By Keith Redpath, Orchestra Faculty
All students in MacLaren’s Upper School learn to play stringed instruments together in the school’s orchestra program. Starting as beginners in year one, they progress over seven years to performing masterworks by some of the finest composers the world has given us. One of the unique aspects of this program is that it is part of the school’s single-track curriculum, so truly all students experience making music together as part of their education. We believe that music should not be an elective course for many reasons: It is a core piece of our humanity, it helps us to emotionally regulate and navigate life’s challenges, it teaches us how to learn, it creates community, it gives us an outlet for expression, it inspires our imagination, and it helps us to understand things with our hearts.
Music in Community
Many people learn how to talk, but they don’t learn to listen. Listening to one another is an important thing in life and music tells us how to do that. – Claudio Abbado, internationally recognized conductor and pianist.
Making music is a form of communication, part of the expressive glue that holds human communities together and has been present amongst humanity since pre-historic times. Contrary to what we might think, in a musical performance, the communication involves everyone who is present: from performer to audience and from audience to performer, as well as from performer to other performers playing at the same time.
Participating in orchestra classes challenges students to be present in the moment. Students learn to let go of “doing” and focus more on communicative awareness. Through listening, students perceive pitch, articulation, dynamics, timbre, and rhythm. Through touch, students perceive the feel and vibration of the instrument in their hands, as well as body awareness through balance and motion. Through sight, students see the gestures of sound production in each other.
Music as a Skill
“Probably the healthiest thing we can do for our brains is to make music.” Dr. Nina Kraus, Northwestern University neurobiologist.
Participating in music classes teaches students skills of learning. Rarely do students experience instant gratification when learning music skills, and they therefore learn to persevere through ups and downs. In music, as with many other areas of learning, all students can grow in skill and understanding. Indeed, orchestra class is largely skill-based and students are building and polishing skills throughout their seven-year experience at MacLaren. Students are discouraged to label themselves as “talented” or “not talented” but are instead encouraged to develop a growth-mindset, which is a further benefit of persevering through music learning.
Perhaps one of the most exciting things neuroscience research has been discovering in the last two decades is the extent to which participating in making music activates all the currently mapped areas of the brain. Visual, motor, prefrontal, auditory, and sensory cortices are all activated when making music. When making music, students are processing a wide range of tasks ranging from executing rhythm, articulation and pitch with complex and sensitive physical movements, to expressing emotional content. Not surprisingly, neurons in both the left and right hemispheres of the brain are at work, making connections across the corpus callosum which bridges these two hemispheres.
Music Education for All
The goal of Thomas MacLaren School is to develop young men and women who are fully human and fully awake to the world. -Thomas MacLaren School mission statement
Our posture toward teaching music at MacLaren is very much in the spirit of the famed pedagogue Shinichi Suzuki’s words: “We are not teaching these children to make them professional musicians. I believe sensitivity and love toward music or art are very important things to all people whether they are politicians, scientists, businessmen or laborers. They are things that make our lives rich.”
Music participation is an expression of being fully human – connecting and communicating with other people, as well as making neuro-connections all across our brains. It is also an expression of being fully awake, through heightened awareness in the present moment. Each semester, every student in sixth- through twelfth-grade orchestras performs for the student body in morning assemblies as well as for the greater community in the Winter and Spring Fine Arts Nights. It is a marvel to hear the growth from our beginners playing Twinkle Variations to our seniors performing masterworks from some of the greatest composers our tradition has to offer, such as Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and Copland. As they do this, they are building community both outside and within the school walls. They are making imaginative connections with their world and growing emotional pathways that help them to meet life’s challenges. They are creating beauty in a world that desperately needs it - and doing it all together, relying on each other, listening to each other – alive and awake to the world!