[Bookclub for musicians] What it takes to become a top musician. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

I stumbled upon this book while I was researching practice methods, and I remembered one of the author's previous books “Culture Code” was one of my favorite books when I was a teenager.

The book started off quite different from my expectations. In the beginning, the author introduces Myelin which is a lesser known part of our neuron system that plays a crucial role in attaining any skill in life. The author talks about it with quite a detail in my standard, and at that point, I was thinking ‘god, this is too much science for me.. I probably won’t be able to finish this’ but once you overcome that initial challenge, the book flows into the meaty parts. There are two main sections of the meaty part. One is about deep practice, and the other is about master coaching. 

Coyle visits several “talent hotbeds” in the world and observes what people go through before they reach the “top of the world” status. One of the hotbeds observed is a very prestigious music summer program “Meadow Mountain School of Music”. Musicians such as Yo Yo Ma, Kyung-hwa Jung, Itzhak Pearlman, Joshua Bell were trained in this program. Coyle depicts and analyzes how lessons were taught and how students approached practice in the book. So that’s a good insight for us musicians. However, these depictions were pretty textbook-contents, and I think if you were a serious musician, you would be already practicing deeply anyways. If you are an amateur musician, this sneak peak would be interesting and helpful. 

For me, the better part of the book was where it talked about master coaching. Basically, it’s about how to lead to greatness. The examples were, of course, about the experienced coaches leading young students, but I think we can all apply this concept to ourselves. In reality, we have to parent and coach ourselves because we can’t have some external forces to guide us all the time. 

Also, the book gave me a great insight to implement for my teaching. As musicians, teaching is an inevitable part of our lives. I think a lot of us can benefit from knowing this insight on how to lead our students through this journey of ignition and deep practice. Very personally, this section also gave me some ideas on rehearsal technique as a conductor. The master coaching process is very similar to leading rehearsals, and reading about how master coaches approach and consider their role really inspired me to be more masterful with my conducting and rehearsals. 

This book is quite easy if you get through that beginning part where it talks about science! I would recommend this book to anyone, but especially to musicians who want to be a better teacher for your artist-to-be students! Also I think it encourages us to be patient with our training period when we read about the top class people’s humble stories in their training period.