Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I would say at least 50 percent. If I’m optimistic, 60. You never know. I have a question about the time profile of creative achievement. To be a top conductor, it’s physically very demanding, of course, and it’s also very demanding on the memory, even if you’re using a score. If there are so many figures in the history of classical music who are doing truly first-rate conducting, maybe at the age of 80, or at least the late 70s — Stokowski, I think, kept on going until 95. That was not his peak, but just that he was able to do it. So what is it about conducting that appears to defy the laws of nature, that you just keep on going and you’re amazing? When you would think, “Well, these individuals would peak at age 62.” Right. Now, it is an amazing phenomenon. It’s not anecdotal. I think it could be statistically verified that conductors live longer and keep working longer than most professions, perhaps almost any professions, when you have Toscanini active well into his 80s, Klemperer active to quite an advanced age. He was really physically quite decrepit. He just had enormous physical challenges, and yet he kept conducting. Even with minimal movements on his part, he elicited these extraordinary performances. I think there are two sides to this. On the one side, just in terms of conducting and its physical demands and its mental demands — hard to verify, but there seems to be something in terms of the intensity of this mental activity of memorizing scores, of this particular mode of upper-body exercise — it does seem to encourage longevity, and it does seem to keep people sharp in some way. I’m completely beyond my realm of knowledge in terms of the medical side of this, but just think anecdotally — it looks as though something like that is happening. So there’s that, but at the same time, conducting is so mysterious in terms of what is actually happening between the conductor and the orchestra. There are explicit messages being sent. There’re instructions being given, but there’s also this slightly mystical side to it, where once you get to a figure like Klemperer, or today, Bernard Haitink, who just retired, or Herbert Blomstedt, who is incredibly vital and active in his 90s.…

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