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Make-up Lessons From An Economist’s Point of View

6/14/2016

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Here at the Sound Factory Music School, we do our best to be reasonable and flexible because, let's face it, sometimes you-know-what happens.  Having a fair make-up lesson policy is important to us, however this article makes an articulate argument as to why music studios, ours included, have to insist that making up classes is a privilege and a courtesy, and not guaranteed. 

"I am an economist and teach at our local university. Students pay good money to attend classes at the university; but if they don’t come to my lecture on a Monday morning, then I am not going to turn around and deliver them a private tutorial on Tuesday afternoon. When I go to the store and buy groceries, I may purchase something that doesn’t get used. Days or months later, I end up throwing it out. I don’t get a refund from the grocery store for the unused merchandise. If I sign my child up for swimming lessons at the local pool, and s/he refuses to return after the first lesson, I can’t get my money back. So there are lots of situations in our everyday lives where we regularly pay in advance for goods or some service, and if we end up not using what we have purchased, we have to just ‘swallow our losses’. On the other hand, if I purchase an item of clothing, and get home and change my mind, I can take it back and expect either a refund or a store credit.So why do I believe that music lessons fall into the first category of ‘non-returnable merchandise’, rather than into the second case of ‘exchange privileges unlimited’ (which I think is one of the advertising slogans of an established women’s clothing store!)? Speaking now as an economist, I would claim that the reason is that items like clothing are “durable goods’ – meaning, they can be returned and then resold at the original price – whereas music lessons are non-durable goods – meaning, once my Monday slot at 3:30 is gone, my son’s teacher can’t turn around and sell it again. The only way she would be able to give him a lesson later in the week would be if she were to give up time that she had scheduled for her own private life; and that seems pretty unreasonable – I can’t think of many employees who would be thrilled if their bosses were to announce that they couldn’t work from 3:30 to 4:30 this afternoon, but would they please stay until 6:30 on Thursday, because there will be work for them then!"

The full article is a good read and important to keep in mind when putting yourself in the shoes of your teacher and studio in cases where students decide not to use their pre-arranged and purchased lesson times.


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FULL ARTICLE
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The key to smarter children? Music lessons - and nagging

5/5/2016

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The below excerpt is a great (and amusing) read from the Globe and Mail, and makes an important point.  A must read for music parents.
In recent years, researchers there have been able to find out all kinds of new things about the brain through advances in techniques...which allow scientists to see how our brains react to stimuli, i.e., what makes them go zzzzz or light up like a switchboard. Aside from longer attention spans and the rest of it, they’ve also discovered that musical study can actually stave off dementia and improve hearing loss.

It all happens through a process called neuroplasticity, which basically means if the brain were a set of muscles, playing an instrument would be the equivalent of the Tracy Anderson Method. This made intuitive sense to me, because trying to persuade a recalcitrant three-year-old to practise Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star each day felt very similar to that Tracy Anderson exercise where you jog on the spot and make teeny, tiny circles with your arms extended.
At first you think, “This is cool.” But after five minutes, you’re, like, “KILL ME NOW.” Stick with it, however, and your child’s brain will have the supple tone of Gwyneth Paltrow’s fortysomething butt.

One Conservatory infographic, entitled “Benefits of Musical Education,” showed two cartoon brains, one grey and one bright yellow.
The yellow “musical brain” belonging to a stick man playing guitar had a list of benefits beside it, including “more grey matter, improved brain structure and function, better memory and attention, higher IQ.”
The grey brain belonging to the stick man with no guitar had nothing written beside it. That, I realized with shame, was my brain. But it didn’t have to be my son’s.
And so, armed with my compelling new research, I did something I’ve rarely done in my life: I formed a new morning routine and stuck to it. For almost a month now, I’ve made (my son) sit down at the piano after breakfast. After a while, he stopped fighting it. He resists as a matter of principle, but ultimately, he knows it is futile.

The Whole Article
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7 Tips To Overcome Nerves (aka Stage Fright / Performance Anxiety… )

3/23/2016

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Excerpt from www.trumpetchris.com

Professional and amateur performers alike have to deal with performance anxiety all the time.  Some claim they eventually overcome it, some never experience it, but some of the best in the business get nervous before every single performance but still perform their best. Some get so nervous that they get violently ill before every show(!!)–but the audience never sees it.  How do they do it? While everyone is different, the following 7 steps should help you on your way to becoming a more confident performer:

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Read the entire article.

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Sing Along!

2/22/2016

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Music can help dementia, stroke patients remember

2/19/2016

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Old songs often linger in your head. Sometimes it's a pleasure and other times it's an annoyance, but those songs may be hugely significant for people suffering from neurological disorders.

Read the full article on CBC.ca
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Music producer Roger Dumas in his office at the Brain Science Center in Minneapolis. (Dave Kattenburg)
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How to Develop the Habit of Practice - Creating the Momentum to Improve

11/24/2015

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An Article From About Education
In an interview recently, I was asked this question: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given about music? My life flashed before my eyes, and I felt very much put on the spot, but then the answer came surprisingly easily. It was from my old mentor, Arthur Cunningham, who had taught a very large number of students over many years, and was among the wisest and most accomplished educators I’ve met.
He was my Yoda.
His advice: “If you practice every day, you will improve!”
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Simple, but profound, and this concept of valuing incremental progress finds its way into all walks of life, beyond music. If you exercise, you will gain strength. If you clean, your environment will become more pleasant. If you communicate, your projects will go more smoothly. If you are thoughtful and loving in your relationships, they will strengthen. Even if all you do is fifteen minutes per day.
Developing the habit of regular practice on your instrument is the most important factor in how you will improve over time.

