Ten years to Mastery

[khiemtran]

At work, I often have my headphones on for several hours a day, and I've been listening lately to the Mozart symphonies. The Mozart symphony cycle is quite instructive because it's fairly heavily weighted towards the early works. I used to wonder why so many orchestras did bad jobs on the symphonies when there were so many good piano concerto cycles out there, until I realised that most of the piano concertos were written in the magical period from about KV375 onwards, when Mozart was indisputedly on top of his game, and most of the symphonies were written while he was still a teenager.

It's interesting to consider the symphonies from age 8 to 18, which takes the listener up to No. 29, possibly the first one to really stand out on its own regardless of the age of the composer. In ten years, you can see him develop from "talented for a child" to artistic maturity. Ten years, that is, of an almost constant output of symphonies, sonatas, concertos and operas. There is undoubted wit and intelligence evident quite early on, and flashes of genius show through at intervals, but it is only when he reaches eighteen and hits KV201 that he really starts producing work that stands out compared to the other composers of the era. And then, once he's hit that threshold, it's only a two or three more years before he's arguably the greatest musician on the planet, the start of a golden streak of output that will remain unbroken until his death.

It's important to remember that even the most unimaginable talent requires hard work for fulfillment, and practice and development to reach maturity. By eighteen, Mozart had already written nearly thirty symphonies and countless other works, but if he had stopped at that point, he would have merely been a historical curiosity today. It is only because he did that groundwork that he went on to achieve the mastery that would let him write some of the greatest pieces of human achievement in space of the next two decades.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I need to think about how this would relate to a writer's development. I like the concept. I have always had problems with the phrase "a million words of crap". No one sets out to write crap, even if in hindsight that's what it was. "Ten years to mastery" is a much better way of putting it.

Thanks for posting, it's triggered some useful thoughts on not giving up too soon.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

I believe the concept of "ten years to mastery" was first identified by Herbert A. Simon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Simon), who was interested in how many chunks of information a person (or AI) would need to know to become an expert in any given field.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link.