetic factors are essential for expertise. The model has been developed by Fredrik Ullén and Miriam Mosing at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and Zach Hambrick, who we met in Chapter 1. Hambrick runs the Expertise Lab, devoted to uncovering the reasons for individual differences in expertise. Why, his team asks, are some people so much better than others at certain things? “We look at training, experience, and talent—this is basically the capacity to be influenced by genetics—and also sociodemographic factors,” he says.
“No one doubts that you have to practice in order to become an expert in something like chess or athletics or music. We aren’t literally born with this knowledge. But what accounts for differences across people? That’s what we focus on.”
They’ve amassed a lot of empirical evidence that they say supports the idea that practice is not enough to explain performance. So let’s look at a couple of papers. In one, Hambrick’s team took eight separate studies of musical ability and practice, and analyzing data from all of them, found that the amount of practice someone put in accounted for 30 percent of the variance in performance. In other words, factors other than the amount of practice put in accounted for 70 percent of the individual differences in performance ability.6 In another, more wide-ranging, analysis of musical ability (not carried out by Hambrick), practice was found to account for only 36 percent of the variance in performance.7 Many other similar analyses have led the MGIMers to the view that genetics is just as important as—if not more than—practice. So despite Rose’s assertion that 90 percent of his success is down to training, the evidence shows that on average only 30-odd percent of the variance in performance outcomes can be explained by practice.
• • •
Rose gestures to his throat. “These are the most precious muscles in the body.” He then gives me a quick primer on how an opera singer produces such volume. You know how babies are able to make an unbelievably loud noise? That’s because they use their entire bodies efficiently to produce sound. “We’re trying to regain that efficiency, as a baby would,” Rose says. “It’s all about using your diaphragm and the right muscles and pushing the sound in the right places.”
Having the right vowel sound is an advantage, because it gets you close to the resonances you need to produce to fill an opera hall. “There’s a reason Italians and Welsh are such great singers,” he says. “It’s because the way they speak is already very close to how you have to be as an operatic singer trying to produce those resonances.” Being French, for example, is no advantage (the language is guttural, apparently), and an accent from the south of England, where Rose hails from, isn’t much better. The short vowel sounds of the north of England are better (which is why the composer Alan Williams, from Salford University, has created an opera designed for the northern accent).8
The role of Baron Ochs is long and sung low in Rose’s range, which means his voice needs to be completely rested before a performance: he won’t even speak in the day before he sings.
“I’ll wake up late, have a nap in the afternoon, then come in. It’s just so tiring. It’s physically, mentally demanding. This is the marathon of opera roles. So I have to be so careful. It’s unlike anything else I have to do.”
It’s an endurance test, and he has to be conservative just to get through the night. When he was young, adrenaline would see him through, but these days he sees it more as a job he has to turn up for and do to the best of his ability.
This sounds dour, but it’s not that he doesn’t love it, it’s simply that he can’t afford to waste the energy on being excited. In New York in 2016–17 he played Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. “Doing Don Giovanni, I can do that falling off a log so I got really excited. It’s less complicated and I know it really well. But with this you have to concentrate every single second and watch the conductor. The text is in German, but I have to do a slight Austrian accent. So this role is as hard as it gets.”
Rose again and again emphasizes that, for him, it is a process. It’s about learning to use his body properly, to breathe, to look at a conductor properly, all things that improve with experience. Given all that, however, he says that there are “natural” singers: he names the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel as one, and the French tenor Roberto Alagna as another. Terfel started singing in Welsh-language eisteddfod competitions when he was four, so he has had a huge amount of practice, which I would have thought makes it difficult to assert that he’s a natural because we’re back to the problem of practice and natural talent. Alagna started off busking in the streets before he was discovered, and despite huge success in opera, was apparently self-taught. “Alagna never had a singing lesson,” Rose says. “But most people have had years and years of lessons. Pavarotti, probably the most perfect singer that ever lived, he studied and studied, and got his voice the way he did through study and practice.”
