Tuning Slide 4.35- Health is Physical and Mental

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I’ll start with a confession from last week- I didn’t get to post anything. We have been traveling on our end of the winter “vacation” and things were going in all kinds of wonderful directions in Savannah, GA, that it never happened.

Two weeks ago I started a three-part series on life lessons to take away from being a musician. In that one I riffed on a post from the website, The Odyssey Online, where Amanda Gribbin reflected on Eight Life Lessons Through Music.

This week I turn to the website, Musicnotes Now.

[From their page: Musicnotes Now – A Noteworthy Blog for Seriously Fun Musicians. Bringing music lovers the latest news, tips, and products to help nourish their love for music.
“Now” is a blog brought to you by Musicnotes – the world leader in digital sheet music.]

There I discovered a post titled:
17 Surprising Health Benefits of Playing an Instrument

In the first section they talk about possible physical benefits including improved breathing, exercise, improved immune response, hearing, and stress reduction. The one item that I have had some experience with centers on the breathing and muscle improvement. I am a whiz at your normal, everyday standard “plank” exercise. My trainer was amazed the first time I did a solid two minute plank. He commented that not too many people my age (or even younger) could do a two-minute plank. A few weeks later we were discussing it again and he said, “I wonder if part of why you can do that so well is because you are a trumpet player and need to use your core?” I don’t know if that is true or not, but it gives some truth to the physical side of playing an instrument.

Perhaps the clearest benefits, and life lessons, however, can be found in the second area mentioned on the website, the mental benefits. Here these are with the comments from the article:

✓ Mental Performance
⁃ Playing music is like doing a workout for every part of your brain. It helps improve your mental performance and memory. There’s even evidence that music can help a patient’s brain recover from a stroke, as well as slow the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

✓ Coordination
⁃ Using your fingers, hands, and feet in a rhythmic manner for a sustained amount of time, while also being conscious of playing the correct tones, can be a challenge for even the most coordinated people. Over time though, playing music refines your motor skills that go beyond the hand-eye.

✓ Time Management
⁃ Learning an instrument requires practice, of course! But more specifically, it requires consistency and routine. Figuring out how to fit practice into your busy schedule and really stick to it helps you develop better time management and organization skills.

✓ Reading Skills
⁃ Reading music helps strengthen your ability to process information by creating new connections between the synapses in your brain. As a result, reading and absorbing information from other sources becomes a lot easier.

✓ Listening Skills
⁃ Learning music doesn’t just improve your ability to hear details; it also makes you better at listening. Whether you’re practicing on your own or playing with other people, you have to listen for timing, expression, and whether you’re in tune. This can make you a better listener even in everyday conversations as well.

✓ Concentration
⁃ Focus is a necessary part of learning an instrument. Improving your musical skills forces you to use all the parts of your brain involved in concentration, making you better able to concentrate in other life situations. This is another reason why music is beneficial for those with disorders like ADD (-Link)

These are not empty ideas. There is a great deal of research as well as anecdotal observation that can point in these directions. Now, one must always ask, are people who improve in these ways drawn to music because they can do that? No, I think it is more than that. Sometimes I think there are people drawn to music because they know it will benefit them.

For example, I am aware of a young person who had some significant learning concerns, possibly on the autism spectrum. They were somewhat reserved and uncertain. Somewhere around 5th or 6th grade they decided they wanted to be a trumpet player. We all know of the reputation we trumpet players have for being front and center and obnoxiously self-centered. That does not seem to be the best way to go for a person who appears just the opposite. Yet, I knew that this young person was about to do something remarkable. I was right. I saw them regularly over the next six or seven years and the change was clear and consistent. They became a trumpet player in all the best ways and expanded into other musical endeavors. It worked to change this person and help them find new and exciting ways to enter into social and school situations.

Yes, it’s an anecdote, an observation made from short and infrequent contacts. But it is not unusual as the above ideas propose.

So, for you and me- we are already musicians. We have learned how to play the instrument. Perhaps we have had to struggle with time-management or focus. Perhaps we know that we could be sharper in our mental performance- we get lazy thinking periods- or we just get lazy. Is that how we want to live? Is that going to help us move forward in music AND in all the other areas of our lives?

I have learned more from being a musician about living and thinking and development. I know that musicians (and often other arts-types) have to do a great deal of work to become more than just mediocre. We know we can do it! We have been doing it. Some of us for a few months or years, some of us for decades. We are not done yet, but we are moving.

Probably in the end, the most important life lesson we get from music is that we can succeed. It is the sense of achievement that builds confidence that helps us move to other levels of achievement and on and on.

Nike had it right, “Just do it.” Then, when we have done it, keep doing it. Why? Because you know you can do it!