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| Students from Spectrum Community School take part in the Victoria Day Parade. It might be time for music education to move back into the curricular mainstream, Geoff Johnson writes. Photo. ADRIAN LAM, Times Colonist |
In many European cultures as well, music is for sharing. Walking down a street in France, I had stopped to admire a duet — a guitar player and an accordionist. “Do you play?” I am asked in faltering English. “Sure,” I reply, “but … ” and the guitar is handed over. “Alors, rejoinez nous” — please join us, and now I’m playing three- or four-chord songs I’ve never heard before, but which have patterns which make sense to a musician’s ear, with new friends I’ve never met before.
Late at night in a street in a small beachside village in Mexico, a group of men, possibly assisted by a touch of “contrabando,” the local illegal tequila, are singing ranchera songs — in two or three harmony parts...
...New research is shedding light on how the brain interacts with music.
“Music is very subjective,” says Dr. Daniel Levitin, a professor of neuroscience and music at McGill University in Montreal and author of the bestselling book This is Your Brain on Music, adding that there are more researchers studying the neurological effects of music now than ever before...
“As a little girl,” Albert Einstein’s second wife Elsa once remarked, “I fell in love with Albert because he played Mozart so beautifully on the violin. He also plays the piano. Music helps him when he is thinking about his theories. He goes to his study, comes back, strikes a few chords on the piano, jots something down, returns to his study.”
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Recommended Reading
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| This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession |
