The Need for Speed: How Virtuosity Evolves from Fidgeting

I spent some time last week watching the 8 year old son of a friend of mine playing with a Rubic's cube. This particular puzzle had always been rather annoying to me, as I have absolutely no idea how to structure a solution for it. And yet, he can solve it in just a few minutes - maybe twenty moves or so. Now, I'm well aware that there are some very prodigious cube-masters in the world, and there are step processes that one can look up online to solve it in as few steps. However, it did impress me that an "ordinary" child could master the puzzle (and a number of other puzzle's as well) so well, and with nothing beyond the nervous obsession that is his nature to guide him. In observing this child, I noticed a few other things as well, such as the ability to play with a particular toy for lengths of time far longer than some other children and most adults. Some autistic children, while unattentive to classroom tasks often exhibit a particularly obsessive interest in certain activities, though in this case, the child's behavior is not quite so extreme. He also sings with his sister - not songs they know, but new improvisations based on fragments of tunes they know, often changing the words to familiar melodies with marvelous fluidity.

This observation got me thinking about virtuosity in music, and particularly in instrumental playing. I think there's something inherent about being human that makes us fidget nervously, tapping our fingers, moving our feet, bobbing our heads, tapping pencils (that can get really annoying for a teacher) and a great many other seemingly meaningless activities that other people around us may even find obnoxious. But such a common behavior among so many people is probably not meaningless. In fact, studies have shown that children who fidget perform better on memory tests. I believe that fidgeting may be one of the root sources of instrumental music (and to an extent vocal), where I have intuitively felt that instrumental performance functions beyond simply accompanying, supporting and imitating the voice (as would be apparent in the recorded history of Western music). Somehow, getting our hands on an instrument, fidgeting with it, moving our fingers nervously around it, creating structures and phrases, pruning the meaningless ones (those that don't make sense to us as listeners, for whatever reason), and ultimately exploring the world of modality with the rhythms that come out of this activity, is natural and even enjoyable for us.

An instrument channels our need to fuss with our hands, and the result is something different from reproducing a song, imitating the prosidy of a text or even the pulse and movement of a dance (though there is likely to be some relation of this need to the latter). The result is virtuosity - an ability to perform at a level that is notably impressive by common standards. And this is where things just start to get interesting. There are a number of notable performers who have made amazing, enviable and significant discoveries largely through their own activities.

Music is that thing that is shared throughout our common human experience, and it is possible that music is not only something that humans can do, but something they must do. And yet, the tendency or desire to fidget, to play with something, or to achieve virtuosic levels of proficiency on an instrument varies by individual. One of the very unique things about music is that it is shared - the fidgeting discoveries made by one individual are percieved, coded and remembered by another, who can then learn it, master it and pass it on. This fairly common human ability to percieve music and transmit it (practically all children can learn music in this way, and some recent experiments of mine have found that average children of age 8 can learn atonal melodies that are practically dodecaphonic) allows us to share in the richness of our diversity, to experience and enjoy the fruits of the discoveries of various prodigious individuals.