School districts around the nation have been conducting several budget cuts, many of which include cutting the band and orchestras of the schools. I understand the budget crisis and I trust that the situation will be fixed, but cutting music from the program should not be one of the solutions. I will give you three reasons as to how learning a musical instrument in schools can ultimately enhance the student’s overall learning experience.
The first reason is the child’s increase in brain and memory capacity. Musicians are shown to have a quicker understanding of subjects at a young age. This is because the corpus callosum, the bridge between the left and right side of the brain, in a music student’s brain is fairly larger compared to a student who is not studying a musical instrument. The only thing is that the children would have to start at a young age to show these signs of growth. It is more typical to start a child’s music experience between the ages of three and eight years old because musical aptitude becomes stabilized before the age of nine. Although the brain will continue to grow into their teen years and early adulthood, the potential for the greatest neurological development by learning a musical instrument would have passed by time they are eleven-years-old.
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The second reason is the increase in reading comprehension. Students who take music lessons surpass in assessments of writing by using the knowledge they’ve obtained from researching. At St. Augustine’s School in Brooklyn, New York, they were getting ready to close in 1985 due to low enrollment and poor academic achievement. In a desperate attempt to save the school, the principal reformed the institution into a fine-arts school.
During the day students must spend one third of the school in music. At fourth grade, they are required to learn piano and one other instrument. All students learn to sing. The school is open to everyone, musically prone to it or not. Now the school has a waiting list of students, although the school is located in an extremely poor area. As of today, the school is one of the only three schools in the greater New York area where 90 percent of the students are reading at the appropriate age level. By including a music program to the schools, they improved their enrollment and the students improved on their reading comprehension.
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Music can really help you improve reading comprehension in many ways. A teaching method that has proven to be efficient is comparing pieces of music to characters. There was an experiment that was done on students who were asked to focus on the characters in the story and how the composer portrays them through instrumentation, melodic lines, rhythms, and dynamics. As students are listening and interpreting the music, they learn to analyze the characters based off the composition clues the composer gives. If reading a book that has a well-made movie attached to it, it is highly encouraged to show that to the students. The reason for this is not to get the students out of reading the book, but for them to better understand it. When a character is introduced, it’s better to hear what music is used to describe the character. This will then give people the chance to pay attention to the characters more, and if they were confused about the character from just reading, this will hopefully answer their questions. Once they get an understanding of the characters based off their “theme,” students are asked to write individually and/or collaboratively the analysis of the characters’ traits. The instrument representation of the characters might also change creating a different mood for the story, thus altering the story.
The third and final reason that proves that learning a musical instrument needs to be a part of a student’s life is the increase of mathematical comprehension. There is a deep connection between music and mathematics and the techniques that are used to teach math are used to teach musicians, and this method has proven successful. Not all students comprehend math quickly and efficiently. Simple mathematics is integrated throughout music lessons. For example, as students develop the rhythms in their pieces, they may begin to think in multiples of four. They realize they have sixteen beats of music in the piece, meaning they have four sets of four beats. Students also begin to grasp the concept of odds and evens. The group of beats can be subdivided into smaller units for particular steps and musical rounds. Students who study music surpass their non-music peers in appraisal of math and the advantage that music gives improves overtime. These findings are found true regardless of socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity.
In conclusion, the skill of learning a musical instrument proves to be beneficial in this time and age. Music can increase a student’s brain activity, so having children receive music instruction can develop their brains in a faster rate compared to children without musical instruction, thus causing an increase in their academic performance. Children who begin learning a musical instrument at a young age show definite improvement in literacy and mathematics. If they were to go without music instruction, the students would have more trouble in those specific areas, causing them to be unable to maintain the knowledge they are gaining. Since musicians also have an increase in memory capacity, the information they received in their other classes can be more effectively stored and available to use when necessary. Overall, we as a society need to make sure that music programs are within schools for the benefit and advancement of children’s learning progress.
