thank god they banned the guy above! i hate commercial high-jacking.
just ran across this book at barnes & noble:
http://www.amazon.com/This-Your-Bra...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269047807&sr=1-1
and i think the chapter on 'what makes a musician' worth the price of admission. he discusses the various elements that make a master in any discinpline. one is the rule 'ten-thousand hours'. it takes three hours of practice a day for ten years to gain mastery. and you have to love your subject dearly to make it work. he talks about how a master learns to think in chunks: genres, phrases, and so on. this enables them to remember so much more. with prodigies, for example mozart. mozart might have begun composing early. however those pieces considered curiosities and seldom played. by the time he got out the good stuff he certainly had the ten thousand in. in photography the only child who made his mark lartigue. true his subject matter exotic and that helps a lot, the nostalgic styles of the time. still he beat the odds, at twenty-five giving up photos to do paintings.
music the universal benchmark, so i think this book worth looking at (i only read that one chapter, which seems to apply to us all).
wayne
www.pbase.com/wwp