EDITORIAL: Music, Neuroscience and Arts Education - 'Saved by the (sax's) bell'

[Ryan Goble]

My former professor Fred Goodman hipped me to this great editorial from the LA Times by Daniel J. Levitin - Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and author of This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. I've read the former book and it is excellent. Some excerpts from his excellent editorial:

In September of the year we entered third grade, Mr. Edie stopped by all the classrooms and told us that he was the school's band teacher. If we got permission from our parents, he would pull us out of class 20 minutes a week and teach us to play an instrument. My parents didn't have much money. I got a cheap pair of shoes at the beginning of every school year, along with a warning that they had to last all year. So buying an instrument was out of the question. But we had an old clarinet that my father had played back in the 1940s, and Mr. Edie thought that was just fine.

 

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That jazz band got pretty good after a few years, and we were asked to play at the opening for the town's first library and its first post office. Being in Mr. Edie's band taught me to be a team player — the importance of listening to others, and of coordinating what I was doing with what they were doing. It gave me a social network and something I was good at that was, thankfully, valued by the surfeit of fistfighting machismo maniacs in our school. And it also awakened in me a curiosity about how things work in general, which is what eventually led me to become a scientist who studies the workings of neurons in the human brain.

 

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When I was 13, Mr. Edie taught me how to conduct, how to write and arrange music (he bought me a college arranging text) and, on weekends, how to do a tune-up and a valve job on a 1948 Plymouth. Today I think of myself as part artist, part mechanic, part music maker and part music explainer. I've learned all those ways of being from him. And from a California public school system that valued the arts as a way to instill social skills and curiosity, and to form more complete human beings.

I hope the next generation of public school kids gets the same opportunity the state of California gave me to discover things about themselves and the world through music.

Read the full editorial in the LA Times.