Music
Photo: Nicolas Alejandro Street Photography vis Flickr (modified)
Will music make my kid smarter? Isn’t that what parents ask themselves? Isn’t that why kids get enrolled in music programs, no matter what they think they want?
Music was handcuffs to me as a child, and I wanted desperately to be free.
I went to guitar lessons for a year and practiced only enough to mangle my fingertips on the steel strings. The promised calluses never developed and the switch to nylon strings did not help. Frustrated by the loneliness, pain and repetitive, recipe-following boredom of the entire enterprise, I finally rebelled until my parents gave up. I wanted to run wild in the woods in which we lived, explore new terrain, build tree houses, and catch critters. Sometimes it was enough to lie among the ferns, staring up at the tree canopy and the sky beyond, appreciating the dappled sunlight and the breeze. The notion of practice or discipline in service to some higher goal seemed farcical. I did not want to learn other people’s songs. I wanted to be an explorer.
It came as an irritation to me then, years later, to have a counsellor tell me that the particular way in which I answered a battery of questions on an aptitude test aligned best with successful musicians. Still later, a musician told me I had perfect pitch. Had I considered becoming a musician? It seemed I had missed something fundamental in my upbringing.
Missing from my childhood musical experiences were community and ease. Kids with more friends, less expectation, and an insulated garage overcome this by forming a band. Music to me meant more discipline, not a joyous, raucous lark among friends. That problem may have derailed me from my best opportunity for a deeply satisfying and productive life.
I have found other pursuits and adventures since.
How delicate though that moment, childhood, and how easily the possibilities derailed, predilections misdiagnosed, and opportunities mishandled. What a god-awful mess, this growing up. How instructive and elusive, joy! Miraculous, is it not, that music lessons should suck the joy out of music?
Consider:
With your teaching, do you kill joy, inspire joy, or seek dispassionate zones of neither?
Do you agree that emotion can improve student engagement and learning?
Does music make us smarter? Justifications for music in the curriculum often rely on side effects, or transfer, as if the exquisite utility of sheet music lies in kindling campfires. There are thousands of academic studies seeking the benefits of musical training that will transfer to the rest of life. After weeks of reading them (and I do not recommend it), a peer-reviewed article in Frontiers in Neuroscience (Miendlarzewska, Trost, 2014) happily summarized matters. “Musical training” covers a wide variety of activities: listening critically to music, memorizing material, grasping notation, reading scores, learning an instrument individually or socially, performing individually or socially and improvisation all come into play. Without absolute clarity on which of them accrue from what activities, here are the documented benefits of studying music (results may vary!):
1) Gains immediately associated with music studies:
a) fine motor skill
b) auditory discrimination
c) rhythm perception
d) auditory discrimination
2) Gains through near-transfer within the brain
a) phoneme discrimination
b) attention
c) working memory
d) enhanced verbal memory
e) task-switching
3) Gains through far-transfer within the brain
a) vocabulary
b) non-verbal reasoning
c) verbal intelligence
d) executive functions: cognitive control, flexibility
e) better second language pronunciation accuracy
f) better reading ability
g) academic performance
If you want all this to stick, however, then you are in it for the long haul. 12 or 14 months of effort do not yield lasting results.
If music can be a tool for brain development, it can also be a tool for classroom management. Music helps kids stay engaged and present. I read, write, study, and work to music, and it helps to keep me productive. Shouldn’t kids similarly benefit in school? An article in the Guardian (Halliday, 2017) relates how the Feversham school in Bradford, England, for example, improved student performance by radically infusing the curriculum with music. Music did not make their students suddenly smarter. Rather, it engaged them in the learning process. A classroom study by researchers at Arizona State University validates this claim (Sandberg, Hansen, Puckett, 2013). Students in this study were more cooperative with the infusion of music into the curriculum, making more time for productive learning. That last point is vital. Music makes time. It doesn’t spend it.
Consider: Do you believe music belongs in school on its own merits, or is that time better spent?
Music develops the mind, and keeps kids cooperative. I write this and my spirit wilts. Music is useful? That is the message? Utility may inspire parents and teachers, but what about the student? What about self-expression? What about fun? What about joy? What about ecstasy? All that other stuff just feels like adults justifying the effort and expense. Music is a thing apart, so proposed Howard Gardner in his book Frames of Mind (1983), postulating multiple intelligences. From another angle, Marvin Minsky in The Society of Mind (1988) imagined the mind as distributed and pluralistic, a vast compendium of independent agents, a complicated host of them primed specifically for music. Minsky believed that by developing our aesthetic sensibilities, by refining our choices, musical or otherwise, so we constructed our sense of the world (Minsky, 1981). Constructing our sense of the world! This at last feels like a purpose worthy of childhood and adolescence. If the practical stuff feels stuffy, here finally is something emotionally resonant.
