Page 37 - How to Shine on Stage

start learning to speak. Rosamunda Shuter-Dyson (1985) argues that we
can detect in cases of marked musical giftedness attentive listening to
music and to singing even before the development of speech.
More recent research on the innate nature of musical abilities has
revealed that the genetic factor significantly affects the level of musical
abilities (Tan, 2016). Miriam A. Mosing et al. (2014) found that inher-
ited traits influence even the amount and quality of a person’s practice,
with the impact ranging from 40% to 71%. This resulted in the conclu-
sion that musical abilities are an example of a multifactorial interaction 35
between genetics and the environment (Mosing et al., 2017; Ullen et al.,
2016).
Rosamunda Shuter-Dyson (1985) divides musical abilities into spe-
cific (tonal, rhythmic, kinaesthetic, aesthetic, creative) and general (au-
ditory) abilities.
Gordon (2015) refers to general musical abilities as audiation, which
he defines as the ability to render heard material meaningful. Audiation
is a basic cognitive function enabling an individual to make sense of mu-
sic while listening to it as well as to organize it and make sense of it while
reading a notation or writing a dictation. Indirect Factors of Musical Performance Success
Accordingly, Gordon (2015) distinguishes five stages of development:
1. detection of sound
2. making sense of sound through tonal and rhythmic patterns within
tonality and metre
3. ability to answer the question “What have I heard?”
4. ability to answer the question “Where have I heard these music pat-
terns and sounds before?”
5. anticipation of what will follow
The first two stages are innate, while the remaining three are
acquired.
According to Rosamunda Shuter-Dyson (1985), specific musical
abilities are divided into:
1. tonal abilities, which include pitch perception, a sense of tonality,
and the perception of harmony and polyphony.
2. rhythmic abilities, which involve the interconnection of rhythmic
and melodic aspects; Sloboda (2005) states that the rhythmic and
tonal systems are interconnected; in most tonal music, knowledge
of tonal structure can help determine rhythmic structure and vice