Early in my teaching career, I was a band director in a public high school on the “less economically advantaged” side of a major Midwestern city. It was here, among some students from middle socioeconomic status (SES) homes and some students from lower SES backgrounds who called the housing project next to the high school home, that I experienced one of the most profound examples of the power of music in the lives of people.
Our high school had a basketball team that several times during my time at the school were state champions, and we liked to think that our pep band was of like caliber! The pep band, led by a high school student director, played a steady diet of the latest pop and rock tunes; and of course, the school’s fight song. I let the students choose the music and rehearse the music. I was simply there to open the band room door every morning at 7:00 am for their practices. This left me time to observe the group and see students passing by in the halls.
Of course, there weren’t many students passing by at 7:00 am; but after the first week or two of practices, I noticed a young African American boy (we’ll call him Kenny) consistently outside listening to the pep band. One morning, I wandered out into the hall and asked his name—“Kenny,” he replied confidently. “Boy, I sure would like to play in that band,” he said, “but I can’t read music.” He wanted to play the drum set.
“Boy, I sure would like to play in that band,” he said, “but I can’t read music.”
To make a long story short, I invited him in and asked the student leader if Kenny could take a turn in the rhythm section. He was a natural. He, of course, had heard a lot of these pop/rock tunes our band was playing; and he had no trouble playing along. He stayed every evening after school to practice on the set when no one was around. Eventually, I asked him to sign up for our jazz band during the school day and that I would teach him to read music.
Kenny began in the jazz band as a sophomore. I came to know him quite well. I found out that he lived in the housing project with his aunt. His success in jazz band transferred to a “can do” attitude in his academic classes. During his junior year, he made the honor roll for the first time; I encouraged him to go on to college. He did just that, not as a music major, but as a theater major. (He was quite outgoing and active in the school theater program as well.)
During our final jazz band concert of Kenny’s senior year, just as the jazz band concluded their final number, Kenny stood up and informed the audience that there was one more selection to be heard—a tune he had written for the jazz band, which was dedicated to my wife and me, whom he affectionately called his “Mom & Pop.” I don’t think I was ever more proud of any student I have taught at any level than I was of Kenny that night.
Music does make a difference in the lives of people!
Dr. Glenn E. Nierman is a Give a Note Board Member and Immediate Past President of the National Association for Music Education.
Usually someone like me is writing to you at the end of the year, pleading for no cuts to be made to our arts programs. But I decided to be proactive and write this at thebeginning of the year — instead focusing on discussing with you ways in which our programs should grow and prosper, not just survive.
Too often, our community is forced to defend the arts in the face of budget season, but we can do better than this. We need to utilize this “quieter” time of year to not only celebrate the arts in education, but to discuss ways to fully incorporate it into the lives of our children so that we rarely need to discuss dismantling our programs ever again.
I believe it’s important to start this year by reminding ourselves of what the goal of our community is in regards to the education of our children. In my view, we are charged with at least these three things:
We’re teaching our students skills necessary for entering the global workforce — but let’s be careful with this. We are preparing them for jobs that do not exist yet due to the speed at which technology is changing the world, so using an “Industrial Revolution model” of education is no longer appropriate.
We’re preparing them to be great citizens.
We’re teaching them to be great human beings — people who can enjoy the deeper forms of beauty, and thus think creatively and in innovative ways about the two points listed above.
During these times of tough budget choices, music advocates such as myself are constantly forced into speaking to the tangible benefits of arts education to ensure it remains a vital part of our public education system. In this case, we need to discuss more about how the arts can becomea more vital part of the system in tangible and intangible (non-tested) ways.
Here are reasons I believe music and the arts have a profound impact on our school system, and some ideas to incorporate the arts into each and every school day:
Music is a core part of our life. Before we discuss ways music and the arts “helps” academics, let’s first make a strong statement as a school community that all young people should participate in the arts because it’s central to every human society on earth and has an unbelievably important role in every aspect of culture; including history, literature, media and ways in which we communicate. The intrinsic value of the arts and their role in our daily lives and society — and the importance of helping young people understand and appreciate that value and role — should be at the forefront of our educators’ and administrators’ minds.
Music education can close our achievement gap. The definition of our Achievementt Gap has almost everything to do with the results of standardized testing. While I personally believe that a student’s success should not be determined by test scores, let’s play that game while referencing some data:
Not only do the arts improve standardized test scores, a 2012 report from the National Endowment for the Arts showed that, by nearly every indicator studied, a student from a low-socioeconomic (SES) background with a high-arts educational experience significantly outperformed peers from a low-arts, low-SES background, closing (and in some cases eliminating) the gap that often appears between low-SES students and their more advantaged peers. These improvements were in graduation rates, college attendance and completion rates, and science and writing scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
My point is that we have tried giving SES students “more school” to boost test scores, and not only has it barely worked — it’s not making them like school any more than they already do (and many are miserable). What if we engaged them in an artistic and creative manner and test scores go up as a result? When are we going to try something different?
