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.
Anna Parini
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.”