Musical performers are usually pretty cluey geezers.
And reading music requires a certain intelligence.
One problem with musicians being clever is that your brilliant musicians
often choose *not* to attend music classes at school, but to perform
brilliantly in [whisper, whisper] more important subjects like English,
Maths, Science and other boring subjects.
One thing I noticed from 18 years in crowd control [aka high school music
teaching] is that the kids who were most brilliant at science, for example
could usually be found electing to study science, but the best kids at music
would often be doing science or maths.
Maybe someone had told them the old but true joke:
What's the difference between a musician and a pizza?
A pizza can feed a family of four.
David McKay