Embedded Files
"Music is the ax for the frozen sea within us." -Kafka
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http://schoolsartstogether.com/
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2011 Study:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110420112058.htm
Musical instrument training tied to higher verbal test scores
Children who take up an instrument for three years or more outscore those who take only general music classes, not only in dexterity and listening skills, but in verbal ability and visual pattern completion, according to researchers conducting a Harvard University-based study. Students who had played an instrument longer also increased their scores proportionately, researchers found. View full story.
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No Child Active in the Arts is Left Behind!
According to the College Entrance Examination Board (2005), SAT takers with coursework in music appreciation scored sixty points higher on the verbal portion of the test and thirty-nine points higher on the math portion of the test, compared to student with no coursework or experience in the arts. View full story.
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Discovering Gifts: The Arts in the Curriculum
The arts enhance the process of learning. The systems they nourish, which include our integrated sensory, attentional, cognitive, emotional and motor capacities, are, in fact, the driving forces behind all other learning (Jensen, 2001, p. 2). View full story.
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The Arts, Creative Learning & Student Achievement – Colorado Study
New data reveals that Colorado public high schools offering more arts education have higher scores on state tests in reading, writing and science – regardless of student ethnicity or socioeconomic status. They also have lower dropout rates. View full story.
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Link to multiple research projects about the benefits of music education
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"One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated.~ I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician.~ I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school she
said, "you're WASTING your SAT scores."~ On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was.~ And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time.~ They just weren't really clear about its function.~ So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with
entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment.~ Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks.~ And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects.~ Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.
One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose.~ There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp.~ Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music?~ There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art.~ Why?~ Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life.~ The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art.~ Art is
part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are.~ Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."
On September 12, 2001 I was a
resident of Manhattan.~ That morning I reached a new
understanding of my
art and its relationship to the
world.~ I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to
practice as was my
daily routine; I did it by force of
habit, without thinking about it.~ I lifted the cover on
the keyboard, and opened
my music, and put my hands on the
keys and took my hands off the keys.~ And I sat there and
thought, does
this even matter?~ Isn't this
completely irrelevant?~ Playing the piano right now, given
what happened in this
city yesterday, seems silly, absurd,
irreverent, pointless.~ Why am I here?~ What place has a
musician in this
moment in time?~ Who needs a piano
player right now?~ I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of
New York, went through the journey of getting through that
week.~ I did not
play the piano that day, and in fact
I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the
piano again.
And then I observed how we got
through the day.
At least in my neighborhood, we
didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble.~ We didn't
play cards to pass the time,
we didn't watch TV, we
didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall.~
The first organized activity that I
saw in New York, that same day, was
singing.~ People sang.~ People sang around fire houses,
people sang
"We Shall Overcome".~
Lots of people sang America the Beautiful.~ The first
organized public event that I
remember was the Brahms Requiem,
later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York
Philharmonic.
The first organized public
expression of grief, our first communal response to that
historic event, was a
concert.~ That was the beginning of
a sense that life might go on.~ The US Military secured the
airspace, but
recovery was led by the arts, and by
music in particular, that very night.
From these two experiences, I have
come to understand that music is not part of "arts and
entertainment" as
the newspaper section would have us
believe.~ It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we
fund from leftovers of
our budgets, not a plaything or an
amusement or a pass time.~ Music is a basic need of human
survival.
Music is one of the ways we make
sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express
feelings when we
have no words, a way for us to
understand things with our hearts when we can't with our
minds.
Some of you may know Samuel
Barber's heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for
Strings.~ If you don't
know it by that name, then some of
you may know it as the background music which accompanied
the Oliver
Stone movie Platoon, a film about
the Vietnam War.~ If you know that piece of music either
way, you know it
has the ability to crack your heart
open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you
didn't know you
had.~ Music can slip beneath our
conscious reality to get at what's really going on
inside us the way a good
therapist does.
