It's so nice to see your sons or daughters on stage, to hear how the audience applauds them. Sometimes it seems to parents that the path to musical triumph is quite real: buying an instrument, entering a music school, persistent studies. But not every parent evaluates the degree of musical abilities of their child objectively.
Any talent, including musical, is a complex phenomenon, not fully understood. There are different models of talent in psychological science. The toughest of them is the multiplicative model formulated by the American scientist D. Simonton: if at least one of the components of talent is equal to zero, then all other components should be “multiplied by zero”. According to this model, only 0.5% of people can be considered talented in one area or another.
This, of course, is an exaggeration, and yet the number of talented people is small, and parents should be prepared for the fact that their child is not included in this number.
Musical ability
The heart of musical talent is musical ability. Among them, the main ones stand out - those without which no musical activity is possible: neither the performance of music, nor the composition, nor even the perception. Scientists and educators believe that all people have such abilities, excluding only those who are totally deaf from birth, the difference lies in the degree of their development.
The main musical abilities were highlighted by the Russian psychologist B. Teplov: modal feeling, musical rhythmic feeling and the ability to form generalized musical and auditory representations.
The fretting feeling is the ability to perceive music as an expression of some kind of content. Its external manifestations are the ability to assess the character of music in a more diverse way than “sad” or “cheerful”, to distinguish a completed melody from an unfinished one, stable harmony from unstable.
Musical-rhythmic feeling is expressed in the ability to move in accordance with the musical rhythm - to march to the beat, to dance, conveying the character of the music in motion.
The ability for generalized musical-auditory representations is manifested in the ability to recognize melodies that a child has heard somewhere and once, in any timbre presentation - no matter what person sings them without words, no matter what instrument they play.
Other components of talent
One of the main signs of talent is the high motivation for musical activity. If parents take a child to a music school "under escort", and at home they are forced to sit at an instrument - this child cannot be called a talented musician, even if he has well-developed musical abilities. A truly talented child is passionate about learning music - sometimes even against the will of his parents - and knows exactly what instrument he wants to play. The desire to learn to play the guitar should be critically assessed - it may not be determined by talent, but by imitation of peers.
It is unlikely that a child with poor health will achieve success in music, who is often sick, gets tired quickly, because performing activity is hard physical work. For the same reason, restlessness can be considered the enemy of musical talent.
No matter how obvious the child's musical talent may seem to his parents, the last word must be left to the teacher-musician. Teachers can make mistakes too, but not as often as ambitious fathers and mothers might think.
