Nurture rather than nature leads to greatness

This month I have invited Anne Marsden Thomas to write an article about her belief that anyone can play the organ to an excellent standard given hard work. Anne  is an organist, organ teacher and author of 20 books.  She is Head and Senior Teacher of Royal College of Organists Academy Organ School where she also directs the annual RCO Academy Summer Course for Organists in the City of London. Anne teaches organ at The Royal Academy of Music, both in the Junior and Senior departments.  Since 2006 she has taught the LRAM course there which trains those wishing to qualify as organ teachers. Anne gives private organ lessons at St. Giles Cripplegate Church.  She has taught hundreds of students over the last 40 years, with many of these students continuing into the music profession. She has been Director of Music at St. Giles Cripplegate Church since 1982.  Although she no longer gives organ recitals, her concert and teaching work has taken her to the USA, Canada, Japan, Europe and all over the UK and she has made several commercial recordings. She trained at The Royal Academy of Music, where she won all the organ performance prizes, and afterwards with Dame Gillian Weir. Anne was awarded the MBE in the Queen’s New Year Honours 2015 for ‘services to organ music’.

David Wakefield

I love teaching everybody! Anne Marsden Thomas

I love teaching because I believe that all my students are blessed with massive potential.  This belief of mine is rooted in my personal history, so I hope you will excuse a little of my life story. When I left school I decided not to be a musician.   That was because I thought I lacked talent and would never succeed in the musical profession.  I believed that, if you are blessed with this magical quality ‘talent’, your destiny is assured.  But, if you lack this magical ‘talent’ … well, don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington!

So, while my friends went off to college, I worked full-time at various non-musical jobs, relegating music study – piano, organ and harmony – to my spare hours.  My piano and organ teachers encouraged me to enter music diplomas and, to my astonishment, I did well.  Meanwhile I was appointed organist to my local church, and found that playing for Sunday services was a highlight of my week.   After three years I realised I was being an idiot:  that, although I still believed myself insufficiently talented to perform music for my living, I was clearly drawn to any sort of musical career, however humble.  Equipped with three shiny new diplomas, I nervously applied to The Royal Academy of Music, feeling like a very old lady at the age of 20.  I was given a place, and thus began four years of happy full-time music study.  And, at last, music became my life.

It was only much later, when I started teaching, that I began to question the whole concept of an uneven distribution of talent.  I noticed that my students, especially the adults, had far more potential than they realised.  But they set themselves limits because they assumed, just as I had, that they lacked talent.  And it inhibited them.  Failing to believe in oneself makes one unwilling to practise, self-conscious in expressing the music and nervous in performance.  Even one’s technique suffers, since self-doubt tenses the muscles and makes the player’s movements unreliable.   For example, we all know that self-trust is essential for accurate pedalling: “I hope the next note won’t go wrong” is a sure way of ensuring that it does!

I started to experiment with the idea that every student I met is blessed with an infinite level of musical ability.  Immediately my teaching took on a new dimension: it became fascinating to identify and develop the special talent that every student possesses.  After forty years I haven’t wavered from that approach:  I honestly believe that all students have a unique musical voice which needs identifying and celebrating, and which can be developed to a high level.      A teacher’s job is to help each student to grow in confidence by pointing out their strengths, and to work hard in addressing the challenges by showing them appropriate practice methods.   I certainly don’t claim to be the UK’s best organ teacher, but I always hope that my belief in my students helps them to believe in themselves, too.

RCO Summer Course 2014 group photo

Recently I have been reading research about talent.  This research indicates that great celebrities have not achieved greatness through talent.  Instead, those who succeeded in their chosen profession had one thing in common:  they all practised – and practised with determined focus – for 10,000 hours before undertaking full-time training.  In other words, it’s not randomly distributed talent that leads to greatness, it’s sheer hard work.

You may be interested to know that the idea of nurture rather than nature leading to greatness is not, in fact, new.  Even the greatest musician of all time, Johann Sebastien Bach, believed it.   Bach said:

“one can do anything if only one really wishes to, and if one industriously strives to convert natural abilities, by untiring zeal, into perfected skills”. 

If you want to know more, I recommend this book.  It is the best of several books I have read on the subject: Matthew Syed: Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice.

Anne Marsden Thomas