Mikael Eliasen is Rose’s old singing teacher. He is head of the department of vocal studies at the Curtis Institute of Music. He has worked with some of the world’s greatest singers, including the late acclaimed American baritone Robert Merrill, the Israeli contralto Mira Zakai, and the Swiss soprano Edith Mathis. He has been music director of the San Francisco Opera Center and artistic director of the European Centre for Opera and Vocal Art, and he works with the young-artist programs at Curtis, the Royal Danish Opera, and the Opera Studio of Amsterdam. He is emphatic on the question of innate talent:
“Some people are born with a voice that other people want to listen to. I don’t think you have any choice about that, either you have it or you don’t.” Take a world-famous singer like Renée Fleming, for example. When we say that she has natural talent, we mean she has a beautiful voice that she was born with. She has worked very hard to achieve her success, but it started with the natural sound, says Eliasen. “That’s what we mean when we say someone is a natural singer.” Without this innate talent, someone who loves singing might pursue it as a hobby and get great satisfaction out of it, he says. “But if they don’t have that gift, then probably it won’t turn into a professional career.”
For the audience there can be a lot of emotion in opera, but for Rose, again, it’s not something he feels when he is performing. I hadn’t appreciated, given how much the audience can be moved emotionally and even transported to another level, in the way that extraordinary art can give you a rush, a glimpse of the higher potential of human beings, that the performers themselves don’t necessarily feel they are operating in a higher realm. They are, apparently, just doing their job.
“I don’t get emotional when I’m singing,” he says. Or only occasionally. Schubert makes him a mess. “But when I do opera, emotion doesn’t really come into it. With Placido Domingo there must be so much emotion going through his body all the time. And his performance comes from an emotional place. With me, I know how to push the emotional buttons of the audience, but I don’t feel it myself. I know what I have to do to make the right reaction in the audience.”
It sounds like a bit of a slog.
“It’s my job and I love to do my job well. And this is the ultimate challenge in my job. To come here, this is my home opera house, the shrine of opera in this country, so to come here and do it well . . . I want to come here and do my job as well as I can.”
His secret, perhaps, if he won’t acknowledge much in the way of innate talent, is a drive and an obsession that’s always been there. “I try to be successful and good at everything I do. Maybe that’s an attitude thing that’s ingrained in people that succeed. It’s obsession. When I was a student, it was complete obsession. Maybe now less so.”
To do this, he says, you have to have the right attitude. “It’s the same dedication as being a nun or a monk; it’s that sacrificial to do it properly. It really is that hard.”
Rose has hit upon one of the most compelling pieces of evidence pointing at a genetic component to musical success.
• • •
Miriam Mosing is a professor in the department of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute. She used a massive database of twins born between 1959 and 1985 to tease out the relative importance to musical ability of practice and genes. The popular idea is that if you take children and give them a little training, say in singing or piano, then the differences in ability between them at first will be innate. Ericsson would say that after months and years of practice, these genetic differences will have been swamped by the new skills the children have learned, so that practice becomes the determining factor. Mosing says this is a radical environmentalist point of view, and that a large body of evidence suggests that practicing isn’t enough to achieve expertise.
Mosing and her team contacted people in the twins database and asked if they played an instrument or regularly sang, and if so, for how long they’d practiced at different ages. The team ended up with responses from 1,211 pairs of identical twins and 1,358 pairs of nonidentical twins. The participants were also scored for musical aptitude: pitch, melody, and rhythm discrimination. Because twins share either half or all their genes, and almost the same environment, it’s possible to examine a trait—such as musical ability—and determine how much is influenced by genetics and how much by practice.
Mosing found that between 40 and 70 percent of the difference in music practice was genetic. Music practice, mind you. They found, in other words, that much of the propensity to practice can be explained genetically. But even more surprising for the commonsense notion that practice makes perfect, Mosing found that in identical twins, different amounts of practice did not contribute to different levels of musical ability. It’s like we saw in the chapter on intelligence: if you raise identical twins separately from birth, their educational attainment is correlated more closely to each other than it is to their school or home environment. She published her findings in the journal Psychological Science, and titled the paper, “Practice does not make perfect: no causal effect of music practice on music ability.”9
Mosing’s work followed another study from Hambrick’s Expertise Lab of 850 pairs of twins, who in the 1960s had been surveyed and questioned on the amount of musical practice they put in, and the success they had achieved. Remember that the common example cited to support the 10,000 hours rule is the time racked up during The Beatles’ intense period of playing together in Hamburg.10
Hambrick and Elliot Tucker-Drob, of the University of Texas, Austin, looked at data collected for the National Merit Scholarship test of 1962. Each twin in the survey, with an average age of seventeen, had provided data on the amount of musical practice they undertook, and on the level of success they had achieved. The categories ranged from “received a rating of good or excellent in a school/county/national contest” to “performed with a professional orchestra.” With their data from both identical and nonidentical twins, Hambrick and Tucker-Drob were able to tease apart the effects of genes and environment on both music practice and accomplishment.
