Well, that was fun. I must say you folks have a very rich
and varied range of knowledge. Let me say just a word about what led me to
raise the question. As you probably know if you have been reading this blog,
there was a time in my life when I worked very hard to learn to play the viola.
For eight years, I took a 90 minute
lesson every week and practiced an hour a day. As a result of all this work, I became a pretty amateur fair violist.
That is to say, I was nowhere near as good as a professional violist sitting in
the last chair of the viola section of a small regional professional orchestra.
The sheer amount of work day after day, month after month, year after year that
is required to achieve the sort of command of the piano or the violin or the
viola that professional musicians exhibit is something that non-musicians I
suspect do not quite understand. When I watch Yo-Yo Ma leaning back and playing
the cello as though he were listening to it rather than actually playing it, I
have some sense of what it took for him to reach that point and I am in awe.
By comparison, it is my impression that it takes relatively
little work to become a good film actor, although obviously some people are
much better at it than others. Hence, it does not surprise me that the children
of quite successful film actors sometimes themselves become successful film
actors. I should imagine it takes a good deal more work than that to become a
first-class plumber although I have never done any plumbing so I do not really
know.
