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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.

Keep the Commandments original (Published in The Friend magazine, 1975)

My mom wrote a religious piece of music when I was young, a song called “Keep the Commandments.” She needed a song for the children’s church organization (“Primary”) in her local geographic area (“stake”). I sang the song in my Primary and then, maybe 5 years later, traveled with her and my sister to Switzerland where we heard it sung (in German) in a Primary meeting there. (We just showed up on that Sunday to attend church and heard them sing it.) That enlarged my perspective at how one little song can affect a much broader audience than we might imagine.

This morning, as I sat in my home watching a church meeting being broadcast live to almost 200 nations worldwide, I heard the most beautiful arrangement of her song sung by a 360-member choir. Their performance was soothing, peaceful, comforting.

Listening to the song caused me to marvel at how a single mother with 5 children just wanted to help the children in her neighborhood. Instead, her song has ended up influencing many. I know she wasn’t thinking, some 38 years ago, “Oh, I’ll write a song that will be sung around the world.” But she did.

My mother is one of my greatest inspirations in teaching music. She has written a number of songs–some simple, some more complex, but has always just wanted to help others with music. Other people have done the same, and I believe that our children–our incredible rising generation will surely create even more beautiful music than we have yet heard in the history of our world. I believe they have that capacity.

(Note: ASL videos for a number of religious songs are available here. These videos were made over many years, so the fashions of interpreters varies according to when they were made. Also, if you are not familiar with ASL videos, it is helpful to understand facial expressions in signing interpretation. Adult interpreters may be more animated in their facial expressions than children.)

 

(The book pictured above is called Hearing with My Heart. I’m not sure why the image cut off at the top!) I’m listening right now to an inspiring interview with Justin Osmond, on a streaming radio channel, which is amazing. He was born with a profound hearing loss and grew up in a very musical family. His parents, because of their extended family’s involvement in music, searched for ways to help him to learn to hear, speak, and make music. His mother would wake up the children in his family at 5:30 am, and after a family study time, she worked with him for 30 minutes on intense speech therapy. He learned to play violin, viola, and drums through vibration.

This was fascinating to me in particularly because I’m listening, as I exercise and do housework at home, to The Power of Music. The first chapter shares the story of Evelyn Glennie, a famous full-time solo percussionist who is deaf. She performs solo as well as with orchestras internationally. How? She takes her shoes off and feels the vibrations. The purpose of her TED talk (also amazing!) is  to teach people how to listen. In fact, she begins her talk saying she feels this is her purpose in life: to teach the world to listen.

So both of these deaf people learned musical instruments through vibration. WOW! So much to explore in this concept! Both Justin in his radio interview and Evelyn in her videotaped talk explain how they learned to differentiate vibrations in order to differentiate pitches. Incredible.

Justin Osmond talks about the gift his mother gave him by the hours spent helping him as well as the gift his grandmother gave him. What did his grandmother do? She had two sons who were hearing impaired, and so her musical family (9 children, The Osmonds, which included Donny and Marie Osmond) started performing in small gigs at places like the local fair, in order to raise money for their brothers’ hearing aids! That effort grew into a charitable organization they named The Osmond Foundation which in turn became the Children’s Miracle Network!

Justin learned for himself the joy of helping another person to hear when he wanted to raise money for a friend whose family couldn’t afford to give him a hearing aid. He did so, and for the first time in his 14-year old life, his friend heard his mother tell him “I love you.”

We had a concert (recital) series at our elementary school two years ago called “Instruments for Good,” in which local young performers came and performed on the first Friday of every month for students. Those young performers and these two deaf musicians remind me of the power of music, service, and good help others access beauty in their lives.

I love it!

This is astounding video reminds us of the capacity for children to learn music. I am guessing, with great confidence, that those children did not learn how to do that without an incredibly dedicated parent at their side and hours upon hours of daily practice.

Those of us who don’t have or don’t want to spend hours every day practicing with a child can still be encouraged that our smaller but persistent efforts will also pay off, because it’s simply a proven principle: “That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do, not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

 

Youth Guild Education and Service Opportunities 2013-14

Here is something that is new to me: a chance for children to get involved in the symphony on various levels. You can attend pre-concert masterclasses, backstage tours, and get discounts on symphony tickets. A child can write a review of a concert they attend for their school newsletter, and they can earn credit for doing all of the above!

So if you want to take your child to the symphony and take the experience to another level which includes service, literacy, or just added depth, check out this information!

One of the challenges of having a children’s choir is funding it. You can teach for free and often find a practice place for free, but sheet music and other related materials are generally not free. Or your choir might not be a community volunteer endeavor: might need to earn a wage, and so you need to charge some kind of tuition.

Today I saw this and thought it was a new twist on funding a choir! It’s “pay what you can” tuition. Wow! Here’s the link to my friend’s choir and how they decided to fund their program this year: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/467233.