They found that about a quarter of the variation in the amount of practice people put in could be explained by genetic factors. That means that a quarter of the drive to go and practice is genetically influenced. They also found that practice magnified the effects of innate talent. In short: genes influence how much you practice, and also how successful you end up being.11
I’ve never had a singing lesson, and I never sing except in the car, alone. My partner marvels that I love listening to music but have no aptitude for it whatsoever. When I lived in Japan, however, I regularly went to karaoke. I’d go out with my colleagues after lab meals or scientific conferences, and I was often asked to sing “Yesterday.” We want to hear it sung by a native Brit, my Japanese friends would urge. Poor them, to hear what is still a massively popular song in Japan, mangled by me. But over the months I found something strange happening. My voice was improving. I learned to choose songs that fitted my limited range—my go-to songs were “Starman” and “Light My Fire”—but also I was just getting better. Practice was helping even me, although we are talking only marginal improvement here. Even in a karaoke bar, the contrast between the noise I made and the stirring sound coming from someone who could really sing was extraordinary. At the end of their paper, however, Hambrick and Tucker-Drob conclude with a line that makes me wonder if, in an alternate-reality timeline, even I could have been a pop star: “These results indicate that children who do not engage in training or practice in music may have hidden talents, or at the very least potentials for talent, that go unrecognized and unrealized.”
Mosing solves the riddle of why so many people, including professional singers such as Rose, still believe in the power of practice. “They’re right,” she says. “Without practice, they wouldn’t be where they are; they have to practice a lot.”
No one is denying the vital importance of practice. But it’s not enough to ensure you get to the very top. “It’s a really nice idea that anyone can achieve anything if only they practice enough,” she says. “This idea that practice is an environmental factor we can use to overcome any limitations—it’s an extremely popular idea.”
Mosing guesses that many of the people I’m meeting for this book probably have amazing innate talent that they start nurturing from an early age—or their parents start nurturing it. “We really like this feeling of agency. If we are successful, we take the credit, we take agency for that. We think that it’s something we can take ownership for. But in many cases that’s not true. The main predictor of success is the socioeconomic status of the parent.”
• • •
“The discovery of the musicality and the singing was very natural. My mother sang with us when we were kids. I wasn’t a prodigy at all, but she has recordings of us singing, and we were able to recall melodies before we could recall words. We could sing before we could speak. Me and my brother and sister, we’re all musicians—and my parents aren’t, by the way.”
The Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan is one of the most celebrated of contemporary opera singers. A conductor as well as a singer, she has worked with many of the world’s top orchestras and conductors, and sung on the world’s biggest stages. When she was about ten, she says, she decided she was going to be a musician. It seems that, unlike Matthew Rose and his swimming and golf, Hannigan didn’t have to shop around until she found something she both loved and was good at.
Later I’ll see her play Agnès in George Benjamin’s Written on Skin. It’s an extraordinary role, created for and by her, in which she plays an illiterate, downtrodden wife who liberates herself by having an affair with a younger man—and ends it by eating her lover’s heart. It’s been called “one of the operatic masterpieces of our time”;12 according to Le Monde it’s “the best opera written for twenty years.”13 Hannigan, said Opera News, is “one of today’s most astonishing musical artists.” “Her whole being breathes music,” said Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf.
We meet midmorning; Hannigan is singing this evening. She has a light scarf around her neck, and I think of when I’ve seen Aretha Franklin swaddling her neck before a performance, and what Rose said about the importance of the vocal cords. Preparation for a performance is gradual.
“I warm up very slowly, with slow stretching, precision breathing, vocalizing, humming humming humming.”
She hums a scale at this point and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. (This feeling, by the way, the delicious shiver down your spine that you can also get if someone whispers in your ear, is called the autonomous sensory meridian response—and is actively sought out by some people.)14 Quite mesmerized simply by her humming, I miss the next few things she says, so it’s lucky I’m recording our conversation. “The warm-up is about awakening the total instrument. It’s not about my rib cage or my vocal cords or my breathing, it’s about everything: my entire emotional being, sensual being, intellectual being, physical being—so you wake everything up; you stimulate everything in one go.”
