"Born on January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a musician capable of playing multiple instruments who started playing in public at the age of 6. Over the years, Mozart aligned himself with a variety of European venues and patrons, composing hundreds of works that included sonatas, symphonies, masses, chamber music, concertos and operas, marked by vivid emotion and sophisticated textures."
Read Entire Biography: http://www.biography.com/people/wolfgang-mozart-9417115#synopsis NEUROSCIENCE OF MUSIC – HOW MUSIC ENHANCES LEARNING THROUGH NEUROPLASTICITYNeuroscience research into the neuroscience of music shows that musicians’ brains may be primed to distinguish meaningful sensory information from noise. This ability seems to enhance other cognitive abilities such as learning, language, memory and neuroplasticity of various brain areas.
Scientific review of how music training primes nervous system and boosts learning Those ubiquitous wires connecting listeners to you-name-the-sounds from invisible MP3 players, whether of Bach, Miles Davis or, more likely today, Lady Gaga, only hint at music’s effect on the soul throughout the ages. Now a data-driven review by Northwestern University researchers that will be published July 20 in Nature Reviews Neuroscience pulls together converging research from the scientific literature linking musical training to learning that spills over to skills including language, speech, memory, attention and even vocal emotion. The science covered comes from labs all over the world, from scientists of varying scientific philosophies, using a wide range of research methods. Read Entire Article: http://neurosciencenews.com/neuroscience-music-enchances-learning-neuroplasticity/ "Does our enjoyment of music—our ability to find a sequence of sounds emotionally affecting—have some neurological basis? From an evolutionary standpoint, does enjoying music provide any advantage? Is music of any truly practical use, or is it simply baggage that got carried along as we evolved other more obviously useful adaptations? Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and biologist Richard Lewontin wrote a paper in 1979 claiming that some of our skills and abilities might be like spandrels—the architectural negative spaces above the curve of the arches of buildings—details that weren’t originally designed as autonomous entities, but that came into being as a result of other, more practical elements around them."
Read Entire Article: www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-do-our-brains-process-music-32150302/?no-ist Frank Proffitt, of isolated Pick Britches Valley in western North Carolina, married into the Hicks family, well-known in the area for their musicianship and storytelling. Anne and Frank Warner had become enamored of a dulcimer made by Nathan Hicks, and in 1938 they traveled from their home in New York to Beech Mountain, North Carolina, for the first of several collecting trips. Frank Proffitt played a number of songs for them, including “Tom Dula,” a nineteenth-century local murder ballad. Twenty years later, the Kingston Trio’s recording of “Tom Dooley” shot to the top of the popular charts, bringing traditional music, and the name of Frank Proffitt to a new, main-stream audience, and contributing significantly to the 1960s folk revival.
Beginning in 1929, when she collected her first folksong from fellow Vermonter Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Helen Hartness Flanders devoted thirty years of her life to finding and recording thousands of folksongs and ballads as performed by traditional singers from Vermont and other New England states. She said that she was “allergic” to ballads: whenever she got near them she caught them. The history of the Archive of Folk Culture begins as a story of “song-catchers.” A year earlier, in 1928, when Robert W. Gordon came to the Library of Congress as head of the newly created Archive of American Folk-Song, he brought with him his dream of collecting all American folksongs. While other collectors were typically interested in finding surviving examples of English and Scottish ballads, and were primarily interested in the academic study of song texts, Gordon collected a wide range of songs from a variety of informants. Furthermore, Gordon made sound recordings of the traditional singers he found, in order to secure not just song texts but also their melodies. Read Entire Article: https://www.loc.gov/folklife/guide/folkmusicandsong.html "As musicians, we are carriers of influence, whether or not we are aware of it and whether or not we intend to be. The sound and messages we release through our art form directly impact our listeners in powerful ways. This is especially true of the youth and adolescents of our society, who are still extremely malleable to the world around them. I remember sitting in the car with my two little cousins, ages five and eight, when "Get Lucky" by Daft Punk came on the radio. They both started singing every word at the top of their lungs. And when Katy Perry sang during the Super Bowl halftime show, the kids at the party sang nearly every lyric verbatim, putting me to shame because I didn't know all the lyrics, and I'm aspiring to be a pop artist. It began to shock me just how acutely youth are being impacted by the music they listened to, and how much attention they're paying to the music being played around them."
