The Natural Musician: On Abilities, Giftedness and Talent. By Dina Kirnaskaya. Trans. by Mark H. Teeter.

Abstract

This book, translated from the original Russian, offers the prospect of a rare window into the thought emerging from that part of the contemporary Russian education system that is concerned with the selection and training of the musically gifted. Its author is Professor of Psychology and Musicology of the Gnesin Academy of Music in Moscow, a multilevel institution offering specialist music training from elementary to postgraduate level. She is also a journalist, having served the BBC Russian Service among others. Russian work on music psychology so rarely reaches an English-language audience that Oxford University Press deserves credit for seizing this opportunity. Indeed, in over thirty years of engagement with the English-language domain of musical expertise and its development, I cannot recall coming across such a substantive contribution from a contemporary Russian author. In this context it is noteworthy that the bibliography of The Natural Musician contains reference to predominantly English-language scholarship of the last quarter century, mostly already well-known to the English-speaking research community. This means that a reader wishing to gain a greater understanding of currents in contemporary Russian scholarship on music education is not going to be entirely satisfied. However, there are some nuggets of distinctly Russian perspectives peppered throughout the work that are worthy of attention.