When I hear her sing I remember Matthew Rose’s description of a baby using its entire body to produce a loud noise—not that Hannigan sounds like a baby wailing, but that despite being small and slender, she produces a sound out of proportion to her frame. She has incredible control over her voice—she calls it “the instrument,” and it occurs to me that it’s like playing a synthesizer, or sitting at a mixing desk, such is the control she has over it.
There’s something important that this description doesn’t capture. It’s the magic of the performance, to use a word that couldn’t be less scientific but conveys what I mean. She has a charisma and authority that is captivating—spellbinding. I want to find out where this comes from without losing all objectivity, so I ask how she went from being a regular singer to a professional soloist.
“I always had the passion for the music. Music for me is like food: I would never eat food I don’t like—unless I was starving. I only agree to sing music that I like. It’s all done from the passion, and the passion gives the energy and the possibility, and it gives the energy to do a backflip, so you’re so excited you can do the crazy stuff. And if you’re bored—like doing my taxes, I’m bored—you can’t do the crazy stuff. But if I’m passionate about something, I have extra strength.”
Her parents always said she had an inordinate amount of joy, that she brought extra joy. That was the word they associated with her. Maybe it’s something like this that makes the difference, that sets her above a regular, trained, very good singer.
“I think so. Because I go into work and I think, my God, what an incredible place to be, to walk into work with these incredible musicians and do what I do.”
What does she think comes naturally to her?
“We worked hard and I studied piano and I sang in choirs . . . but the ability—what I was born with was a certain energy and drive to develop the discipline to do what I do. And curiosity.”
Like Rose, she emphasizes how hard she’s worked. “Sometimes if a conductor says to me ‘you’re a genius,’ I think no, because I’ve worked exceptionally hard. The desire to work hard comes from the love for the work.”
I ask Miriam Mosing what her work tells us about the factors that influence musical success. “One is our genetic endowment,” she says. “And that includes this ability—drive—the ability to work really hard on one thing.”
Both Mosing and Hannigan have converged on what Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, calls grit.15 This is the amount someone strives to achieve something—their perseverance—and the amount they love what they do—their passion.16
Mosing points out something that is obvious the moment you say it, but is ignored whenever we talk about nature and nurture, genetics and environment. “I think nurture really misses something here. Our nurturing environment is highly correlated with our genes. We get genes from our parents and our parents have created an environment which is influenced by their genes. In a sense, the environment we are born into correlates with genetics. If I have high musical skills, my parents have high musical skills.”
Here’s an example of how Hannigan’s childhood environment seems to closely correlate with the drive she feels she was born with. Her mother had three children in fourteen months (“Can you imagine? Three children in diapers?”) and had to be super organized. “She had a long schedule on the refrigerator with each of our names and a roster: it was to the minute. Wake up, Barbara brush teeth, Ryan practice piano, everything tick tick—every moment of our day was planned—playtime, bedtime—who could get their fifteen minutes of piano practice before school if she didn’t do that?”
The regimented scheduling has stayed with her. Hannigan’s daily routine is precisely planned, weeks in advance. “I schedule my work like that. My practice sessions—all the stuff I have to do. I had a kind of discipline from a very young age that made me want to continue that, and I did.”
As we’ve seen, no one denies the importance of practice, or the need for grit. But what the proponents of ultra-environmentalist views seem to miss, as Mosing’s work has shown so dramatically, is that practice and grit are themselves genetically influenced. The race now is to identify the genes themselves—and it’s a race that’s going on around the world.
• • •
Mongolia, sandwiched between China to the south and Russia to the north, is the most sparsely populated country in the world. For the most part it is ethnically unmixed, families are large and the environmental influence—the diet, the healthcare, and the type of schooling the children get—is pretty much the same for everyone. This makes it perfect territory for gene hunters.
Dashbalbar district, in Mongolia’s Dornod province, has about 0.37 people per square kilometer. (By comparison, the UK has 256 per square kilometer; the US, with its much larger land mass, still has 35 people per square klick.) Despite the paucity of humans in the region, Jeong-Sun Seo at the Genomic Medicine Institute at Seoul National University in South Korea managed to recruit 1,008 people from seventy-three families, and gave them a series of tests designed to investigate genetic influences on musical ability. Seo is a member of the GENDISCAN study group (the acronym stands for GENe DIScovery for Complex traits in large isolated families of Asians of the Northeast).
