Original title: Range; How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
Author: David Epstein
This is tiny parts of the book, in which don’t portray a whole book’s content. Interesting notions/quotes are being delivered here!
Jack Cecchini, a musician who is world class in both jazz and classical. Stumbled across a guitar when he was 13. Took free music lesson in clarinet, then transferred it to the guitar. Once in a concert, his electric gutar was broken, but he learned quite fast the fingering of classical guitar. “I’d say I’m 98 percent self-taught. He switched between instruments and found his way through trial and error”.
Duke Ellington, a preeminent American composer stopped learning music before he read notes. “As far as anyone teaching me, there was too many rules and regulations…As long as I could sit down and figure it out myself, then that was all right”.
Django Reinhardt, a Belgian jazz guitarist, was burned most of his body when the wagon he was in exploded. So, he was used to improvise while playing guitar. He is the pioneer of “Gypsy jazz” and virtuosic guitar solo. “…the man who could neither read music nor study it with the traditional fingerings, without question, the single most important guitarist in the history of jazz”.
Based on those childhood stories by elite musicians, there are numerous of interesting fragments in the book that guide into some core ideas.
Cecchini once said, “I couldn’t play that again if you put a gun to my head” when he was asked to repeat an impressive improvisation play. One interesting point regarding way of learning music is “At the beginning, your mom didn’t give you a book and say ‘this is a noun, this is a pronoun, this is a dangling participle'”. Instead, in the context of learning music, “You acquired the sound first, and then you acquire the grammar later”. It implies on a notion of “The more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example”. That’s the core of creativity.
“I think when you’re self-taught you experiment more, trying to find the same sound in different places, you learn how to solve problems” in general context.
MW
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