Don't composers of symphonies have to know how to play all those instruments in order to write the music for them? How is that possible?

Thank you for taking the time to try to explain the process to me Durdle. But I have to admit it all seems like MAGIC to me. How a brain can possibly function at such a high level. Same thing happens when others try to explain how something works in the physical world or the theoretical world where Quantum Physicists live and work. There are different levels capacities of the mind and I am so often in awe of how a brilliant mind works. On a personal level I had a very brilliant boss who was VP of Finance. I was his assistant and he was an excellent problem identifier and problem solver. I told him once I wish I could go inside his brain and watch how it works because it was a mystery to me. He laughed and he said "I know" but I think he thought I was joking. I wasn't. Although if it were possible to do that I probably still wouldn't understand where the ideas come from. I guess what you don't understand is always filled with magic isn't it? How can people know so much? An unanswerable question I expect. So of course I am compelled to ask it. :)

Then how do you explain Beethoven and his deafness?

He went deaf in middle age, he could hear perfectly well as a young man and was a maestro of the pianoforte. Inspired by Mozart. Sonata Pathetique and the Ninth Symphony he never actually heard, but he had such depth of musical knowledge by then that he could hear them in his head. He knew how they would sound.

:):):)

I doubt that. No disrespect intended but "at least average intelligence" ..."find it difficult to learn anything to more than modest level". I doubt  is true of you but I do  much prefer modest people than those who are full of themselves. You know what? I learned to "swim" (really how not to drown) in my 30's. I learned that once I relaxed I couldn't go down.I don't sink. I just lay down in the water and floated! It astonished me! Of course I did that in the shallow end of a pool at first. My ex-husband sunk like an anchor unless he moved about vigorously. Once I learned to RELAX and stop stiffening up I never had a problem. I'm not fat and wasn't then so it wasn't that fat floats. There is that "Unsinkable Molly Brown" thing I must have going for me. Not a strong swimmer. I would NEVER try that in the ocean. I know better. But a harmless backyard pool? No problem. I wonder what other things are that. I think having babies too. That's why people adopt and then the lady gets pregnant. I think if I have a strong suit it's curiosity which seems to be more now than when I was younger. I have more time now to wonder about things.  I do enjoy mystery though. Some would cut open a drum to see where the sound comes from thereby ruining it. That would not be me. Thank you for your thoughtful and informative reply Durdle. Sharing thoughts and having people open up part of themselves is always a delight and not often enough to suit me. So I do appreciate and value those who are willing to do that. Hope all is still well with you and your family and that you are STAYING SAFE. Happy Tuesday!:)

I'm not entirely sure what you mean there, Rosie.

My comment is very much true of me - I discovered several years ago from my Medical Records that  my IQ was tested when I was 8, and found high, over 130. Yet I was always a slow learner and have always found I can learn things to a  certain level but no further.

I find it frustrating, but I do not claim to be at all unique. Tested levels notwithstanding, I am sure there must be plenty of people of at least ordinary intelligence but unable to learn anything very well. A friend in the medical profession once told me the usual type of IQ tests used on children are not really very meaningful anyway, and were designed as rough guides to academic potential.

In fact the assessor was a clinical-psychologist working out the mental problems I had. The record is very sparse, tantalisingly so; and I was never properly treated.

I asked my friend what sort of IQ tests would be useful for adults. She said they would assess things like creativity and lateral thinking - such as list the possible used for an empty cardboard box. I don't know if that was a real test question of one she made up in the conversation to illustrate her point, but though it seems trite at first glance, actually, it isn't!   

I have though, always had a streak of curiosity too, leading to my life-long interest in science and engineering.

'
Ah, there you  mention an ability I lack - despite having always lived at the sea-side I cannot swim no more than a few yards in shallow sea-water. That is because I am one of those apparently-rare people who cannot float. I used to, but only if I lay rigidly, back arched, on my back, in the sea. So all my efforts are soon expended keeping on the surface far more than moving through it.

