Quotes

Notes fly so much farther than words. There is no other way to reach the infinite.
-- Anaïs Nin
In a world of peace and love, music would be the universal language.
-- Henry David Thoreau
“...don’t just buy these records and take them home so your kids can play around with them while you go off and do something else. I want to see you join right in, do what your kids do… Act like they act. Yell like they yell. Dance the way you see them dance. Sing like they sing. Work and rest the way kids do.
You’ll be healthier. You’ll feel wealthier. You’ll talk wiser.”
-- Woody Guthrie
“To sing is to love and to affirm, to fly and soar,
To coast into the hearts of people who listen,
To tell them that life is to live,
That love is there,
That nothing is a promise, but that beauty exists,
And must be hunted for
And found."
--Joan Baez
--David Levitan has a book called, This is Your Brain On Music
From the review: "He points out that
"no known human culture now or anytime in the recorded past lacked music,"
which indicates that it is somehow evolutionary necessary.
"Music listening, performance, and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified, and involve nearly every neural subsystem."
"Whenever I get a book on neurology or psychology, the first thing I look up in the index is music, and if it's not there, I close the book."
---Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist
--Here are more valuable things learned from Daniel Levitin's fantastic and highly-recommended book "This is Your Brain on Music":
  • -music uses many parts of the brain
  • -the brain learns musical grammar
  • -there are two possible theories about how our brains remember music:
    • One is "record-keeping," saying our brain is like a video camera, recording all it sees and hears, and that it stores absolute pitch. (This would go along with the MT policy that we always should sing the songs in the right keys.)
    • The other theory is "constructivist," saying that we remember music relationally, just the gist of it, an abstract generalization. The tempo and pitch of a song can be varied, but we still recognize the song. We remember the musical contour, as a pitch-free template. (This makes more sense to me, but I don't mind singing the songs in the "right" keys, because it's good for my personal pitch awareness.) Levitin's conclusion is that a multiple trace memory model is best, a hybrid theory, that our brains store both abstract and specific information.
  • -babies develop neural connections when listening to music that pre-dispose them to like their culture's music and to be moved by it (This is one reason why it is so great that MT includes music from all over the world.) -infants prefer consonance over dissonance.
  • -infants are hard-wired to detect and track the contour of music, especially over several pitch intervals -music and dance are inseparable in every society in all times -music aids people in sexual selection of mates, in social bonding and cohesion, and in cognitive development, preparing the brain for complex cognitive and social activities -rhythm stirs our bodies; tonality and melody stir our brains.

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