Read Entire Article: blog.sonicbids.com/what-kind-of-impact-does-our-music-really-make-on-society "By definition the guitar is a musical instrument having a flat-backed rounded body that narrows in the middle, a long fretted neck, and usually six strings (see photo), played by strumming or plucking.
The guitar is considered a European-invented instrument that first appeared during the medievel period. The form of the modern classical guitar is credited to Spanish guitar maker Antonio Torres circa 1850." Read Entire Article: inventors.about.com/od/gstartinventions/a/guitar.htm "Oboe, French hautbois, GermanOboe, treble woodwind instrument with a conical bore and double reed. Though used chiefly as an orchestral instrument, it also has a considerable solo repertoire.
Hautbois (French: “high [i.e., loud] wood”), or oboe, was originally one of the names of theshawm, the violently powerful instrument of outdoor ceremonial. The oboe proper (i.e., the orchestral instrument), however, was the mid-17th-century invention of two Frenchcourt musicians, Jacques Hotteterre andMichel Philidor. It was intended to be played indoors with stringed instruments and was softer and less brilliant in tone than the modern oboe. By the end of the 17th century it was the principal wind instrument of theorchestra and military band and, after theviolin, the leading solo instrument of the time." Read Entire Article: https://www.britannica.com/art/oboe-musical-instrument "Stanley "Stan" Getz (February 2, 1927 – June 6, 1991) was an American jazz saxophonist. Playing primarily the tenor saxophone, Getz was known as "The Sound" because of his warm, lyrical tone, his prime influence being the wispy, mellow timbre of his idol,Lester Young.[1] Coming to prominence in the late 1940s with Woody Herman's big band, Getz is described by critic Scott Yanow as "one of the all-time great tenor saxophonists".[1] Getz went on to perform in bebop and cool jazz, but is perhaps best known for popularizing bossa nova, as in the worldwide hit single "The Girl from Ipanema" (1964) performed with Astrud Gilberto and for his work done under the influence of João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim."
Read Entire Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Getz Music may have originated with animals, allowing our distant ancestors to communicate and build societies
"Chimpanzee lead guitarists are thin on the ground. The stage at London’s Royal Albert Hall sees few lemur violin virtuosos. Conventional wisdom has it that music is a relatively modern human invention, and one that, while fun and rewarding, is a luxury rather than a basic necessity of life. This appears to be borne out by the archaeological evidence. While the first hand axes and spears date back about 1.7 million years and 500,000 years respectively, the earliest known musical instruments are just 40,000 years old. But dig a little deeper and the story becomes more interesting. While musical instruments appear to be a relatively recent innovation, music itself is almost certainly significantly older. Research suggests it may have allowed our distant ancestors to communicate before the invention of language, been linked to the establishment of monogamy and helped provide the social glue needed for the emergence of the first large early and pre-human societies. There is also emerging evidence that music might have even deeper origins: some monkeys can distinguish between sound patterns in ways similar to how humans can recognise slight differences between melodies." Read Article: www.bbc.com/earth/story/20140907-does-music-pre-date-modern-man "The idea of music as a healing influence which could affect health and behavior is as least as old as the writings of Aristotle and Plato. The 20th century profession formally began after World War I and World War II when community musicians of all types, both amateur and professional, went to Veterans hospitals around the country to play for the thousands of veterans suffering both physical and emotional trauma from the wars. The patients' notable physical and emotional responses to music led the doctors and nurses to request the hiring of musicians by the hospitals. It was soon evident that the hospital musicians needed some prior training before entering the facility and so the demand grew for a college curriculum. A very brief historical glimpse of this fascinating profession follows..."
Read Article: http://www.musictherapy.org/about/history/ |
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November 2016
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