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Of Music, Success, and Intuition

By Peter Lloyd

Sat down to read “Is Music the Key to Success?” by Joanne Lipman in the New York Times. As a songwriter with only the most modest success behind me, I wondered if I had missed the parade or what. Then I began reading. The first sentence, “Condoleezza Rice trained to be a concert pianist…”

Hold on a minute! Give me a little help here. The woman who had on her desk Richard Clarke’s “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US” and did nothing… a success? Don’t get me started.

Next on Lipman’s list—Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve. Are you serious? Then hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner. I had to stop reading.

The folks on Lipmans’s list may be successful in some eyes, but they all gave music a back seat in their lives at best. If you want to talk about success as a product of musical training, I think you have to consider what happens when one devotes one’s life to music.

Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison ended their lives too soon to evaluate their long-term success, but who could call shaping the future of music anything but success?

Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, Iris Dement, Tom Waits, Thelonius Monk, John Lennon—a few of my favorite musicians to which I invite you to add yours—represent lives devoted to music and marked with success. But for every Dylan, many many devotees go unrecognized and unsuccessful by commercial standards.

So I’m inclined to disassociate music and success. Coming up with criteria for measuring success can only end in unresolvable debates. Like arguing taste or defining art. Better to leave it alone.

But then there’s Woody Allen. An artist in whom musical and non-musical success live together. Allen practices every day, according to one interview, and performs not infrequently. So does Rice, according to my research. She’s played for the queen of England and with Yo-Yo Ma.

I go to Einstein, however, for the insight I hope to tease out of this Workout.

In music or in any artistic or otherwise creative endeavor, intuition plays the lead role. The only answer to what makes the difference between the performance of a great jazz standard by Lawrence Welk’s and Duke Ellington’s band can only be expressed in terms of how it feels. You can’t do art without intuition based on feeling.

So when Albert Einstein says, “At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason,” he could be talking about his music or his science.

How great would this world be if successful people, like those Lipman chose as models, applied their musical intuition and refused to go with a decision unless it felt right?

See also: Is Music the Key to Success? by Joanne Lipman, New York Times

Peter Lloyd hitchhiked across the United States and Canada several times in the 60s entertaining folks from Ogunquit, Maine, to Haight-Asbury with his own songs.

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