Top-down mandates are one thing, but implementation in the classroom is another. If we continue to create school schedules that are solely based on state mandates without any creative implementation on our part, our children lose. Besides, these mandates and educational fads are changing all the time, leaving us reactive and scrambling to conform instead of proactive and placing the mandates “where they belong”. Whatever our educational leaders say about the arts, they measure achievement through math and language arts scores, not drawing proficiency or music skills. It’s no surprise then that our district has zeroed in on the tests. We can do better, and we have the capacity to decide to be ahead of the curve regarding education reform if we choose to do so.
We need to narrow the “opportunity gap.” While we continue to keep up with these state mandates and new testing fads, our economically disadvantaged kids lose out big time. They are the ones who see more contact time in academic subjects at the expense of the music and the arts, yet they are the ones who may benefit most from music’s benefits: enhanced brain development, spatial/visual/temporal processing, improving memory and attention, physical coordination, personal discipline and teamwork. Consider the fact that students with access to arts education have higher attendance rates and lower drop out rates, and that the arts engage the parents and families of students who are involved in performances and recitals. Why wouldn’t we make the arts available to at-risk students in abundance?
Creativity is learned and it must be a habit, so we need to create innovative school schedules. Like any other learned skill, creativity must become a habit in order for it to “stick”. One day a week of the arts in the school schedule, especially in the earlier grades, is a far shot from teaching creativity.How would we build a “perfect” school day for our students if there were no state mandates? Let’s start there. That ideal schedule would reflect our true values as a community and act as a powerful starting point for building a schedule that works for all children. There are no perfect schedules, but a carefully planned schedule should include flexibility that will positively impact teaching, instruction, and professional development in the arts.
We need to train every single teacher in the arts. A curriculum rich in the arts is a more engaging curriculum for all. We need to pool our resources and provide professional development opportunities throughout the year to give our teachers step-by-step strategies to teach in and through the arts. This will greatly help our teachers bring art and music into their students’ everyday classroom experience. Through this development, our teachers can learn to teach the “whole child” and reach students who may struggle with traditional approaches to learning — students who have been “lost” in our test-rich system until now. This will be some of the best money we have ever spent for our schools.
I am writing this because, like you, I want to see the students in our schools succeed, and I’ve seen first-hand the powerful impact arts education can have on students’ academic success. Our arts-centered school reform initiatives can engage students and teachers, improve our schools’ climates and cultures, and help connect our schools to families and communities. We need to do everything we can to fuel students’ imaginations and creativity; the arts will enhance students problem-solving and critical thinking skills, which aid their learning in other subject areas. An education in the arts exposes students to a variety of cultures while enriching their learning experience and teaching them how to be empathetic, tolerant and open to working with others — all necessary skills for success in our multi-cultural society.
Music and arts education should not be a luxury in our district. Creativity isn’t only reserved for artists and musicians, so let’s turn this problem on its head and share the belief that the arts as the nucleus of an education are essential for every child. Learning to create and appreciate visual and aural aesthetics is more important than ever before to the development of the next generation of great thinkers, innovators, and human beings.
We have tried the way of the almighty test. Let’s try something different.
The most common question asked of us is “How often does my piano need to be tuned?”
A piano goes out of tune when the piano is subjected to heat and humidity changes. Moving the piano does not hurt the tuning until the piano reacts to different temperature and humidity levels. The change in atmosphere affects the dimensions of the case parts making pianos go sharp in higher humidity and flat in lower humidity.
In residential use a piano should be tuned at the change of seasons. Four tunings a year is ideal. If the temperature and humidity are kept constant through external devices such as a humidifier in the winter months and air conditioning in the summer, the need for tuning can be minimized and reduced to twice a year.
In professional use the piano needs to be tuned more frequently. Usually this occurs because of increased use or an institutional atmosphere such as an auditorium that may have the heat and air conditioning turned on or off frequently. For high level professional use (like a concert hall) the piano may need to be tuned daily to insure that it is in perfect tune for each instance of concert or recording work.
Tuning a piano is a profession that requires training, practice, and a knowledge base that takes an investment of time and practice to learn and master. It is best to leave tuning to the professionals.
If your parents ever submitted you to regular music lessons as a kid, you probably got in a fight with them once or twice about it. Maybe you didn’t want to go; maybe you didn’t like practicing. But we have some bad news: They were right. It turns out that all those endless major scale exercises and repetitions of “Chopsticks” had some incredible effects on our minds.
