{"id":3551,"date":"2016-05-19T14:21:58","date_gmt":"2016-05-19T14:21:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sslso.org.uk\/?page_id=3551"},"modified":"2022-02-13T10:39:58","modified_gmt":"2022-02-13T10:39:58","slug":"1-looking-outwards-june-2016","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sslso.org.uk\/?page_id=3551","title":{"rendered":"Looking Outwards 14 June 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nurture rather than nature leads to greatness<\/em><\/span><\/h1>\n

\"larger\"<\/a>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.\u00a0Anne \u00a0is an organist, organ teacher and author of 20 books.\u00a0 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.\u00a0Anne teaches organ at The Royal Academy of Music, both in the Junior and Senior departments.\u00a0 Since 2006 she has taught the LRAM course there which trains those wishing to qualify as organ teachers.\u00a0Anne gives private organ lessons at St. Giles Cripplegate Church.\u00a0 She has taught hundreds of students over the last 40 years, with many of these students continuing into the music profession.\u00a0She has been Director of Music at St. Giles Cripplegate Church since 1982.\u00a0 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.\u00a0She trained at The Royal Academy of Music, where she won all the organ performance prizes, and afterwards with Dame Gillian Weir.\u00a0Anne was awarded the MBE in the Queen’s New Year Honours 2015 for ‘services to organ music’.<\/em><\/p>\n

David Wakefield<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

I love teaching everybody! Anne Marsden Thomas<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/h1>\n

I love teaching because I believe that all my students are blessed with massive potential.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 That was because I thought I lacked talent and would never succeed in the musical profession.\u00a0 I believed that, if you are blessed with this magical quality \u2018talent\u2019, your destiny is assured.\u00a0 But, if you lack this magical \u2018talent\u2019 \u2026 well, don\u2019t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington!<\/em><\/p>\n

So, while my friends went off to college, I worked full-time at various non-musical jobs, relegating music study – piano, organ and harmony \u2013 to my spare hours.\u00a0 My piano and organ teachers encouraged me to enter music diplomas and, to my astonishment, I did well.\u00a0 Meanwhile I was appointed organist to my local church, and found that playing for Sunday services was a highlight of my week.\u00a0\u00a0 After three years I realised I was being an idiot:\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I was given a place, and thus began four years of happy full-time music study.\u00a0 And, at last, music became my life.<\/p>\n

It was only much later, when I started teaching, that I began to question the whole concept of an uneven distribution of talent.\u00a0 I noticed that my students, especially the adults, had far more potential than they realised.\u00a0 But they set themselves limits because they assumed, just as I had, that they lacked talent.\u00a0 And it inhibited them.\u00a0 Failing to believe in oneself makes one unwilling to practise, self-conscious in expressing the music and nervous in performance.\u00a0 Even one\u2019s technique suffers, since self-doubt tenses the muscles and makes the player\u2019s movements unreliable.\u00a0\u00a0 For example, we all know that self-trust is essential for accurate pedalling: \u201cI hope the next note won\u2019t go wrong\u201d is a sure way of ensuring that it does!<\/p>\n

I started to experiment with the idea that every student I met is blessed with an infinite level of musical ability.\u00a0 Immediately my teaching took on a new dimension: it became fascinating to identify and develop the special talent that every student possesses.\u00a0 After forty years I haven\u2019t wavered from that approach:\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A teacher\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0 I certainly don\u2019t claim to be the UK\u2019s best organ teacher, but I always hope that my belief in my students helps them to believe in themselves, too.<\/p>\n

\"RCO<\/a>

RCO Summer Course 2014 group photo<\/p><\/div>\n

Recently I have been reading research about talent.\u00a0 This research indicates that great celebrities have not achieved greatness through talent.\u00a0 Instead, those who succeeded in their chosen profession had one thing in common:\u00a0 they all practised \u2013 and practised with determined focus – for 10,000 hours before<\/em> undertaking full-time training.\u00a0 In other words, it\u2019s not randomly distributed talent that leads to greatness, it\u2019s sheer hard work.<\/p>\n

You may be interested to know that the idea of nurture rather than nature leading to greatness is not, in fact, new.\u00a0 Even the greatest musician of all time, Johann Sebastien Bach, believed it.\u00a0\u00a0 Bach said:<\/p>\n

“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”.\u00a0 <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

If you want to know more, I recommend this book.\u00a0 It is the best of several books I have read on the subject:\u00a0Matthew Syed: Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice.<\/em><\/p>\n

Anne Marsden Thomas<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0Anne \u00a0is an organist, organ teacher and author of 20 books.\u00a0 She is Head and Senior Teacher of Royal College of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/full-width.php","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3551","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sslso.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sslso.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sslso.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sslso.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sslso.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3551"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/sslso.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8795,"href":"https:\/\/sslso.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3551\/revisions\/8795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sslso.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}