Is Music the Key to Success? -NY Times Article
There are more famous successful people (several of whom may surprise you by their instrument/music training) name-dropped in this article than I care to reiterate, so I will just sum up this article using their closing paragraph:
I have a BA in music. I have been interacting with music since I was 4 years old. Out of all the things I have learned through music, I'm not sure the four mentioned here would be my "top" list (although discipline and collaboration is certainly up there, and yet I still hate group projects with a passion, so maybe I can't claim the collaboration bit?). Even so, they are so essential to being a mature human being, much less successful in the work field, and I can definitely see how they relate to both music and our society as a whole.Consider the qualities these high achievers say music has sharpened: collaboration, creativity, discipline and the capacity to reconcile conflicting ideas. All are qualities notably absent from public life. Music may not make you a genius, or rich, or even a better person. But it helps train you to think differently, to process different points of view — and most important, to take pleasure in listening.
What are your thoughts on what you have learned from music? Or, of those four qualities mentioned above, how have you learned them outside of music?
(If you haven't noticed, I'm desperate for some collaboration of our own on this blog, so if you're reading this - or anything on the blog - I'd love your input please!)
Hobey-ho.
discipline i can totally agree with, and reconciling conflicting ideas, but i'm totally convinced that the creativity part depends on how you play/learn music, i guess i'm just not buying that memorizing a Bach prelude is going to make me a more creative person. Even if I hadn't ever experienced the benefits listed above, I know my life would be much poorer without music in it.
ReplyDeleteI see what you mean about the creatively part. I do think playing music has made me think outside the box, but I suck at improvisation on any of my musical elements. I always have. I like to play what's on the page and if it's not on the page I don't want to figure it out. I struggled a lot with that when I was learning fiddle tunes in the Rocky Mountains. My teacher actually told me that "Classical music killed your inner drummer." So in that sense, I'm completely not creative. But I do write a lot, and music is still expressive, so I feel I have creative outlets.
Delete:) i can't even imagine having to learn things by ear... i guess if i had started when i was younger i might have been able to pick it up, but thinking about doing it now just gives me hives.
ReplyDeleteI completely understand playing exactly what's on the page, I have a somewhat disturbing love affair with scales, they are quick, "simple", and exactly the same each time. They can also be played mechanically without any of those pesky dynamics and "feelings"! So they're not "real" music, but they are the most relaxing thing to play! (i apologize foe the excessive number of "quotes" in this post).
ReplyDeleteI think the best musicians can learn by ear/improvise and also do amazing things with what's on the page, but that's not to say that musicians who only do one of those is not a competent and wonderful musician in their own right. Although I'd definitely think that musicians who can't read music are at a huge disatvantage. I like scales alright for warm-ups, especially my 9-note chromatic sections (they really sing in the lowest octave of the bassoon), but I see them as only preps for music, not music itself really.
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