I say "apparently" because though I do know two others like me, and you say the same of your ex-; but you rarely do hear from anyone else in that situation. Many will admit they cannot swim, but because they have never learnt, not because they cannot float. 

What we human ballast-weights do hear though, are incredulity and even near-accusations of lying, from many who are good in the water, so cannot grasp the concept of others not being buoyant.

It is a common fault though, among people who are good at something to assume everyone else either is as good as them, or just lazy or stupid. "It's easy! Anyone  can do it!" is one of their battle cries that boost their own egos while ruining their victim's confidence; along with nasty accusations like "You aren't trying - you can do anything if only you put your mind to it!" It never occurs to them that minds are individual and not all minds are good at learning.

One  my Maths teachers was a bit like that. A bombastic clown who divided the world into born mathematicians and dim-witted ignorami, he was fond of shouting to the class, "Maths is easy! It's you who make the difficulties!". He would help only the bright, keen ones though.

I see what you mean about ruining the drum to see how it works, but the genuinely curious ask how to investigate it without ruining it.  My Mum once reckoned scientists who do things like analysing the rainbow (with masses of hard trigonometry!) remove the mystery and romance, but I see it as yes, it removes the mystery but enhances the beauty.

Thank you - yes, our family is fine! My sisters and I met last week for the first time since March, even though we live within walking distances of each other. I hope you too are all well and safe!

My IQ is 126 or was when I was tested. Over time IQ's can increse somewhat. Perhaps you are dyslexic? I think very fast and decide very fast and as a result sometimes my haste leads me to a place I'd prefer not to be. But I cannot stop how my brain works. I suppose some kind of drug would slow it down but I don't take drugs. Not a pill popper. All I can go by is what I perceive as we engage in a variety of conversations. That's all I have to work with. As for my drum analogy. Our company took us to Disneyland for some occasion and the owners were friends with a high-up someone at Disneyland. At one point he said he was going to explain how they get the apparitions in the Haunted Mansion to work. I told him I did not want to know the mechanics of it because then I'd no longer be mystified. So I walked away out of earshot while the others listened intently. I don't want to KNOW some things. I took a Music Appreciation course and regretted it. Leaning how music is built and its components takes away my ability to just sit back and let the music envelop me. I love to be mystified. I don't want to know how the magician's magic tricks are created. I will always walk away from that. But I am very curious about many things which is why I ask so many questions. The questions I ask beget more questions. The replies I get beget more questions. So I ask them. I'm a very simple plain wrap  economy version human. Nothing fancy about me. HOWEVER when I encounter something ILLOGICAL it drives me bonkers and I have to point it out or comment on it. Now that is not to say I am so smart and others aren't. Whatever "it" is may be very logical and I just can't grasp it. I know precisely what you mean when you say there is a point beyond which you cannot understand more. I liken it to being a sponge. There is a limit to how much a sponge can hold. Sponges comes in a variety of sizes but I wonder if all sponges are made of the same material? I know all brains are not alike. I haven't checked the news today but I'm sure it will be more depressing. However I'm a bouncer back person. I may get down but I don't stay down for long. Buoyant mentally as well as physically. So far. Thank you for your thoughtful and informative reply Durdle. We're locked down tight once again. Our fate? Our destiny? :) This post was edited by RosieG at July 16, 2020 3:15 AM MDT

No, I am not dyslexic, just very slow to pick anything up.

I was reading and writing well at quite an early age, and apparently learnt to speak a bit late but then became fluent with a wide vocabulary, very rapidly. 

I know what you mean about stage magic, fairground Haunted Mansions and the like, and one of the tricks of the trade is to keep the audience puzzled and guessing even though they know it is not "magic" or "ghosts" in an supernatural way.

I remember watching a stage magician's act, and from our table we had an almost side-on view but even from that angle you could not tell what he really doing!  

One conjuring act that was exposed, was the 19C "séance", and it was the conjuror and escape-artist Harry Houdini who exposed it, presumably because he thought it was a cruel and cynical trade. He said their effects used standard conjuring skills, and of course the medium was also very good at what we would regard as psychological tricks - leading questions, the nature of the client's reactions, etc. 

