Lessons? I don't need no stinkin' lessons!

David Epstein on the Genius of the Self-Taught Musician

Excerpt:

While I was sitting with Cecchini, he reeled off an impressive improvisation. I asked him to repeat it so I could record it. “I couldn’t play that again if you put a gun to my head,” he said. Charles Limb, a musician, hearing specialist, and auditory surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, designed an iron‑free keyboard so that jazz musicians could improvise while inside an MRI scanner. Limb saw that brain areas associated with focused attention, inhibition, and self‑censoring turned down when the musicians were creating. “It’s almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself,” he told National Geographic. While improvising, musicians do pretty much the opposite of consciously identifying errors and stopping to correct them. Improv masters learn like babies: dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later. “At the beginning, your mom didn’t give you a book and say, ‘This is a noun, this is a pronoun, this is a dangling participle,’” Cecchini told me. “You acquired the sound first. And then you acquire the grammar later.”

 

I don't read anything in this that says that self-taught musicians have an advantage; only that it surprises people (like the author) that they can function as musicians as well as they do.

 

Then don't waste your time on it!