FYMU 102A: Music Makes You Smarter

The award-winning creator of the acclaimed documentary The Music Instinct: Science & Song," explores the power of music and its connection to the body, the brain, and the world of nature.

A million listeners trust NPR's Brooke Gladstone to guide them through the complexities of the modern media. Bursting onto the page in vivid comics by acclaimed artist Josh Neufeld, this brilliant radio personality guides us through two millennia of media history, debunking the notion that "The Media" is an external force beyond our control and equipping us to be savvy consumers and shapers of the news.

This introduction to the history and philosophy of music education provides an overview, concentrating on the period from the 1950s to the present. Michael Mark describes and interprets the radical changes that have shaped current music education. Contemporary Music Education contains detailed discussion of practical and philosophical foundations, including the influence of the Contemporary Music Project, the Yale Seminar, the Juilliard Repertory project, and the Tanglewood Symposium. Current teaching alternatives treated include the Orff, Kodaly, and Suzuki approaches.

Lawyers. Accountants. Radiologists. Software engineers. That's what our parents encouraged us to become when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of "left brain" dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which "right brain" qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate. That's the argument at the center of this provocative and original book, which uses the two sides of our brains as a metaphor for understanding the contours of our times.

The 24 chapters have been organized according to five sections: The first section (Development) examines the critical months and years from conception to the end of infancy. It looks at how the musical brain develops, ways of understanding musical development, and the nature of musicality. Section two (Engagement) scrutinizes claims about the non-musical benefit of exposure to music, for example that music makes you smarter. This is followed by four thorough reviews of dealing with musical preference and taste, literacy, aesthetic identity and the perception of emotion in music. Section three (Differences) focuses on those issues that help explain and identify individual differences. It includes chapters examining how children develop their motivation to study music, conceptions of giftedness and talent, and two chapters on music therapy. Five chapters cover skills that can develop as a result of exposure to music. It considers the informal activities associated with musical play and the use of computers and technology. There are also chapters dealing with the acquisition of vocal and instrumental skills, as well as the individual and social worlds of children's musical creativity. The final section of the book discusses five different contexts: The chapter on historical perspectives provides readers with information that will assist them in making comparisons between how children have learned and developed their musical capacities in the past, with current opportunities. This is extended by two additional chapters that focus on children's involvement in music in non-western cultures. The book concludes with two chapters focusing on youth musical engagement and the transition from child to adult.

What is listening in the digital era? Today, new technologies make it possible for us to roam instantly and experimentally across musical languages and generations, from Detroit techno to jam bands to baroque opera, or to drive deeper into the set of tastes that we already have. Either way, we can listen to nearly anything, at any time. The possibilities in this new age of listening overturn old assumptions about what it means to properly appreciate music, to be an educated listener. In "Every Song Ever," the veteran New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff re-imagines the very idea of music appreciation for our times.

On the eve of his 40th birthday, Gary Marcus, a renowned scientist with no discernible musical talent, learns to play the guitar and investigates how anyone--of any age --can become musical. Do you have to be born musical to become musical? Do you have to start at the age of six? Using the tools of his day job as a cognitive psychologist, Gary Marcus becomes his own guinea pig as he takes up the guitar. In a powerful and incisive look at how both children and adults become musical.

In our society, cultural activity - or 'the arts' - usually refers to the high culture of the elites and popular mass culture. Clarke Mackey argues for a third category that is as old as human society itself but seldom discussed: "vernacular culture." Vernacular culture comprises all those creative, non-instrumental activities that people engage in daily - activities that provide meaning in life: conversations between friends, social gatherings and rituals, play and participatory sports, informal storytelling, musical jam sessions, cooking and gardening, homemade architecture, and street festivals. In this lively and eclectic discussion, Mackey maintains that practising and celebrating such activities at the expense of passive, consumer culture have far-reaching benefits. Mackey further examines how literacy, imperialism, industrialization and electronic technologies have produced a culture of spectatorship, apathy and powerlessness. This is a timely, considered, and provocative response to the popularity of amateur, participatory, and do-it-yourself culture available on the internet.

When Gustavo Dudamel, at the age of twenty-eight, ascended the podium at the Hollywood Bowl for his inaugural concert as conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he immediately captivated the hearts of his audience, just as he had the minds of music critics who designated him a modern-day Leonard Bernstein. In Changing Lives, the maestro's story becomes the entry point to an equally captivating subject: El Sistema, the music education program that nurtured his musical talent, first as a young violinist and then as a budding conductor under the mentorship of its founder, José Antonio Abreu. What began in Venezuela has now reached children in Los Angeles, New York City, Baltimore, and cities around the world. No matter the location, the overarching goal of El Sistema is unwavering: to rescue children from the depredations of poverty through music. Part history, part reportage, this book reveals that arts education can indeed effect positive social change.

From our first social bonding as infants to the funeral rites that mark our passing, music plays an important role in our lives, bringing us closer to one another. In "The Music between Us," philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins investigates this role, examining the features of human perception that enable music's uncanny ability to provoke, despite its myriad forms across continents and throughout centuries, the sense of a shared human experience.

Rob Kapilow has been helping audiences hear more in great music for almost twenty years with his What Makes It Great? series on NPR, at Lincoln Center, and in concert halls throughout the US and Canada. In this book, he gives you a set of tools you can use when listening to any piece of music in order to hear it,s story told in notes.

This inspiring book leads the way to a new kind of advocacy, one that stops justifying the arts as useful to learning other subjects, and argues instead for the powerful lessons that the arts, like no other subjects, teach our kids.

Why Music Matters explores the role of music in our lives, and investigates the social and political significance of music in modern societies.

Classical music, whose demise has been predicted for at least a decade, has always had its staunch advocates, but in today's media-saturated world there are real concerns about its viability. Why Classical Music Still Matters takes a forthright approach by engaging both skeptics and music lovers alike. In seven chapters, "Why Classical Music Still Matters" affirms the value of classical music--defined as a body of nontheatrical music produced since the eighteenth century with the single aim of being listened to--by revealing what its values are: the specific beliefs, attitudes, and meanings that the music has supported in the past and which, Kramer believes, it can support in the future.