Music uniting the head and the heart.

I watched YoYo on "Firing Line" and he made two remarkable statements confirming my philosophy of music and life.

The first was that the technology of radio and recording suppressed amateur musicians, second rate orchestras and musicians, and that this hurt musical culture as a whole.

Every city had an orchestra or band during the Golden Ages - Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and even the Jazz Age and Big Band era. Bach wrote for amateur orchestras in Leipzig. I grew up in Concord MA and we had a respectable orchestra out of a mere 20,000 population. When music facsimiles became as facile as winding up a spring or pushing a button, suddenly everyone wanted to hear the best orchestra on the world. Second rate is no longer worth the time to listen, let alone pay for.

There are more subtle mechanisms, too. When the patrons were European royalty, they had musical instruction and so were much more sophisticated consumers of music, leading to advancement in luthiery, playing techniques and composition. They had professional orchestras and composers and competed against the neighboring cites, duchies and kingdoms and produced Euro-Classical music. Classical music of other cultures likewise advanced under educated elites and professional classes or guilds.

When every middle class household had to have a piano and someone who could play it, from roughly 1890 to 1929, there was a surge of pedagogy and new forms. This was extended by public musical education of High School bands and orchestras in a virtuous circle.

Neuroscience has discovered that musical training increases brain mass 10%, some ten billion additional brain cells in part to hear music ten times better than the general population who listen to recordings through speakers instead of music. People today don't learn how to listen to music, to hear its components, depth and breadth.

Maestro Ma went on to say that music is the only activity that unites the head and the heart. He opined that we need both analytical and empathic skills together to make good decisions and govern well and normally these are exclusive brain states. Perhaps this principle accounts for the demonstrably better public and private governance from including women in top leadership. (Not to say that women are not analytical and men can't be empathic, but in my experience...)

It is confirmed that the extra brain cells in musician's crania include not only the cortical areas of motor skills, haptic and proprieceptive senses, hearing, musical, mathematical, and symbolic intelligence, but also spatial and emotional intelligence, plus the integrative white matter that links these together into a whole, so RIGHT ON YO YO!

Link to study on Effects of Musical Training on Brain Development.

http://www.musicianbrain.com/papers/Hyde_MusicTraining_BrainPlasticity_nyas_04852.pdf