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Might making music be a “fountain of youth?”
Have you ever wondered why so many conductors and pianists continue to perform well into their 80s and 90s? The Swedish-American conductor Herbert Blomstedt (photo at right) is 98, but you wouldn’t know it by his concert schedule. The number of performances on his calendar over the next few months would be the envy of…
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The Musical Brain wins award
I’m excited to announce that my book The Musical Brain: what students, teachers, and performers need to know has won a 2024 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson book award. Sometimes this award is won by first-time authors as I am; it has also been awarded to well-known authors such as Oliver Sacks for Musicophilia: Tales…
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Musicians, Ninjas, and Neuroplasticity
Ninjas and musicians don’t seem to have much in common, although they both spend a lot of time practicing. But I began to think about the differences in performance in the two disciplines after I was introduced to the sport by my 12-year-old niece, Eva Fornwalt, who has been practicing ninja for the past couple…
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Music as Medicine
Although Renée Fleming is best known as an internationally celebrated opera singer, she is also passionately interested in the intersection of the arts, health, and neuroscience. A chance meeting in 2015 between Fleming and Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the NIH, led to a collaboration between the NIH, Fleming, and the Kennedy Center.…
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Music in the NICU
A friend who is a chaplain in a nearby hospital often sings to the premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). She does this because it just feels like the right thing to do. Don’t we always sing to babies to soothe and comfort them? And she notices that the babies immediately calm…
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The brain – and finding the beat
I attended a spring concert a few weeks ago that prompted me to think about rhythm, movement, and the brain. The concert was at a very small private school (pre-school through grade 4) and was titled “Poetry Everywhere.” It was a mix of absolutely charming poetry written and read by the students and songs they…