Talent as Musical Intelligence

Abstract

Jake was enjoying his first few months of piano lessons and eager to make musical connections with all he was learning. At his last lesson, he learned the pattern of whole steps and half steps of a major scale, discovering the joy of playing his first black key in the G major scale. The teacher was hesitant to venture farther than C major and G major during that first introduction to scale structure. Jake couldn’t wait to share the discovery he had made “all by himself” during his week of piano exploration. He began his journey from the bottom C of the keyboard. He played the scale he had learned last week, jumping up five keys to G and playing that scale. Then with a wry smile, he ventured five more keys up to D, A, E, B, and so on, playing each discovered scale with imaginative fingering but accurate notes! Jake had discovered the basic scale relationship of the “circle of fifths” on his own. Jake’s curiosity and ability to find and solve a musical problem exemplifies a student who demonstrates musical intelligence. This term describes the process of developmental learning through music, which distinguishes it from music aptitude, which is based primarily on natural musical capacities. The concept of musical intelligence most likely dates back to the early Chinese and Greek theories of music and most decidedly is included in the texts of Carl Seashore. The renaissance of the term can be credited to Howard Gardner, a leading cognitive psychologist at the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University, who included musical intelligence as one of seven multiple intelligences in Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983). The publication of Gardner’s theory broadened the concept of intelligence from a single factor of general intelligence, or “g,” to seven separate intelligences, each unique to a specific domain. Actually, the idea of multiple intelligences is not new or novel. J. P. Guilford’s Structure of Intellect (1959,1967) includes over 120 different ways of knowing. Tests and curricular models based on this theory are prevalent in the field of gifted education.