Interview with a High School Music Student - Essay Example

Number Interview with a High School Music There has been a lot of research in recent years that seems to say children who get music training from a young age grow up with better school skills and interpersonal skills. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2007, “[M]usical training enhances the same processing skills in the brain and nervous system that are needed for talking and reading because musicians use all of their senses to practice and perform music” (Warner, 2007, para. 2). A study performed in 2006 by Canadian researchers compared students who received musical training with a group of their peers who did not receive musical training. In their report, the Oxford University Press comments, “[I]t is very interesting that the children taking music lessons improved more over the year … [in] non-musical abilities such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics and IQ than did the children not taking lessons” (2006, para. 12). Although scientists don’t understand exactly how musical training helps children overall, they know that it does. These two studies support a notion that school teachers have been pressing for years: musical training is as important as advanced math or reading skills and these programs should not be cut when school budgets are tight. Yet despite the scientific support for the fact that musical training for children affects more than just their knowledge and appreciation of music and spills over into other areas of their learning and lives, music, the arts, physical education, and other electives often are cut in hard times. I also believe that musical training for young people is important to help them become well-rounded students and people, so I decided to talk to a student who had been part of her school’s band for many years just to get an idea of how music has affected her personally. After reading how children in research studies were measurably better in many skills, I wondered if that was just hype or if a student from my area would also fall into that category. From my interview with Dianna [her name has been changed at her request] I can see that five years of high school band training have definitely had an impact on her development as a student and as a person. We met at a coffee shop in the evening. She could only stay for a few minutes but she said she would write down answers to my list of questions. I’ve included her words here because they are a great example of how musical training can enhance a child’s abilities in so many areas, and she interprets her experiences in a unique and wonderful way. During the quick interview, I found out that Dianna is a high school senior who has been in her school’s band for more than 5 years. She is second chair flute. She also took flute lessons outside of school for three years and performed solos for the lessons. Dianna was asked to perform as a soloist with the high school choir last year, so other music teachers at her school recognize her abilities. She speaks very well and handles herself comfortably with a relative stranger, and told me she “tested out” of reading (reaching a college reading level) when she was in sixth grade. Dianna told me that she would like to continue playing the flute when she goes to college if she has time, but she has no plans on becoming a professional musician or a music teacher. She is obviously very intelligent and I asked her what impact her musical training had on her development as a person and on her studies in high school. At this point she told me there was too much to say and she would write down the answers to my questions in essay form. (I have included the questions at the end of this essay, but you can see that she took the questions and answered them in her own unique way.) It all started with the mouthpiece of a flute. Nothing fancy, a few whistles that barely squawked, but then suddenly wham, bam, and she found herself thrust into High School band two seconds away from The Big Concert. All was chaos, sure, but it couldn’t even begin to dampen the sounds that her band made as they pulled together to create something unique, something beautiful, something significantly personal, and something just simply wonderful to listen to. The first practice of the year was always unreal. It was just a bunch of kids getting together to honk out what few notes they could remember while trying to tap their toes and move their fingers in some kind of rhythm. Mr. G. [the band teacher] would hand out the music and say “All right, everyone, take this home and study it. In two months we’ve got a concert to put on.” And everyone would laugh and shake their heads—yeah, sure, Mr. G. We know that. And no one would do much of anything. And Dianna isn’t much different. She plays her silver flute, practices her notes, and goes to weekly lessons just to try and get a little better than the current first chair, her mortal enemy. At the beginning of each class, while the kids are running around throwing mouth pieces and swapping reeds, she twiddles her thumbs over click-clacking keys and tries to remember when her cue is. She usually forgets. Mr. G. steps onto the platform and, eventually, the hum quiets to rapt attention. He raises a hand with his favorite baton clutched lightly between three fingers and swish, swish, the music starts. It’s not a pretty thing at first, but Dianna and the rest of the band manage to stumble through the first sixty measures until finally Mr. G. takes pity on them and signals them to stop. While he bends over the page looking for where it all went wrong, Dianna and the first chair flute, Leah, swap ideas on just how to play high C. Is this finger up, or down? Is the thumb involved? What the heck is that pinky doing over there? How come your flute has more buttons than mine? Until finally Mr. G. rises with a smile on his face and swish, swish, the band starts up again. They play along, stumbling much less this time, until finally the blessed eight bars of rest crops up and the flute section drops their flutes as a unit. Dianna taps her toes to the beat, daydreaming and thinking about her wish to play the Piccolo, or just one blessed solo. But, until then, the eight bars are up and Leah raises her instrument to