I bet that you have never been to a
wedding where there was absolutely no music.~ There might
have been
only a little music, there might
have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was
some music.~ And
something very predictable happens
at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of
emotions, and then
there's some musical moment
where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or
plays the flute
or something.~ And even if the
music is lame, even if the quality isn't good,
predictably 30 or 40 percent of
the people who are going to cry at a
wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts.~
Why?~ The
Greeks.~ Music allows us to move
around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange
our insides
so that we can express what we feel
even when we can't talk about it.~ Can you imagine
watching Indiana
Jones or Superman or Star Wars with
the dialogue but no music?~ What is it about the music
swelling up at
just the right moment in ET so that
all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the
same moment?~ I
guarantee you if you showed the
movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen
that way.~ The
Greeks:~ Music is the understanding
of the relationship between invisible internal
objects.
I'll give you one more example,
the story of the most important concert of my life. I must
tell you I have
played a little less than a thousand
concerts in my life so far.~ I have played in places that I
thought were
important.~ I like playing in
Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very
happy to please the
critics in St. Petersburg.~ I have
played for people I thought were important; music critics of
major
newspapers, foreign heads of
state.~ The most important concert of my entire life took
place in a nursing
home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years
ago.
I was playing with a very dear
friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do,
with Aaron
Copland's Sonata, which was
written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend
of Copland's, a
young pilot who was shot down during
the war.~ Now we often talk to our audiences about the
pieces we are
going to play rather than providing
them with written program notes.~ But in this case, because
we began the
concert with this piece, we decided
to talk about the piece later in the program and to just
come out and play
the music without
explanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly
man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert
hall began to
weep.~ This man, whom I later met,
was clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear
from his buzz-cut hair,
square jaw and general demeanor that
he had spent a good deal of his life in the military.~ I
thought it a little
bit odd that someone would be moved
to tears by that particular movement of that particular
piece, but it
wasn't the first time I've
heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert
and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next
piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the
first and second
pieces, and we described the
circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned
its dedication
to a downed pilot.~ The man in the
front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to
leave the
auditorium.~ I honestly figured
that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage
afterwards, tears
and all, to explain
himself.
What he told us was this:~
"During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an
aerial combat situation where
one of my team's planes was
hit.~ I watched my friend bail out, and watched his
parachute open, but the
Japanese planes which had engaged us
returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so
as
to separate the parachute from the
pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean,
realizing that he
was lost.~ I have not thought about
this for many years, but during that first piece of music
you played, this
memory returned to me so vividly
that it was as though I was reliving it.~ I didn't
understand why this was
happening, why now, but then when
you came out to explain that this piece of music was written
to
commemorate a lost pilot, it was a
little more than I could handle.~ How does the music do
that?~ How did it
find those feelings and those
memories in me?"
Remember the Greeks:~ music is the
study of invisible relationships between internal objects.
This concert in
Fargo was the most important work I
have ever done.~ For me to play for this old soldier and
help him
connect, somehow, with Aaron
Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost
friends, to help him
remember and mourn his friend, this
is my work.~ This is why music matters.
What follows is part of the talk I
will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome
them a few days from
now.~ The responsibility I will
charge your sons and daughters with is this:
"If we were a medical school,
and you were here as a med student practicing
appendectomies, you'd take
your work very seriously because you
would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to
waltz
into your emergency room and
you're going to have to save their life.~ Well, my
friends, someday at 8 PM
someone is going to walk into your
concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart
that is
overwhelmed, a soul that is weary.~
Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how
well you do
your craft.
You're not here to become an
entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself.~ The
truth is you don't have
anything to sell; being a musician
isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used
Chevies.~ I'm not an
entertainer; I'm a lot closer to
a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker.~ You're
here to become a sort of
therapist for the human soul, a
spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist,
someone who works
with our insides to see if they get
things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with
ourselves and
be healthy and happy and
well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I
expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save
the planet.~ If
there is a future wave of wellness
on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of
mutual
understanding, of equality, of
fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government,
a military force or a
corporation.~ I no longer even
expect it to come from the religions of the world, which
together seem to have
brought us as much war as they have
peace.~ If there is a future of peace for humankind, if
there is to be an
understanding of how these
invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it
will come from the artists,
because that's what we do.~ As
in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the
artists are the ones
who might be able to help us with
our internal, invisible lives."
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Perception
Perception
Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approx. 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule
4 minutes later:
the violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.
6 minutes:
A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.
10 minutes:
A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.
45 minutes:
The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.
1 hour:
He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.
No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.
This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities. The questions raised: in a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context? One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made... How many other things are we missing?
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