One area in which I test by logic and the Devil's Advocate view is the "conspiracy fantasy" (they rarely deserve "theory") and the sensational. I may not know or have any evidence for what really happened or was observed,  but ask myself, "Is this really a likely explanation?" or "If were doing that, what would I gain?"

.

My simile for learning capacity is not the sponge but the bucket of water standing on a beach - a row of them, in fact, each labelled with its own topic, like "Maths" , French", "Art", etc.; and each of its own size. You can fill each bucket, but once it is full you can keep pouring in as much water as you like, but it only runs over the rim and is lost in the sand.

I have told the mind does not work like that, but that's how mine seems to work for me. I am not sure whether it is my depth of understanding, the volume of facts, or what it is. I am not good at rote learning, but that's common. I need to understand it too.

I do though now recognise a possible break-point.

When my sisters and I cleared our parents' home after Mum died (Dad had died some years previously) we found some old school reports Dad had squirreled away in the bureau he used for stationery and so on. The most telling was a small, simple, fairly informal document from my first Infant's School, pleased with my good progress in Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. In the following year Dad's work was moved to a new establishment nearly 100 miles away, uprooting our and many other families - and by some utterly crass fluke of non-planning in some remote office in London, right in the middle of the school Summer Term! This put me in the second Year of Infants' School in an entirely new school, and I think I was unable to cope with the jump from one school and course to another even though they were probably close in contents and level.  

Our Dad was mush better educated than I could manage, with a Degree I believe he gained in an external course rather than as a full-time university student. He was a Chartered Electrical Engineer working as a scientist, so much of his work would have been advanced mathematics, and he was also very practical. My earliest memories of him are of watching him service his motor-cycle. I now have that bureau, use it still as a stationery cupboard and book-case, and I think he had made it as one of his early wood-working projects.  

      
 

Isn't the mind/brain and how it works the least understood of all there is to learn about and know? Was it Einstein who didn't speak until he was 3 or so? There are some who hit the deck running and some who seem to be exceedingly slow. Why is that I wonder? Should one brain be about the same as the next brain? I mean one auto is about the same as the next beneath the hood isn't it? Basic parts with the same purpose? Some a bit fancier but still they perform the same function? The brain is a mystery. I have a very good friend who got an undergraduate degree in COGNITIVE SCIENCE. He learned about so many things having to do with memory and thinking and said there is more we don't know about the brain than we do know. How many things are like that? Everything maybe? Geez! It's daunting. My Jim's thought processes are  slower than mine. He has a good mind but it doesn't operate quickly. We have a good laugh about it. He keeps reminding me of what his dad told him (whom I never met. Jim's parents died before we met). "MEASURE TWICE. CUT ONCE". It's how we roll. He plans prepares for a lot longer than I do. I just don't have the patience. I wonder where patience comes from and why some of us have loads of it and others don't? Well I'll ask. Thank you for your reply Durdle! :)

Oh yes, knowing how the brain transmits signals and which part of it does what, is one thing, but it is still a long way from understanding character, emotions, memory, talent, etc. Including patience.

I know the Measure Twice, Cut Once maxim well. It comes from trades like carpentry, but I can still manage to mis-measure things twice or more!  

My main downfall (I have many) is IMPATIENCE Durdle. Now Jim is very patient. In our family I am the breaker of things and Jim is the repairer. No I do not purposely break anything and I have learned from Jim to STOP if something doesn't move easily. DO NOT FORCE IT. I think knowing is one thing and actually doing is much harder. How do we change whom we are? I think we don't but we can maybe make allowances for our defects and try to avoid getting ourselves in situations where they "shine" as it were. Thank you for your thoughtful reply! :)

Child prodigies and autistic savants do exist. Einstein is believed to have been on the spectrum, Dirac and Tesla almost certainly were. Mozart composed his first Symphony before he could the his shoes, little Amira Willighagen was singing opera at eight. They are much rarer that once thought, but they certainly exist.

Not only rarer, but I think now the supposed link between unusual ability and autism has been discredited.

