Discourses of Talent in American Music History, Pedagogy, and Popular Culture

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

With musical case studies as its prime evidence, this project demonstrates how constructions of “giftedness” and “talent” emerge from, obscure, and perpetuate differential access to power and privilege. Using archival and ethnographic research methods as well as a broad range of primary sources and scholarly literature, it examines the ways these concepts circulate widely in social discourse and proposes alternative approaches that music educators might adopt.
The dissertation addresses three related research questions: Why is talent so powerful a concept in educational, academic, and popular American musical discourses? What is the historical genealogy of contemporary conceptions of musical talent? And finally, How do these conceptions of talent operate and compete in musical contexts?

The dissertation centers on three case studies. In “Explaining Talent” I analyze nineteenth-century discourses of musicality through the lens of the black and disabled pianist known as “Blind Tom,” concluding that understandings of musical talent and race were co-constituted during this era. In “Performing Talent,” I consider performances and portrayals of musical potential on American Idol, America’s Got Talent, and The Voice, asserting that each of these contemporary television programs forwards specific epistemologies of musical talent as a narrative device to boost viewership, promoting a fantasy of The American Dream; finally, drawing upon several years of ethnographic fieldwork within two pedagogical communities, “Teaching Talent” demonstrates how two popular teaching methods’ (developed by Shinichi Suzuki and Mark O’Connor, respectively) support differing philosophies of talent that influence how students learn—and which students are able to learn. Each of these chapters engages with a common theoretical framework that I advance in the first chapter: a typology that historicizes eight of the most common metaphors and meanings of talent and analyzes the ideological work they perform. This typology considers talent as inborn nature, as gift, as potentiality, as ease of learning, as opposed to genius, as connected to conceptions of disability, as defined by an affective response in onlookers, and as cultivation alone.

Although ethnomusicologists have observed that the concept of talent is unique to certain musical traditions, my research is the first to interrogate the conceptual history and social functions of musical talent as a cultural construct. In addition to intervening in scholarly discourses that misconstrue talent as a straightforward or immutable quality, the project reframes American musicological and educational debates around “natural” musical abilities, demonstrating the need to consider the social and cultural biases that inform pronouncements of talent in scholarly, pedagogical, and popular contexts. My dissertation also seeks to inform the pedagogical practices of teachers and professors of music, illuminating the ways that certain assumptions about natural abilities and capacities may systemically disadvantage students who have not yet learned the skills
and strategies required to cultivate and perform a “talented” identity.

Author

• Lindsay Wright, University of Chicago