Twang, thrash, bash, beat, blow, or do it all electronically. School offers the opportunity to do it socially. Somehow, perhaps slowly, some form and technique will assert themselves. What is good? What is better? What would be amazing? How do you communicate that? Ideas about how to do this have abounded since well-before Julie Andrews sang do-re-mi in the Sound Of Music. Actually, Guido da Arezzo derived the do-re-mi mnemonic from the hymn Ut queant laxis in his Micrologus (1025), and ideas about teaching music probably originated long before that. I know only that practicing alone with sore and bloody fingers is not motivating. There are five methods of musical instruction of particular note, all of them anchored in natural abilities like singing and movement, and in music as a social endeavor, not an isolated one:
Suzuki method: Join a social environment saturated in music, learn by ear and by repetition, memorize, and perform publicly in order to master an instrument. Parent and child often learn music together. Learning music is like learning a mother tongue.
“All children everywhere in the world are brought up by a perfect educational method: their mother tongue. Why not apply this method to other faculties? ”
Kodály method: Learn the basics of music through singing before starting an instrument.
“Teach music and singing at school in such a way that it is not a torture, but a joy for the pupil; instill a thirst for finer music in him, a thirst which will last for a lifetime. If the child is not filled at least once by the life giving stream of music during the most susceptible period-between his sixth and sixteenth years-it will hardly be of any use to him later on. Often a single experience will open the young soul to music for a whole lifetime. This experience cannot be left to chance, it is the duty of the school to provide it. ”
Orff Approach (schulwerk): Develop musical creativity and independence “through movement, dance, exploration, improvisation, composition, and performance” (Long, 2013, p. 4).
“It must therefore be stressed that elemental music in the primary school should not be installed as a subsidiary subject , but as something fundamental to all other subjects . It is not exclusively a question of musical education; this can follow, but it does not have to. It is, rather, a question of developing the whole personality. ”
Dalcroze Method (eurhythmics): Focus on rhythmic bodily movement, improvisation and the human voice, with a strong emphasis on building a sense of rhythm.
“One of the most important factors in musical education is the training and development of the sense of Rhythm. There is little doubt that Rhythm is the earliest aspect of music which appeals to children. It is, through the whole of our life, the pulse by which the vitality of music can most readily be measured. In addition to this the practice of the right rhythmic movements has a twofold value in education-the purely physical value of training the muscles and improving the bodily health, and the aesthetic value of teaching self-expression in one of its most beautiful forms. ”
Miendlarzewska & Trost (2014) in their paper summarizing the benefits of music training, state that rhythm is likely the source of many of music’s cognitive benefits and it’s pleasures:
“We have proposed rhythmic entrainment as a major underlying mechanism that is responsible for the beneficial effect of musical training on cognitive functions, especially with regard to the executive functions. Musical rhythms help to orient attentional processes in time, which implies a benefit for preparation and control of motor actions, and honing of temporal processing of information. We have reported several studies suggesting that these processes are also linked to cognitive functions such as reading ability and attentional focus. Furthermore, rhythmic entrainment is also regarded as an emotion induction mechanism, which again hints at the pleasurable aspect of musical activities.”
El Sistema: A free classical music program designed to lift underprivileged youth out of poverty through ensemble work.
“The effect of El Sistema is felt in three fundamental circles: in the personal/social circle, in the family circle and in the community. In the personal/social circle, the children in the orchestras and choirs develop their intellectual and emotional side. The music becomes a source for developing the dimensions of the human being, thus elevating the spirit and leading man to a full development of his personality. So, the emotional and intellectual profits are huge — the acquisition of leadership, teaching and training principles, the sense of commitment, responsibility, generosity and dedication to others, and the individual contribution to achieve great collective goals. All this leads to the development of self-esteem and confidence. ”
Music connects you directly, viscerally to your emotions. Music is a language of emotion. It is a way to explore your own feelings, and communicate them to others and construct an aesthetic sense of the world in a spirit of play. Exploring emotion through music, guided by an experienced coach, I cannot imagine anything further from my own experience so many years ago.
References
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Your thoughts on this journal post are highly valued, as I continue to build and refine my perspective on schools and the school environment. Please share your own experiences and perceptions of the school environment below!