Psychological studies continue to uncover more and more benefits that music lessons provide to developing minds. One incredibly comprehensive longitudinal study, produced by the German Socio-Economic Panel in 2013, stated the power of music lessons as plain as could be: “Music improves cognitive and non-cognitive skills more than twice as much as sports, theater or dance.” The study found that kids who take music lessons “have better cognitive skills and school grades and are more conscientious, open and ambitious.” And that’s just the beginning.
The following list is a sampling of the vast amount of neurological benefits that music lessons can provide. Considering this vast diversity, it’s baffling that there are still kids in this country who are not receiving high-quality music education in their schools. Every kid should have this same shot at success.
Several studies have found strong links between pitch processing and language processing abilities. Researchers out of Northwestern University found that five skills underlie language acquisition: “phonological awareness, speech-in-noise perception, rhythm perception, auditory working memory and the ability to learn sound patterns.” Through reviewing a series of longitudinal studies, they discovered that each these skills is exercised and strengthened by music lessons. Children randomly assigned to music training alongside reading training performed much better than those who received other forms of non-musical stimulation, such as painting or other visual arts. You’ve got to kind of feel bad for those kids randomly assigned into art classes.
2. It improved your mathematical and spatial-temporal reasoning.
Music is deeply mathematical in nature. Mathematical relationships determine intervals in scales, the arrangement of keys and the subdivisions of rhythm. It makes sense then that children who receive high-quality music training also tend to score higher in math. This is because of the improved abstract spatial-temporal skills young musicians gain. According to a feature written for PBS Education, these skills are vital for solving the multistep problems that occur in “architecture, engineering, math, art, gaming and especially working with computers.” With these gains, and those in verbal and reading abilities, young musicians can pretty much help themselves succeed in any field they decide to pursue.
In a 2007 study, Christopher Johnson, a professor of music education and music therapy at the University of Kansas, found that “elementary schools with superior music education programs scored around 22% higher in English and 20% higher in math scores on standardized tests compared to schools with low-quality music programs.” A 2013 study out of Canada found the same. Every year that scores were measured, the mean grades of the students who chose music were higher than those who chose other extracurriculars. While neither of these studies can necessarily prove causality, both do point out a strongcorrelative connection.
Surprisingly, though music is primarily an emotional art form, music training actually provides bigger gainsin academic IQ than emotional IQ. Numerous studies have found that musicians generally boast higher IQsthan non-musicians. And while these lessons don’t necessarily guarantee you’ll be smarter than the schlub who didn’t learn music, they definitely made you smarter than you would have been without them.
Children who start studying music early in life develop stronger linguistic abilities. They develop morecomplex vocabularies, a more nuanced understanding of grammar and higher verbal IQs. These benefits don’t just impact children’s learning of their first language, but also their ability to learn every language they attempt to learn in the future. The Guardian reports: “Music training plays a key role in the development of a foreign language in its grammar, colloquialisms and vocabulary.” These heightened language acquisition abilities will follow students their whole lives and will aid them when they need to pick up new tongues late in adulthood.
6. It made you a better listener, which will help a lot when you’re older.
Musical training makes people far more sensitive listeners, which can help tremendously as people age. Musicians who keep up with their instrument enjoy a much slower decline in “peripheral hearing.” They can avoid what scientists refer to as the “cocktail party problem” in which older people have trouble isolating specific voices (or musical tones) from a noisy background.
But beyond just auditory processing, musical training can also help delay cognitive decline associated with aging. Some of the most promising research positions music as an effective way to stave off dementia. Studies out of Emory University find that even if musicians stop playing as they age, the neurological restructuring that occurred when they were kids helps them perform better on “object-naming, visuospatial memory and rapid mental processing and flexibility” tests than others who never played. The study authors add, though, that musicians had to play for at least 10 years to enjoy these effects. Hopefully you stuck with it long enough.
All musical instruments require high levels of finger dexterity and accuracy. The training works out the motor cortex to an incredible extent, and the benefits can apply to a wide range of non-musical skills. Research published in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2013 found that kids who start learning to play before the age of 7 perform far better on non-musical movement tasks. Exposure at a young age builds connectivity in the corpus callosum, which provides a strong foundation upon which later movement training can build.
Playing music puts a high level of demand on one’s working memory (or short-term memory). And it seems the more one practices their instrument, the stronger their working memory becomes. A 2013 study foundthat musical practice has a positive association with participants’ working memory capacity, their processing speed and their reasoning abilities. Writing for Psychology Today,William R. Klemm claims that musicians’ memory abilities should spread into all non-musical verbal realms, helping them remember more content from speeches, lectures or soundtracks.
10. It improved your long-term memory for visual stimuli.
Music training can also affect long-term memory, especially in the visual realm. Scientists at the University of Texas at Arlington reported last year that classically trained musicians who have been playing more than 15 years score higher on pictorial long-term memory tests. This heightened visual sensitivity likely comes from parsing complex musical scores. The study makes no claims for musicians who learn to play without reading music.
