Range - David Epstein Page 0,24
what exactly they were. A young Pietà musician named Prudenza apparently sang beautifully, and performed fluently with the violin and the “violoncello all’inglese.” Music scholars have argued about what that even is, but, as with anything else the Pietà could get its musical mitts on—like the chalumeau (wind) and the psaltery (string)—the figlie learned to play it.
They lifted composers to unexplored heights. They were part of the bridge that carried music from Baroque composers to the classical masters: Bach (who transcribed Vivaldi’s concertos); Haydn (who composed specifically for one of the figlie, Bianchetta, a singer, harpist, and organist); and perhaps Mozart, who visited an ospedale with his father as a boy, and returned as a teen. The figlie’s skills on a vast array of instruments enabled musical experimentation so profound that it laid a foundation for the modern orchestra. According to musicologist Denis Arnold, the modernization of church music that occurred through the figlie was so influential that one of Mozart’s iconic sacred pieces, without the girls of the Venetian orphanages, “might never have been composed at all.”
But their stories were largely forgotten, or thrown away, literally. When Napoleon’s troops arrived in 1797, they tossed manuscripts and records out the ospedali windows. When, two hundred years later, a famous eighteenth-century painting of women giving a concert was displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the mysterious figures dressed in black, in an upper balcony above the audience, went entirely unidentified.
Maybe the memories of the figlie faded because they were women—playing music in public religious ceremonies defied papal authority. Or because so many of them neither came with families nor left any behind. They lacked family names, but the abandoned girls were so synonymous with their instruments that those became their names. The baby who came through a notch in the wall and began her way in the world as Anna Maria della Pietà left the world having been, by various stages, Anna Maria del violino, Anna Maria del theorbo, Anna Maria del cembalo, Anna Maria del violoncello, Anna Maria del luta, Anna Maria della viola d’amore, and Anna Maria del mandolin.
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Imagine it today: click a tourism site and the entertainment recommendation is the world-famous orchestra comprised of orphans left at the doorstep of the music venue. You will be treated to virtuoso solos on instruments you know and love, as well as those you’ve never heard of. Occasionally the musicians will switch instruments during the show. And please follow us on Twitter, FamousFoundlings. Never mind 200-ducat dowries, the figlie would have speaking agents and feature film deals.
Just like Tiger Woods’s television appearance when he was two, it would foment a frenzy of parents and media seeking to excavate the mysterious secret to success. Parents actually did flock in the eighteenth century. Noblemen vied (and paid) to get their daughters a chance to play with those “able indigents,” as one historian put it.
But the strategies of their musical development would be a hard sell. Today, the massively multi-instrument approach seems to go against everything we know about how to get good at a skill like playing music. It certainly goes against the deliberate practice framework, which only counts highly focused attempts at exactly the skill to be performed. Multiple instruments, in that view, should be a waste of time.
In the genre of modern self-help narratives, music training has stood beside golf atop the podium, exemplars of the power of a narrowly focused head start in highly technical training. Whether it is the story of Tiger Woods or the Yale law professor known as the Tiger Mother, the message is the same: choose early, focus narrowly, never waver.
The Tiger Mother’s real name is Amy Chua, and she coined the term in her 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Like Tiger, the Tiger Mother permeated popular culture. Chua advertised the secrets to “how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids.” On the very first page of the very first chapter is the litany of things Sophia and Lulu must never do, including: “play any instrument other than the piano or the violin.” (Sophia gets piano, Lulu is assigned violin.) Chua supervised three, four, and sometimes five hours of music practice a day.
Parents in online forums agonize over what instrument to pick for their child, because the child is too young to pick for herself and will fall irredeemably behind if she waits. “I am slowly trying to convince him how nice playing music is,”