OPINION
Is Music the Key to Success?
By JOANNE LIPMAN
Published: October 12, 2013
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.”
Joanne
Lipman is a co-author, with Melanie Kupchynsky, of the book
“Strings Attached: One Tough Teacher and the Gift of Great Expectations.”
A version of this
op-ed appears in print on October 13, 2013, on page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: Is Music the Key to Success?
