EVENT
The Berlin Violin Study
Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer's 1993 landmark study of violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music that provided the empirical foundation for the deliberate practice framework — and whose popularized 'ten thousand hours' finding obscured its most important result.
In 1993, K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer published what would become one of the most influential studies in psychology: an investigation of violinists at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin designed to identify what distinguished the elite performers from the merely competent. The researchers divided the violinists into three groups by teacher assessment of their likely professional trajectory — the best, the good, and the students aiming at music-teaching careers — and investigated the life histories of each. The finding that entered mainstream
culture was quantitative: by age twenty, the best violinists had accumulated approximately ten thousand hours of solitary
deliberate practice, compared to approximately five thousand for the merely good, and substantially less for the future teachers. Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 popularization of this result as the 'ten-thousand-hour rule' in
Outliers made the finding globally famous and, in the process, obscured what Ericsson considered its actual importance: that the
structure of practice,