I remember my medical-lecturer friend once explaining to me that it's not helped by "autism" covering such a range of conditions and severity it is too easily a convenient "explanation" for anything thought unusual, even when the combination is by co-incidence not physiology. Indeed, I had gained an impression that just as 1950s people apparently had a fashionable fetish for being "happy, secure and well-adjusted",  it became fashionable in the last few decades to call others, or oneself, as being on something called "the autistic spectrum". Usually, it merely referred to some trait, characteristic or even hobby thought harmless but odd or eccentric by the happily and securely well-adjusted. 

If I recall it correctly, she added that autism bears no relation to IQ and no direct relation to learning ability. Though it could hamper learning by the social effects it can have. Overall, autistic people cover pretty much the same range of intelligence and ability as anyone else. The corollary is  that an unusually high IQ is not a symptom of autism, whose main effects are reduced communication and social skills, with a desperate need for routine and certainty. 

The context of our conversation had been my mentioning I had thought I am slightly autistic - even if I am, I am no prodigy at anything. Just the reverse in fact. Routine is not my strong point either! 

Mozart is a poor example, too. Autistic or not, he undoubtedly had a talent for music, but he was forced into it to an extent we would now see as abusive, from a very early age, by his ambitious father. I don't know about the others you name, but Amadeus Mozart was by no means the only one to have been pushed relentlessly by bullying parents craving something to boast about.  

He is one of the child prodigies I was talking about. So is Amira.

That's why I picked up on Mozart.

I don't know the name Amira Willighagen, but I hope she was not also forced into hours and hours of practice by over-ambitious parents with a single aim in life, as happened to Mozart. It does mean we cannot really judge his genuine ability as a child musician, but though obviously he could learn music rapidly, I doubt his talent was really exceptional. It was just his whole being was compressed for him into a narrow world behind staves and bars.

There was an item on this darker side of life on the radio the other day, about young gymnasts, though it was not their parents who were the bullies, but coaches. Though the "Tiger Mum" type was mentioned too....

I was lucky. My parents encouraged me to learn, perhaps partly motivated themselves by the curiously high IQ score I had gained from a clinical-psychologist after they, and our GP, realised there was something wrong with me. However, they were not so stupid and cruel as to be "pushy". It would have failed anyway, as even if I was called unusually bright by an artificial test, I lacked the ability to learn anything to a high level. I probably disappointed them, but they did not make too much of it. Anyway, would it have really mattered? It was my life after all, not theirs; and in some ways I would have wanted that "failure", so they were not controlling or using me.

Amira's voice obviously hasn't been overused - yet. By her own words, she decided to sing to "do something for Queen's Day" - her brother plays violin, and she wanted to contribute. First burst onto the scene as a precocious nine-year-old on "Holland's Got Talent" (which she won), now she's almost grown up and still sings like an angel.
She did grow up in a musical family, but although encouraged, she doesn't appear to have been pushed.

On 60 minutes I think I saw a young girl composer whose name was "alma" maybe? Her head was always filled with melodies. I thought perhaps she was Australian R. Do you know of whom I speak?

Thankyou - I will keep my ears open for her.

How do we measure "potential"?

A good point!

It can't be anything  more than a subjective judgement based on performance and interest so far. It is not a quantitative characteristic and does not indicate the person is going to follow, let alone excel in, that particular path in life.

For example, everyone in our family thought one of my nieces would become a professional singer or actress, as she showed great promise in two amateur shows whilst studying drama. These revealed her to be good at both. Her singing voice sounded like Kate Bush without the histrionics - after I told her so she said the professional sound-engineer who had videoed the first show, had made the same comparison.

Not to be though. She was more interested in theatre's support work rather than the board-treading itself, and after working for a touring pantomime company for a time realised the profession is so insecure she left it and used her graphic-design skills in the employ of a council's publicity-department.

So yes, she had great potential... but potential is only ever a suggestion or a guess.

Sadly it is too often used and abused by parents, politicians and the like, in meaningless but cosy clichés like "maximising children's potential" - usually to try to secure more funding for schools.

