"If a child with natural musical gifts is adopted by a family that sees no value in spending money on violin lessons for a four-year-old, we could lose the next Joshua Bell. Likewise, if a family of violin virtuosos adopts a child from a non-musical family, forcing a musical education on a child without the natural gifts to benefit from it may prove both frustrating for the parents and psychologically damaging to the child, whose true gifts may reside elsewhere, undiscovered.
"Funny, and I think futile, argument. In the first sentence, try substituting the words 'adopted by' with 'born to.' In the second, replace 'adopts' with 'produces,' and 'a child from a non-musical family' with 'a non-musical child.'"
Genetic traits, or clusters of them, can be dominant or recessive. If you breed racehorses, it doesn't mean every foal is a sure Triple Crown champion. But without that selective breeding, you're extremely unlikely to get one.
Traits run in families. I suggest you look up in musical catalogs the compositions from the children of J.S. Bach. Or look up the Barrymore family, or the Fondas.
If Grandpa was a virtuoso violinist, you're much likelier to get those crucial violin lessons before age five, when the muscles and bones of the fingers are most malleable and the neural pathways are most easily canalized, than if through mischance you find yourself growing up in a family of electrical engineers with no institutional memory of your violinist grandfather.
That being my line, I already know all about the Bachs. However, I thought you'd be at least somewhat interested in hearing the personal observations of a jaded old unspectacular working stiff musician who has been around the Bach, er, Bloch, a few times, rather than pointing to a noteworthy famous example we've all heard of.
If Grandpa was a virtuoso violinist, you're much likelier to get those crucial violin lessons before age five, when the muscles and bones of the fingers are most malleable and the neural pathways are most easily canalized, than if through mischance you find yourself growing up in a family of electrical engineers with no institutional memory of your violinist grandfather.
Ditto my previous comments. I grew up around all four of my grandparents, who all told us kids about life in their respective families while growing up. As it happens, even today, my "engineer father" is still the self-appointed proud family historian, and has made it his hobby and passion to draw up detailed genealogies and histories going back at least 5 generations. If anyone would know of any "virtuoso anybody anything" in the family tree, he would. There just aren't any. Yet despite the mutation, I got to be pretty decent; good enough to make a living. ;)