Range

David Epstein in "Range" examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable(has a wicked environment)—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.

I will try to write some summery of chapter 3rd of this book.

Ospedale della Pietà

Chapter 3 begins with the story of the _‘Ospedale della Pieta’_ in Baroque Venice (17th/18th c.) which was an orphanage that trained abandoned girls in music. A group of Venetian nuns called the Consorelle di Santa Maria dell'Umiltà established this charitable institution for orphans and abandoned girls in the fourteenth century. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Pietà and the three other charitable Ospedali Grandi were well known for its all-female musical ensembles that attracted tourists and patrons from around Europe.

Here, one of them is _‘Figlie di coro’._ it was the all-female music ensemble that were highly acclaimed, popular, and influential in defining an entire musical era. These girls were the seventh-century equivalent of rock stars.

Figlie took singing lessons, and learned to play every instrument their institution owned. it helped that they were paid for learning new skills.

The distinguishing characteristic of this orchestra was the instrumental range of the musicians with each musician being skilled not in one but an assortment of instruments. Famous composers like Antonio Vivaldi taught and wrote music specifically for the figlie.

Breaking Convention - Case "Jack Cecchini"

The first was in 1950 in Chicago, when he was 13 and stumbled across a guitar resting on his landlord’s couch. He ran his fingers over the strings as he walked by. The landlord picked it up, demonstrated two chords, and immediately asked Cecchini to play accompaniment with them. Of course, he couldn’t. “He’d shake his head when it was time for me to change the chord, and if I didn’t he’d start swearing,” Cecchini recalled with a chuckle. Cecchini’s interest was ignited, and he started trying to imitate songs he heard on the radio. By 16, he was playing jazz in the background of Chicago clubs he was too young to patronize. “It was like a factory,” he told me. “If you had to go to the bathroom, you had to get one of the other guys to pick it up. But you’re experimenting every night.” He took the only free music lessons he could find, in clarinet, and tried to transfer what he learned to the guitar. “There are eight million places on the guitar to play the same notes,” he said. “I was just trying to find solutions to problems, and you start to learn the fingerboard.” Pretty soon he was performing with Frank Sinatra at the Villa Venice, Miriam Makeba at the Apollo, and touring with Harry Belafonte from Carnegie Hall to packed baseball stadiums. That’s where the second stumble came in.

During a show when Cecchini was 23, one of Belafonte’s stage dancers stepped on the cable that connected his guitar to an amplifier. His instrument was reduced to a whisper. “Harry freaked out,” Cecchini recalled. “He said, ‘Get rid of that thing and get yourself a classical guitar!’” Getting one was easy, but he had been using a pick, and for acoustic he had to learn fingering, so the trouble was learning to play it on tour.

He fell in love with the instrument, and by 31 was so adept that he was chosen as the soloist to play a concerto by none other than Vivaldi accompanied by an orchestra for a crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park. The next day, the _Chicago Tribune_’s music critic began his review: “Despite the ever‑increasing number of enthusiasts who untiringly promote the resurrection of the guitar as a classical instrument, there are but few men who possess the talent and patience to master what remains one of the most beautiful but obstinately difficult of all instruments.” Cecchini, he continued, “proved to be one of those few.”

Despite his late and haphazard start, Cecchini also became a renowned teacher of both jazz and classical guitar. Students traveled from out of state to pick his brain, and by the early 1980s lines formed down the stairs of his Chicago school in the evenings. His own formal training, of course, had been those free clarinet lessons. “I’d say I’m 98 percent self‑taught,” he told me. *He switched between instruments and found his way through trial and error.*

Breaking Convention - Case "Django Reinhardt"

Django Reinhardt was born in Belgium in 1910. Django went to school if he felt like it, but he mostly didn't. He crashed movie theaters and shot biliards, and was surrounded by music. Django Reinhardt's love for the guitar developed in his early years, influenced by his family and the musical environment around him. Django started with violin but he didn't love it. He learned in the call-and-response style (it means he learned by listening to and imitating other musicians, often playing along with them in informal settings). when he was twelve an acquaintance gave him a hybrid banjo guitar. He had found his thing, and became obsessed. In 1928, he suffered severe burns in a fire that left him with limited use of his left hand. Despite this challenge, Reinhardt developed a remarkable technique that allowed him to play chords with a thumb and two fingers.

He is particularly known for his contributions to the genre of gypsy jazz, which blends traditional Romani music with jazz elements. Even though he never learned to read music (or words- he was illiterate), Django composed a symphony, playing on his guitar what he wanted each instrument in the ensemble to do while another musician struggled to transcribe it.

He died of a brain hemorrhage at 43, but music he made nearly a century ago continues to show up in pop culture. Examples:

• The Matrix movie
• The Aviator movie
• Mafia 1 video game
• The Bioshock video games

“Improv masters learn like babies: dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later. “At the beginning, your mom didn’t give you a book and say, ‘This is a noun, this is a pronoun, this is a dangling participle,’” Cecchini told me. “You acquired the sound first. And then you acquire the grammar later.”