Here’s what’s been happening with Delicious Music:

I have been teaching lessons at school but haven’t had time to get my lesson plans online due to my family needs and the holidays. I hope to post those lessons when I can! It might be next year when I cycle back through to teach them again, but hopefully it will be before then! I have learned that when fitting this project into my life, I have to just keep on moving forward and add more the next time I repeat the cycle.

I have an opportunity to teach my own children in our beginning orchestra class at school, and so I am now going to focus on those lesson plans and support materials. You’ll find them under the Lesson Plans tab. My goal is to post information for the parents in my blog and hope that the parents will make comments on the pages to provide feedback on how things are going for them as they help their child learn as the program rolls out.

I’ve written a couple of extremely simple songs (nothing fancy here) that I can use both in the kindergarten classes and in orchestra, the idea being that when the children join beginning orchestra, they will already have the songs in their head. That way they focus their energies more on learning how to play a song more than on learning the song itself.

I’m really excited to be building this string instruction on the knowledge that a number of my students gained when I taught them music in kindergarten! Teaching music is really fun, even for an inexperienced neophyte like me.

Today I learned about an online music library (wiki) of sheet music and recordings of music that are available in the public domain (meaning that their copyright has expired). It is called the Petrucci Music Library (imslp.org).

What a resource!

I didn’t get to explore it much, but what a gift for musicians to be able to search for a song and print it out instead of having to go buy a copy.

Ironically, just Sunday I was searching for a piece of music and came to this website, but wasn’t familiar with this resource, so I skipped over it.

I’m grateful my daughter’s flute teacher pointed it out to me!

(This is what we learned in beginning orchestra today.)

Today I visited our school’s beginning orchestra for the first time. There were 12 children: 10 violinists, 1 cellist, and 1 violist, all having had one lesson a week for the last two months. And in front stood our incredible orchestra teacher: a mother of 5 who is teaching these children as a volunteer, for the love of children and music. Can you imagine?!

I visited to lend a hand, to instruct and correct. You know what I realized? Just tuning 12 instruments alone by yourself can take a third of the class time! What an advantage it would be having two instructors there: one to teach, one to go around correcting and modeling correct posture, bow hold, etc.

We need some more violin-playing volunteers!

The best part of being there was seeing that the children were happy! There was a good feeling in the room. The children patiently waited as the others had their bow holds corrected. They worked hard. It’s not the same pace as private lessons, but what delight they had in being able to play their first song and begin learning “Twinkle, Twinkle!” I was so happy to see what they had accomplished!

Where there is not funding for music in the regular day-time instruction, the only way we can have instrumental instruction is to have extracurricular instruction. And the only way to keep it affordable is with the help of volunteers. What a gift volunteerism is!

I decided it would be helpful to create a page about violin bow holds and tuning as a parent resource. Go here to visit the new violin resource page!

 (Image from this article.)

My eyes and ears are constantly on the lookout for information about the influence of music on people. When I was in a Suzuki violin teacher training several years ago, I was given a reprint of an article published in Scholastic Magazine, an educational magazine for children distributed in schools across America. Unfortunately, the article did not have a citation. I’m big on accurate research and look for citations.

So today, after reading an article about mice and music in another magazine, I searched on the internet for the study about which I had formerly read. I found a description of the study in several places, but this post had the most information about the experiment.

Beginning in 1996, David Merrill, a high school student in Virginia, performed two lengthy experiments. He took 3 groups of mice: one that listened to classical music, a second that listened to hard rock (Anthrax), and a third that was not exposed to any music. The group that listened to classical music fared the best in the maze timings, the silence group scored second best, and the hard rock group killed each other. He had to end the experiment the first year because he ended up with only one mouse alive in the hard rock group.

The second year he performed the experiment, he put the mice in their own aquariums to keep them separate, so they couldn’t kill one another. The first group listened only to Mozart, the second group to Anthrax, and the third group to no music. Again, the Mozart and no music group improved their times, while the hard rock music group took 20 times as long to complete the maze.

(Here is another brief description of Merrill’s experiment, along with some other videos related to music/animal experiments. Fascinating.)

Today I read another article that cited a study made on mice and music. The article states,

“Two researchers explored this relationship by studying the effects of music and rhythm on the nervous system of mice. For eight weeks, one group of mice constantly listened to Strauss waltzes (highly organized and orderly music), while a second heard disharmonious sounds in the form of continuous drumbeats. A third group was raised in silence.

“After eight weeks, the mice were placed in a maze to find food. The mice in the second group wandered off with no sense of direction–’a clear indication they were having trouble learning’–and took much longer to find the food than they had at the beginning of the study. The mice exposed ‘to discordant sounds not only developed difficulties in learning and memory, …but they also incurred structural changes in their brain cells.’ The researchers diagnosis is very interesting: ‘We believe that the mice were trying to compensate for this constant bombardment of disharmonic noise….They were struggling against the chaos.'”

While I couldn’t find the original study online, I did find another summary here.

Beat, rhythm, volume, and harmonies all affect our brains, which in turn affects our bodies. Some kinds of music that is disharmonious and has a heavy beat or certain kinds of repeating rhythms apparently affect our brains and bodies negatively.

It helps to know that what we put into our brains and bodies affects us, and to better understand how it affects us, so that we can choose the music that helps us, and the children around us, to be healthier, happier, and kinder.