All the subjects had their genomes sequenced, and were tested and scored for musical skill. Individuals performed pitch-production accuracy tests, where they listened to a tone through a headset and had to reproduce it. Seo’s team then performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on the data set. This is a test that looks for links between particular genetic variants and a certain trait. It is often used to search for genetic influences on disease, but in this case the method managed to tease out links to musical talent. For example, the team found evidence for a link between a gene called UGT8, known to be active in the development of the brain, and musical ability.17 The gene is located on chromosome 4, in a region that had also been highlighted by a Finnish study investigating the genetics of musical talent.18
Irma Järvelä studies the genetics of musical traits at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Since we know that musicality varies between people, Järvelä’s group has constructed a database consisting of ninety-eight family trees containing nearly a thousand people to look at the genetics underlying this variation. She has assessed musicality using three tests, and subjects have completed extensive questionnaires as well as providing blood samples for DNA analysis. “We found that about 50 percent of the inheritance of music test scores can be explained by genetic factors in Finnish multigenerational families,” she says on her website.
Järvelä has also crunched genetic data from more than a hundred studies on musical and sensory genetics (from birds and other animals as well as humans) and highlighted the genes most likely to have an effect on musical ability. They include genes involved in cognition, learning, and memory, and several to do with neuron function and activity.19
Such studies are still very preliminary and have limited “power,” meaning the links are as yet tentative. They don’t always agree, either—Järvelä’s latest work turned up several genes on chromosome 4, but not UGT8, the gene found in the Mongolian study.
Miriam Mosing warns not to read too much into these kinds of studies yet, as the samples are still too small. To find robust examples of genes linked to any complex trait is difficult—we saw this in the chapter on intelligence and we’ll see it again with happiness—which is why the identification of a candidate gene in one study isn’t replicated in another. She says that a few years ago geneticists thought they would be able to find genetic variants with big effects on particular traits, so there would be one variant for music skill, say. “But the past few years have shown that for most complex traits the variants we find explain a maximum of one percent of the variance.”
Just as with genetic variants linked to intelligence, there will be many hundreds linked to musical ability. That doesn’t mean they aren’t there, nor that people will stop looking. “I doubt that in the future we will be able to test a person and say ‘this person should pursue a musical career because they have these specific genes,’ ” says Mosing. We might be able to look at a person’s entire genome and predict whether there are enough variants to add a little to music skill, but we won’t be able to predict the outcome.
Gary McPherson is the Francis Ormond professor of music at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. He is also the director of that institution, which is the oldest and most prestigious devoted to music in Australia. Barbara Hannigan and Matthew Rose told me that they rated their hard work over their natural talent, but in his career McPherson’s seen and taught many thousands of music students and professionals. “Professionals in all walks of life have put in a lot of hard work to get to where they are, but for me, there are natural abilities that impact on our development, and possible genetic influences that also shape our abilities,” he says. “I’m very interested in motivation—what drives a person to want to do the 10,000-plus hours of practice and exposure to get to that level. You can’t explain high level singing or music performance ability merely through just the hours undertaken practicing.”
McPherson refers me to a model of ability developed over the last three decades by Françoys Gagné, now retired, but for many years a psychologist at the University of Montreal. The differentiating model of talent and giftedness (DMTG) acknowledges that the basis of ability is biological—that is, that there is a solid genetic foundation to musical skill. Here’s an extreme example of what that means. It’s the story of a blind boy referred to as LL, who has an IQ of only 58 but began playing the piano at age eight:
One evening, at about age fourteen, LL heard Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 for the first time as a theme song to a movie on television. To his foster parents’ complete astonishment, LL played that piece back flawlessly from beginning to end later that evening, having heard it just that one time. Since then, LL’s piano repertoire, completely from memory, has expanded to thousands of pieces. Professional musicians who have witnessed LL’s piano playing have indicated that he seems to know “the rules of music” instinctively and innately.20
Yi Ting Tan is a colleague of McPherson’s at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. She has reviewed the scientific literature on the genetic components of musical ability and found several genes implicated in success in singing, musical perception, absolute pitch, music memory and listening, and even choir participation. The genes are scattered around, on chromosomes 8, 12, and 17, with a cluster on chromosome 4.21
“The shape of our vocal tract and length of vocal folds are genetically influenced, and I think vocal timbre definitely has a genetic basis too,” she says, pointing out that family members often sound alike. “It is probably necessary to recognize that some individuals just have better vocal characteristics to start with, which flourishes further with training.”
