Mathematical ability and musical ability may not seem on the surface to be connected, but people who have researched the subject and studied the brain say that they are.Three quarters of the bright but speech-delayed children in the group I studied had a close relative who was an engineer, mathe-matician or scientist, and four fifths had a close relative who played a musical instrument.The chil-dren themselves usually took readily to math and other analytical subjects and to music.
Black, white and Asian children in this group show the same patterns.However, it is clear that blacks have been greatly overrepresented in the development of American popular music and greatly underrepresented in such fields as mathematics, science and engineering.
If the abilities required in analytical fields and in music are so closely related, how can there be this great discrepancy? One reason is that the development of mathematical and other such abilities requires years of formal schooling, while certain musical talents can be developed with little or no formal training, as has happened with a number of well-known black musicians.
It is precisely in those kinds of music where one can acquire great skill without formal training that blacks have excelled popular music rather than classical music, piano rather than violin, blues rather than opera.This is readily understandable, given that most blacks, for most of American history, have not had either the money or the leisure for long years of formal study in music.
Blacks have not merely held their own in American popular music.They have played a dispropor-tionately large role in the development of jazz, both traditional and modern.A long string of names comes to mind—Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin, W.C.Handy, Louis Armstrong Charlie Parker...and so on.
None of this indicates any special innate ability of blacks in music.On the contrary, it is perfectly consistent with blacks having no more such inborn ability than anyone else, but being lim-ited to being able to express such ability in narrower channels than others who have had the money,the time and the formal education to spread out over a wider range of music, as well as into mathe-matics, science and engineering.
How can blacks finally achieve greater skills in kinds of music that don't need formal training?无参考译文
表面上数学能力和音乐能力似乎没有什么关系，但是研究这个学科和大脑的人说两者之间存在联系。在我研究的一组聪明但是说话较晚的儿童中，四分之三的孩子近亲中有一位是工程师、数学家或科学家，五分之四的孩子近亲中有一个人会演奏某种乐器。这些孩子通常比较擅长数学、其他分析性学科或音乐。
在这个小组中，黑人、白人和亚裔孩子表现差不多。但是很显然，黑人在美国流行音乐发展中具有超强的代表性，而在譬如数学、科学和工程这样的领域代表人数却严重不足。
如果分析科学和音乐领域所需的能力如此紧密相关，那么怎么会出现这么大的差距呢？原因之一就是数学能力和其他类似能力的发展需要多年的正规学校教育，而某些音乐才能的发展则只需要极少或者根本不需要任何正规的训练，很多有名的黑人音乐家就是这样。
正是在那些不需要经过正规训练就可以获得极好技能的音乐领域，黑人们在流行音乐上的表现比古典音乐优秀，在钢琴上的表现优于小提琴，在蓝调音乐方面的表现超过歌剧。这种现象很好理解，因为在美国历史上，大多数黑人经济窘迫，或者没有闲暇时间接受长期正规的教育。
黑人不仅在美国流行音乐中享有一席之地，他们在传统和现代爵士乐的发展中也发挥了极大的作用。我能说出一系列人的名字——艾灵顿公爵、斯科特·乔普林、W.C.汉迪、路易斯·阿姆斯特朗、查理·帕克等等。这些并不能说明黑人在音乐方面具有某种天生的才能。相反，这正和黑人不比其他人更有天分的说法完全一致，与其他有钱、有时间、接受正规教育的人相比，他们只能被局限在更加狭隘的空间里发挥自己的才能，而无法涉足更广阔的音乐种类，包括数学、科学和工程这样的领域。