Why Study Music?
"Music is a Vessel for True Knowledge"
Researchers probing the inner workings of the brain have found neutral firing patterns that bear a remarkable resemblance to music - suggesting that music may hold the key to higher brain function. For example, a recent study at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, discovered that grade school children who took piano lessons for three years scored higher than their non-musical peers on tests of general and spatial cognitive development - the very faculties needed for performance in math, engineering and other pursuits. Studies at Michigan State and UC Irvine have found similar results.
"Discipline is the Outcome"
Additionally, the weekly lessons and the long-term goals of musical study teach students a valuable work-ethic, not to give up when they are facing an obstacle that seems insurmountable, but that with dedication, practice, and a good attitude they can overcome anything and achieve success. We've found that our students develop stronger homework and study habits, and quickly learn to approach all academic subjects like they do music: with patience, confidence, and attention to detail, the same skills that ensure their success throughout their schooling and professional lives.
Research by Dr. Elliot Eisner, Professor of Art and Education at Stanford University:
“The arts inform as well as stimulate, they challenge as well as satisfy. Their location is not limited to galleries, concert halls and theatres. Their home can be found wherever humans chose to have attentive and vital intercourse with life itself. This is, perhaps, the largest lesson that the arts in education can teach, the lesson that life itself can be led as a work of art. In so doing the maker himself or herself is remade. The remaking, this re-creation is at the heart of the process of education.” (Eisner, The Kind of Schools We Need 1998: 56)
“What we see is not simply a function of what we take from the world, but what we make of it. “ (Eisner, The Arts and the Creation: Intro xii)
“The arts invite us to attend to the qualities of sound, sight, taste, and touch so that we experience them; what we are after in the arts is the ability to perceive things, not merely to recognize them” (Eisner, The Arts and the Creation: 5)