I think the most certain fuel for potential to become actual is passion. Intense love of or desire for a specific thing. Now a parent cannot possibly instill his/her passion for anything and then live through a child's achieving it whatever the "it" is. Passion for something can develop early or late and sometimes never. It is with the "nevers" that often shock us. Suicide sometimes in fact. When people EXPECT more of you than you have or wish to deliver it can be devastating. I think we all have potential to be or do but do we have the PASSION to see it though? I like that. I'm going to ask. Thank you for your thoughtful reply Durdle! :)

Thank you!

I am sure most of us have the potential to achieve something worthwhile, but to what level is another matter and while passion certainly is crucial, that level depends very heavily on ability.

That is also why unfair expectations  can be so cruel - usually they are from others projecting their own ambitions or egos on their victims, and totally miss the point that we all have our own limits of both passion and ability for any given subject.  

I  can learn things only to fairly modest levels no matter hard I try; but other people excel in their chosen fields or even just generally. I don't pretend to understand why, but I know that though they work hard at it, they don't find it difficult to work up to that advanced level.

'
You had asked about composers!

Well, I think I have found something far harder than that, in music.

A composer needs to understand what different instruments sound like alone and together, and obviously how to write melodies and harmonies using those sounds. An individual player needs read music, know his or her own instrument thoroughly, and understand what of the rest of the band or orchestra are doing. Most work from the pages-full of "tadpoles" in front of them but the best concerto soloists play from memory! 

However, the other evening I heard Die Walkure (The Valkyrie), a recording made several years ago of its performance in the Royal Albert Hall as one of that season's Henry Wood Promenade Concerts*. Nina Stemme (soprano) was the Valkyrie of the title, Brunnhilde; and Bryn Terfil (tenor) played her father, the god Wotan.

I realised operatic singing of that complexity must be fiendishly difficult.

The opera is in three acts I think it was, each up to around an hour long, though the characters are not in every act.

It is in German, but that of course was its composer, Richard Wagner's own language.  Nina Stemme is Swedish, Bryn Terfil is Welsh. The other singers were of various nationalities too.

You  can recognise some of the tunes but most are not catchy like those of a Gilbert & Sullivan or Lerner & Lowe light-operetta / musical. Many of the singers' cues are entirely instrumental and in places there are sizeable intervals between each sung passage, with the musical cue to start each passage not obvious to the listener.

So the singers have not only to remember and sing long, complicated songs in what for most of them is a foreign language, and with difficult tunes over wide pitch ranges, to a difficult "backing". They also need understand what they mean, and express the appropriate emotions strongly without losing musicality - a skill most pop singers lack.

I don't know if the conductor can signal the cues by gestures, but otherwise it all comes down to sheer individual memory, skill and stamina.   

Easy for the composer - he or she needs know the human voice ranges and remember that even opera signers need to breathe and to rest at intervals; but is normally writing in own language and does not have to sing it, or remember if the next bit is after the twiddly woodwind figure or the reply from the strings, its melody and the dramatic expression!

(In Die Walkure, the Wotan is sometimes very angry, at other times sad and despairing, according to the place in the story.)

===

* This year's live "Proms" are of course off due to the pandemic, so the  BBC, which hosts them, is broadcasting selected recordings of past concerts. It has apparently planned something live for the season's last couple of weeks, but what and how I don't know. It has also been supporting musicians by commissioning them to play in otherwise empty auditoria, and by some surprising ensemble work by musicians physically separated, playing in their own homes via telephone links. 

We can only wait and see what will happen to its Winter season of relayed, live opera performances from New York's Metropolitan Opera House. If new, live performances can't go ahead, the two countries' radio networks might be able to re-broadcast previous ones, if they were recorded.

I assume these are matinees because the British broadcasts of them start in the early evening. The BBC uses the pre-performance ad-breaks in the American radio company's service it uses, to give us information about the work and the performers.  

The relay is set up by an international broadcast-exchange scheme called the European Broadcasting Union.