What practice means, though, varies between different people. This is a dangerous fact to drop, but I have known several world-class artists, playing in the world’s finest orchestras and with GRAMMY awards on their bookshelves, who have admitted to me that they seldom practice, in the traditional sense. No endless scales, no method books, no tedious drills. However, they do rehearse several times a week, if not every day.
So, they are getting the hours in a their instruments. And I suspect at the beginning of their careers, or as children, they did put in some time developing technique.
Building the initial momentum is the hardest part, so here are a few tips for getting the ball rolling.
  1. Set a regular practice time, and defend it. If you know that every day you will practice at 7:30 AM, you will be there. Even if it’s just fifteen minutes, set a regular time. Hopefully, you can expand duration, as the habit develops. Expect that it will take two or three months to develop the habit. But at a point, if will feel stranger not to practice than to practice, like it feels weird for most of us to skip a day brushing our teeth. No, repeat after me: "Sorry, I can't do that then, I have to practice." That's how you defend this time, which is critical for your becoming a better musician and a happier person.
  2. Play music, not just tedious drills. If it’s most enjoyable for you to play along with a recording, do that. As the saying goes, “Life is short; eat dessert first.” Ideally, you won’t only do that, but if that kind of lead is necessary to help you develop the habit of practice, go for it. And if you have an hour session, you’ll be able to get to the technique development dimensions too. Again, at first, the critical thing is to develop the habit of regular practice, perhaps more than specifically what you are practicing.
  3. Vary how you spend your time. There are many things to learn about music besides simple technique: developing a sense of timing, memorizing tunes, understanding theory, creating tone, interpretation, listening to others, improvisation, and so on. You need it all, so don’t just practice the tedious dimensions of music making. Divide your practice into different dimensions: repertoire, technique, sight-reading, etc. Make every session interesting and fun—and relevant.
  4. Think in terms of weeks, not days. Rather than practice arpeggios in all twelve keys every day, instead practice three or four a day, and then a different three or four the next day. In three or four days, you’ll have covered them all. This will relieve some tedium and give you more time to practice more inspiring dimensions of music-making.
  5. Involve others. If you can schedule a weekly jam session with friends or family, you’ll be more motivated to practice. And if you can schedule a performance or a recording, that will similar be a good motivator.
Keep your practice sessions fun and empowering, and help yourself look forward to them. The purpose of music is joy and enrichment of the soul, so make sure that you’re getting that first. Then, use the momentum you get from following the love of it to pull your technique along. As the habit takes hold, you can fine-tune what you do in order to optimize the productivity of this important time.
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Using Music to Close the Academic Gap

11/4/2015

1 Comment

 
New studies on the cognitive advantages of learning instruments at early ages
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Several times a week, a group of at-risk youth in Los Angeles reports to makeshift music rooms at Alexandria Elementary School near Koreatown for lessons in violin or cello or bass—and to Saturday ensemble programs where they learn to play with bands and orchestras. As the students study their instruments, researchers study the students’ brains.
The children, who devote at least five hours per week to their music, are participants in the award-winning non-profit Harmony Project, which provides free instruments and instruction to kids in underserved areas of the city if they promise to stay in school. The scientists, who hail from Northwestern University’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, travel from Evanston, Illinois to a satellite lab in Hollywood for a few weeks each year to examine the impact of the music lessons on the children’s language and cognitive skills. What they are finding, according to Dr. Nina Kraus, a professor and neuroscientist at Northwestern and lead researcher of the study, is that music instruction not only improves children’s communication skills, attention, and memory, but that it may even close the academic gap between rich and poor students. Kraus reported these results in a National Endowment of the Arts-sponsored webinar in July.
When Plato said that music gives “wings to the mind,” he might have been onto something. Recent studies increasingly point to the power of music to shape the brain and boost its functioning.

Read the whole article

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Ditch the 10,000 hour rule!

10/23/2015

2 Comments

 
Excerpted from "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning"Here’s a study that may surprise you. A group of eight-year-olds practiced tossing beanbags into buckets in gym class. Half of the kids tossed into a bucket three feet away. The other half mixed it up by tossing into buckets two feet and four feet away. After twelve weeks of this they were all tested on tossing into a three-foot bucket. The kids who did the best by far were those who’d practiced on two- and four-foot buckets but never on three-foot buckets.
Why is this? We will come back to the beanbags, but first a little insight into a widely held myth about how we learn.
The Myth of Massed Practice
Most of us believe that learning is better when you go at something with single-minded purpose: the practice-practice-practice that’s supposed to burn a skill into memory. Faith in focused, repetitive practice of one thing at a time until we’ve got it nailed is pervasive among classroom teachers, athletes, corporate trainers, and students. Researchers call this kind of practice “massed,” and our faith rests in large part on the simple fact that when we do it, we can see it making a difference. Nevertheless, despite what our eyes tell us, this faith is misplaced.

Read the full article

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October 22nd, 2015

10/22/2015

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Does Your Rhythm Suck? This Addictive Game Can Help

10/21/2015

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Good news if you can’t hold a beat: An app called Steve Reich’s Clapping Music might be able to fix you.  Clapping Music, from the British app shop Touchpress, is a gamified lesson in tempo.

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/rhythm-suck-addictive-game-can-help/
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  • Home
  • Our Story
    • About Us
    • Awards & Testimonials
    • News & Events
  • Our Team
  • Lessons & Programs
    • Music Lessons >
      • Piano/Keyboard
      • Guitar (Choice of Styles)
      • Strings
      • Woodwinds
      • Brass
      • Drums & Percussion
      • Celtic Instruments
      • Indian Carnatic Singing
    • Groups & Ensembles >
      • RCM Smart Start—Early Childhood Classes
      • Rock Band!
      • Violin Club
    • Summer >
      • Rock Band Summer Camp
    • Choosing An Instrument
    • Learn Online
  • Why Music?
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Buy Sheet Music