Nature or Nurture? A Re-examination of Sloboda and Howe's (1991) Interview Study on Talent Development in Music

Abstract

The core of this text will consist of a re-examination of data gathered by Sloboda and Howe (1991) through interviews with young students in a specialist music school. I will demonstrate that these authors, guided by a strict environmentalist framework, incorrectly interpreted their data because they did not acknowledge the role of musical giftedness as a significant determinant of the large differences observed in their sample between exceptional and average students. I intend to show that their results cannot be correctly interpreted without introducing musical aptitudes as a significant causal factor. Since the authors did not specify in their text what theoretical framework guided their study, my description of their position as strict environmentalism is inferred from other publications by them (e.g. Sloboda, Davidson and Howe, 1994; Howe, Davidson and Sloboda, 1998).