Is Music the Key to Success?
CONDOLEEZZA RICE trained to be a concert pianist. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a professional clarinet and saxophone player. The hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner is a pianist who took classes at Juilliard.
Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement. But what is
it about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize
success in other fields?
The connection isn’t a coincidence. I know because I asked. I put the
question to top-flight professionals in industries from tech to finance
to media, all of whom had serious (if often little-known) past lives as
musicians. Almost all made a connection between their music training and
their professional achievements.
The phenomenon extends beyond the math-music association. Strikingly,
many high achievers told me music opened up the pathways to creative
thinking. And their experiences suggest that music training sharpens
other qualities: Collaboration. The ability to listen. A way of thinking
that weaves together disparate ideas. The power to focus on the present
and the future simultaneously.
Will your school music program turn your kid into a Paul Allen, the
billionaire co-founder of Microsoft (guitar)? Or a Woody Allen
(clarinet)? Probably not. These are singular achievers. But the way
these and other visionaries I spoke to process music is intriguing. As
is the way many of them apply music’s lessons of focus and discipline
into new ways of thinking and communicating — even problem solving.
Look carefully and you’ll find musicians at the top of almost any
industry. Woody Allen performs weekly with a jazz band. The television
broadcaster Paula Zahn (cello) and the NBC chief White House
correspondent Chuck Todd (French horn) attended college on music
scholarships; NBC’s Andrea Mitchell trained to become a professional
violinist. Both Microsoft’s Mr. Allen and the venture capitalist Roger
McNamee have rock bands. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, played
saxophone in high school. Steven Spielberg is a clarinetist and son of a
pianist. The former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn has played
cello at Carnegie Hall.
“It’s not a coincidence,” says Mr. Greenspan, who gave up jazz clarinet
but still dabbles at the baby grand in his living room. “I can tell you
as a statistician, the probability that that is mere chance is extremely
small.” The cautious former Fed chief adds, “That’s all that you can
judge about the facts. The crucial question is: why does that connection
exist?”
Paul Allen offers an answer. He says music “reinforces your confidence
in the ability to create.” Mr. Allen began playing the violin at age 7
and switched to the guitar as a teenager. Even in the early days of
Microsoft, he would pick up his guitar at the end of marathon days of
programming. The music was the emotional analog to his day job, with
each channeling a different type of creative impulse. In both, he says,
“something is pushing you to look beyond what currently exists and
express yourself in a new way.”
Mr. Todd says there is a connection between years of practice and
competition and what he calls the “drive for perfection.” The veteran
advertising executive Steve Hayden credits his background as a cellist
for his most famous work, the Apple “1984” commercial depicting
rebellion against a dictator. “I was thinking of Stravinsky when I came
up with that idea,” he says. He adds that his cello performance
background helps him work collaboratively: “Ensemble playing trains you,
quite literally, to play well with others, to know when to solo and
when to follow.”
For many of the high achievers I spoke with, music functions as a
“hidden language,” as Mr. Wolfensohn calls it, one that enhances the
ability to connect disparate or even contradictory ideas. When he ran
the World Bank, Mr. Wolfensohn traveled to more than 100 countries,
often taking in local performances (and occasionally joining in on a
borrowed cello), which helped him understand “the culture of people, as
distinct from their balance sheet.”
It’s in that context that the much-discussed connection between math and
music resonates most. Both are at heart modes of expression. Bruce
Kovner, the founder of the hedge fund Caxton Associates and chairman of
the board of Juilliard, says he sees similarities between his piano
playing and investing strategy; as he says, both “relate to pattern
recognition, and some people extend these paradigms across different
senses.”
Mr. Kovner and the concert pianist Robert Taub both describe a sort of
synesthesia — they perceive patterns in a three-dimensional way. Mr.
Taub, who gained fame for his Beethoven recordings and has since founded
a music software company, MuseAmi, says that when he performs, he can
“visualize all of the notes and their interrelationships,” a skill that
translates intellectually into making “multiple connections in multiple
spheres.”
For others I spoke to, their passion for music is more notable than
their talent. Woody Allen told me bluntly, “I’m not an accomplished
musician. I get total traction from the fact that I’m in movies.”
Mr. Allen sees music as a diversion, unconnected to his day job. He
likens himself to “a weekend tennis player who comes in once a week to
play. I don’t have a particularly good ear at all or a particularly good
sense of timing. In comedy, I’ve got a good instinct for rhythm. In
music, I don’t, really.”
Still, he practices the clarinet at least half an hour every day,
because wind players will lose their embouchure (mouth position) if they
don’t: “If you want to play at all you have to practice. I have to
practice every single day to be as bad as I am.” He performs regularly,
even touring internationally with his New Orleans jazz band. “I never
thought I would be playing in concert halls of the world to 5,000, 6,000
people,” he says. “I will say, quite unexpectedly, it enriched my life
tremendously.”
Music provides balance, explains Mr. Wolfensohn, who began cello lessons
as an adult. “You aren’t trying to win any races or be the leader of
this or the leader of that. You’re enjoying it because of the
satisfaction and joy you get out of music, which is totally unrelated to
your professional status.”
For Roger McNamee, whose Elevation Partners is perhaps best known for
its early investment in Facebook, “music and technology have converged,”
he says. He became expert on Facebook by using it to promote his band,
Moonalice, and now is focusing on video by live-streaming its concerts.
He says musicians and top professionals share “the almost desperate need
to dive deep.” This capacity to obsess seems to unite top performers in
music and other fields.
Ms. Zahn remembers spending up to four hours a day “holed up in cramped
practice rooms trying to master a phrase” on her cello. Mr. Todd, now
41, recounted in detail the solo audition at age 17 when he got the
second-highest mark rather than the highest mark — though he still was
principal horn in Florida’s All-State Orchestra.
“I’ve always believed the reason I’ve gotten ahead is by outworking
other people,” he says. It’s a skill learned by “playing that solo one
more time, working on that one little section one more time,” and it
translates into “working on something over and over again, or
double-checking or triple-checking.” He adds, “There’s nothing like
music to teach you that eventually if you work hard enough, it does get
better. You see the results.”
That’s an observation worth remembering at a time when music as a
serious pursuit — and music education — is in decline in this country.
Consider the qualities these high achievers say music has sharpened:
collaboration, creativity, discipline and the capacity to reconcile
conflicting ideas. All are qualities notably absent from public life.
Music may not make you a genius, or rich, or even a better person. But
it helps train you to think differently, to process different points of
view — and most important, to take pleasure in listening.
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