belt out a few lines, followed by Maria, who plays Clarinet the way people can only dream of. The band twiddles and toots its way to the big crescendo at the end, which half the percussion misses, and Mr. G. drops his baton. They did much better than anyone could have hoped, and now comes the two minute break while they switch to the other show stopping number they plan to play that Monday night in the not so distant future. Weeks later and everyone begins to feel the tension of the concert looming. Someone is trying to tune the drums, a seemingly impossible task, while the lone Coronet in the back is searching high and low for her spit rag. Dianna clutches her seemingly frozen flute in her hands, trying to heat it up a little so it doesn’t freeze to her lip when they start warming up. Though she hails from a mostly non-musical family, her father not having a taste for that sort of thing and her mother being musically illiterate, Dianna finds a strange fascination with the fact that a group of kids can get together once a day, five days a week, and create something that sounds almost passable. Though she won’t tell them that, or they’ll let it go to their heads. For now she’s happy to let Mr. G. call the shots on how well the band is doing, and he says they seriously need to get the lead out if they plan to perform next week in front of the entire community. A few kids take up the challenge to actually bring home their music and look at it, and those kids come out better for the experience. Dianna, for her part, takes her sheet music to her after school lesson and goes over it with the best flute instructor around, Ruth. Ruth teaches Dianna the highs, the lows, the in-betweens, things Mr. G., a classic trumpeter, grasps purely on an intellectual level. She takes the knowledge she gains from the experience and does her best to pass it on to the first and third chair, on either side of her, as well as the two flutists that sit behind her. And it does some good. The flute section, for all its ups and downs, has finally come together in a cohesive group. James Galway, Dianna’s flute idol, would be proud. The flutes can finally mellow out their sounds, rising in harmony to play their part in the grand scheme of things. It reverberates across chairs and over piles of books to trumpets, tambourines, clarinets, and French horns until finally, yes, they are ready to play. Black shoes click on the hard tiled floor as one long line of students march to the auditorium, instruments and music precariously balanced in their hands or around their necks. They whisper excitedly to one another until finally, there it is, the command to enter. They march their row up the stage quickly and efficiently, as if they do this every night, and sit down demurely with feet crossed. Dianna looks out over the crowd. It is jaw dropping, and scary. The auditorium, which seats nearly a thousand people, is packed. She picks out her mother, and gives a little wave, then smiles at her Grandma and Grandpa, the poor fools who had to suffer through the squeaks and squawks at practice. The people around her are shifting in their seats, trying to look comfortable in dress clothes and glaring lights. Mr. G. steps on stage. He finds the microphone awkwardly and says a few words about the raffle that translates to help us, our school is poor. Then he steps up to the podium. Everyone is already silent, holding their breath for fear of breaking the silence. Mr. G. smiles and cracks a joke, sending a ripple of laughter through the ranks. He raises a hand, instruments fly to lips, and then the group plays a single lonely note, a B, to make sure everyone is in tune. Then, swish, swish of the baton, and they play. As you can see, musical training has had an impact on Dianna, and she certainly has a command of the English language. How much influence the music had on her overall development is impossible to tell when all factors of her life are taken into account, but the principles studied by researchers are well represented here. Of course, this is not a scientific study; it is simply an interview with a student. Warner’s (2007) report showed that adults carry over the residual effects of musical training; when the adults in the study were measured using electrodes, the ones who had the training showed more brain activity in their speech centers than the non-musically trained people. The Oxford University study showed the same effect was true in children. It would be very interesting to hook Dianna and her band mates up to electrodes both when they were playing and when they were just sitting around talking with each other, but of course that would be impossible. Being involved in high school band has certainly had an influence on Dianna—she enjoyed the experience, if nothing else, and learned to play an instrument and appreciate at least the music the band practiced. I didn’t ask her if this training carried over into a greater appreciation of music overall—a longer interview might have revealed an answer to this question. Although I couldn’t perform a scientific study, my interview with a high school band student revealed that there is a reason music teachers should continue music programs in the schools even during difficult budgetary times: this student was bright, funny, got excellent grades, and had the opportunity to experience performing in front of a crowd of strangers, which are all interpersonal and life skills all students should have. Interview Questions Tell me about the daily practices that your band held as part of the school’s general music program. Do you think you are a good musician after practicing for this many years? Was it difficult to learn how to play the flute? What helped you most? What kind of relationships have you developed with your fellow band mates? How has your family influenced your musical development? How have music lessons outside of school helped you as a musician? Are you nervous during performances? How do you deal with that? Works Cited Oxford University Press (OUP). “First Evidence that Musical Training Affects Brain Development in Young Children.” ScienceDaily website, September 20, 2006. Available from . Warner, Jennifer. “Learn Music to Boost Literacy in Kids?” WebMD Health News, September 24, 2007. Available from . Read More