Peak: Secrets From The New Science of Expertise

by K. Anders Ericsson

In the fall of 1987 I took a position at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. After finishing my memory studies with Steve Faloon, I had followed up by studying other examples of exceptional memory, such as waiters who could recall the detailed orders of many customers without writing them down and stage actors who had to learn many lines every time they began a new play.2 3 In each case I had studied the mental representations that these people developed in order to build their memory, but they all had a major limitation: they were “amateurs” who had undergone no formal training but had just figured it out as they went along. What sorts of achievement might be possible with rigorous, formal training methods? When I moved to Berlin I suddenly had the chance to observe just such methods in musicians. That opportunity arose thanks to the presence of the Universität der Künste Berlin — or, in English, the Berlin University of the Arts — which is located not far from the Max Planck Institute. The university has thirty-six hundred students in four colleges — a college of fine arts, a college of architecture, a college of media and design, and a college of music and the performing arts — and the music academy in particular is highly regarded for both its teaching and its student body. Its alumni include the conductors Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter, two giants of twentieth-century conducting, and the composer Kurt Weill, best known for The Threepenny Opera and, in pa...

Music andmemory