Tan adds that even personality traits like motivation and conscientiousness are likely to have a genetic basis.22 It seems you need the right genes to succeed as a professional singer.
• • •
I mentioned earlier that MGIM—the multifactorial gene-environment interaction model—is not exactly a memorable way to sum up what the wealth of science is telling us about how we become experts in a particular field. I was pondering this when I came across an amazing piece of work by Arne Güllich at the department of sport science at the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. Güllich performed an analysis of the results of international top athletes. He compared eighty-three people who had won medals at Olympic games and international competitions (the sample included thirty-eight Olympic and world champions) with a similar number of professional athletes who were highly accomplished but had not won medals. He matched them for age, sport, and gender, and recorded, using questionnaires, the amount of practice and training they’d done. It turns out that the medalists specialized later in their main sport than did the nonmedalists, and that they had done less training in that main sport as children and adolescents. Now here’s the thing: the medalists had done more practice or training in other sports than their main sport. They kept up participation in these other sports and specialized later in their main sport. Güllich published the piece in 2016 in the Journal of Sports Sciences.23
If you’re wondering why I’ve veered into sports science in a chapter about music, Güllich says the same pattern is seen in other domains: “The principle of ‘multiple sampling and functional matching’ is not unique to elite sports but is also found in music, arts, and science”—although that’s based on his understanding from his colleagues in those fields, not from hard data such as he has gathered for sports.
Some evidence comes from Dean Keith Simonton, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. Simonton looked at 911 operas composed by all fifty-nine of the classic composers, from Beethoven to Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner. He found that the most successful composers were those who’d mixed up their genres. “It may be,” wrote Simonton in his paper on this subject, published in Developmental Review,24 “that intellectual cross-training may have the advantageous function of mitigating the negative effects of overtraining.”
Güllich says the mechanisms that produce this effect are not clear, but that trying various things is effectively the same as not putting all your eggs in one basket. “It increases the probability to settle on a main sport that particularly ‘fits’ with the athlete. The fit might be in terms of performance, but also finding the right coach and the right peer group. It also reduces the risk of overuse injury. When an athlete develops across a range of sports, he or she can draw on experience in a variety of learning modes to develop the training regimen that suits them best.”
He also has some interesting points to make about Anders Ericsson’s views on expertise, pointing out limitations of the initial 1993 paper. For example, Ericsson and colleagues used junior musicians, not top-level soloists, in their study. And “deliberate practice” was ascribed to the musicians’ childhood activities, but such criteria cannot be recorded retrospectively. “Today, numerous works have debunked the validity of Ericsson’s deliberate practice theory, as far as elite sports is concerned,” says Güllich.
For his part, Ericsson has issues with Güllich’s paper and with Hambrick’s work.25 The main one, he says, is that those authors don’t distinguish between deliberate practice—that is, teacher-led instruction and designed individual practice—and any type of training or practice.26 The argument is sure to rumble on, since what is at stake is, effectively, the American dream: that we can be anything we want to be. Not only that, but we can potentially become expert in anything. What I’ve realized in this chapter is that we can’t. I couldn’t have become an opera singer. Or an F1 driver. Or a chess grand master. I found what I could do, but it wasn’t like all choices were open to me; those that were, I believe, were influenced by my genes. I don’t feel this is something to be afraid of. On the contrary, it is empowering to understand the genetics and channel your resources to the right place.
Aniruddh Patel, a psychologist who specializes in music cognition at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, says it is likely that some of the variation in singing ability has a genetic component. “There is a swing in the pendulum back toward the idea that practice alone is not enough to explain extraordinary talent, as there are people who are roughly matched in amount of practice but greatly different in skill.”
With Güllich’s work in mind, what advice would Zach Hambrick give to people who want to improve, or to maximize their children’s chances of success? “Try a lot of different things,” he says. It’s back to the idea of gene–environment correlation. Our genes influence the activities that we engage in and the environments that we create for ourselves. If we try many different things, we’ll find the one that fits us best. “It’s allowing for this gene–environment correlation to operate,” says Hambrick.
In other words, we’ve got to be like Goldilocks. Try different chairs, porridge, and beds, until you find the one that fits you best.