Analyzing brain scans of musicians ages 6 through 18, researchers out of the University of Vermont College of Medicine have found tremendous thickening of the cortex in areas responsible for depression, aggression and attention problems. According to the study’s authors, musical training “accelerated cortical organization in attention skill, anxiety management and emotional control.” That’s why you’re so emotionally grounded all the time, right? Right.
12. It enhanced your self-confidence and self-esteem.
Several studies have shown how music can enhance children’s self-confidence and self-esteem. A 2004 study split a sample of 117 fourth graders from a Montreal public school. One group received weekly piano instruction for three years while the control received no formal instructions. Those who played weekly scored significantly higher on self-esteem tests than those who did not. As most of us know, high levels of self-esteem can help children grow and develop in a vast number of academic and non-academic realms.
Creativity is notoriously difficult to measure scientifically. All measures generally leave something to be desired. But most sources hold that music training enhances creativity “particularly when the musical activity itself is creative (for instance, improvisation).” According to Education Week, Ana Pinho, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, found that musicians with “longer experience in improvising music had better and more targeted activity in the regions of the brain associated with creativity.” Music training also enhances communication between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. And studies show musicians perform far better on divergent thinking tests, coming up with greater numbers of novel, unexpected ways to combine new information.
“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.” – Plato
Who doesn’t love music and isn’t somehow emotionally, mentally or even physically affected by it?
That’s also why some people have been known to burst into tears after watching a classical orchestra. We came across an interesting post by Melanie Foster at Online PHD Programs on the 15 Studied Effects of Classical Music on Your Brain. Here’s an excerpt from her piece:
“Classical music, whether you love it or hate it, has been a powerful cultural force for centuries. While it no longer dominates the music scene, the argument for continued appreciation of the genre goes far beyond pure aural aesthetics. Classical music has been lauded for its ability to do everything from improve intelligence to reduce stress, and despite some exaggeration of its benefits, science shows us that it actually does have a marked effect on the brain in a number of positive ways.”
Our favorite effect is how emotional expression in music and speech affect the brain similarly. Music imitates the tonal characteristics of emotions relayed through voice, which taps into our innate communicative abilities. That’s why music can cause a stir in your senses through its different instruments, modes and melodies – and this applies to music of all genres and cultures around the world.
Get a taste of Melanie’s article through the infographic above, and find out what the 15 effects of classical music to the brain are by reading all about it here.
Phipps Plaza, the Southeast’s premier shopping destination located in the heart of Buckhead and owned by Simon, a leading global retail real estate company, is excited to announce the recent addition of Steinway Piano Galleries to its impressive retail roster.
“Upon visiting Phipps Plaza for the first time, I knew it was the perfect fit for Steinway Piano Galleries,” said Ron Losby, president of Steinway & Sons. “We’re thrilled about our new location and to be able to serve the Atlanta community in such an upscale environment.”
The recently opened 2,626 square foot store is located on the second level in the Court of the South with a unique selection of Steinway-designed pianos. Since 1853, Steinway & Sons has been hand-crafting the finest pianos in the world from its factory in New York, where the company was founded. Steinway is the piano choice for over nine out of 10 performing concert artists each year.
Representing the best in acoustic pianos, Steinway Piano Galleries is celebrating over a century in business and has served over 250,000 customers in its history. Piano lessons are also available in the store’s state of the art teaching facilities along with other services such as piano tuning, repair and restoration.
“Steinway Piano Galleries is excited about the opportunity to present the full line of Steinway and Steinway-designed Boston and Essex pianos at Phipps Plaza,” said Chris Syllaba, president and CEO of Steinway Piano Galleries. “The iconic Steinway brand is a perfect match with Phipps Plaza, the premier, luxury shopping destination in the heart of Buckhead.”
The Atlanta community is invited to join Steinway Piano Galleries for its grand opening celebration on Wednesday, October 22 at 6:30 p.m. RSVP preferred atinfo@steinwaypianogalleries.com.
The sound of music at Mercer University is about to get a lot richer and a lot more enhanced.
That’s because a large donation to the music school bought students nearly 40 brand new, top-of-the line Steinway pianos and helped refurbish seven others.
Mercer University’s chancellor, Dr. Kirby Godsey, gave $1.5 million to the Townsend School of Music in his wife, Joan’s, honor.
That money helped create the Joan Stockstill Godsey Center for Keyboard Studies and will cover annual maintenance and upkeep for the pianos.
“I was totally blown away, I had no idea,” Joan Godsey said.
For Godsey, ebony and ivory are her solace.
“I started piano when I was 7 years old and music has been my life,” Godsey said.
You can read the rest of the story, here, on WMAZ’s website.
Dear Board of Education Members:
By Tom Barnes 
