We want to wish all of our readers a Happy Purim and a Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Remember March is “Music in Our Schools Month” so start your day right by listening to Classical music which has the power to improve your mood, make you smarter, help you work faster with more accuracy, improves health and healing, grows healthier plants in fewer days, increases sales in stores, soothes your mind and preventing crime. If school cafeterias and school buses played Classical Music, the students would be calmer and more focused without violent tendencies.
If anyone has an experience they would like to share with our readers on the benefits of classical music please send it and it will be include it in the April 2010 newsletter!
Our poem for March is “I am Music” by Allen Inman (1992). To read the poem click on the following link:
Madeline’s Musical One Minute Radio Show for March 2010:
How does Classical Music play a part of George Bernard Shaw’s life and what instrument did he play?
Click here for Your Radio Show.
https://www.madelinefrankviola.com/madelines-one-minute-radio-show/Question of the Month: Who was George Bernard Shaw?
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish author of more than 60 plays, 5 novels, short stories, a music and literary critic, orator, and pianist. His most famous play “Pygmalion” was adapted into the Broadway musical “My Fair Lady”. He wrote and spoke about “prevalent social problems” such as “gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles.” George Bernard Shaw said, “I am a typical Irishman; my family came from Yorkshire.”
George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26, 1865 in Dublin, Ireland. “His father, George Carr Shaw, was in the wholesale grain trade” and his mother, Lucinda Elisabeth Gurly Shaw “was sixteen years younger than her husband.” She was a talented singer and taught music, helping out the family income. She was “the daughter of an impoverished landowner.” George’s father, George Carr Shaw, was always drunk and this “prompted his son to become a teetotaler.” His mother Lucinda Elisabeth Gurly Shaw gave him an excellent background in music. He learned to play the piano quite well.
Throughout his life he disliked schools and teachers. He said, “Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents”. In his fourth novel, “Cashel Byron’s Profession” he shows his disdain for “formal education in his Treatise on Parents and Children”. George Bernard Shaw “considered the standardized curricula useless, deadening to the spirit and stifling to the intellect. He particularly deplored the use of corporal punishment, which was prevalent in his time.”
His family moved to a revitalized neighborhood and Shaw attended the Wesleyan Connexional School, a private school close to Dalkey and then attended Dublin’s Central Model School. He completed his education at Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day. When he was fifteen he began “work as a junior clerk” for five years.
His mother eventually went to London to sing and teach music with his two sisters. George remained with his father. Shaw joined his mother and sister in London in 1876 at the age of twenty. He left Ireland and did not return for almost thirty years. His mother, sister and Vandeleur Lee, his mother’s voice teacher, gave him an allowance of a pound a week for the next two years while he studied at the public library and the British Museum. During this time he began earning “his allowance by ghostwriting Vandeleur Lee’s music column” and writing unsuccessful novels.
George Bernard Shaw was “the only person to be awarded both a Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion.” Shaw at first wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize, but his wife “considered it a tribute to Ireland.” He would not take the monetary award. He requesting the money be “used to finance translation of Swedish books to English.”
When George Bernard Shaw died on Nov. 2, 1950 the lights of Broadway were turned off in his honor!
“Music Can Heal” (Jan 21, 2010) from the Sahara India Media. ncrsamaylive.com Dr. Rakshit says, “Music increases metabolism and accelerates respiration, influences internal secretion, improves muscular activities and affects the central nervous and circulatory systems.”
“Introducing TED Fellow: Robert Gupta” (Feb. 10, 2010) by Helen Walters from Business Week.com. At the age of 11 Robert Gupta made his debut as a violin soloist with the with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv. After receiving his Masters Degree in 2007 from Yale at the age of 19 he joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Gupta “studied the biochemical pathology of Parkinson’s disease” at the Harvard Institutes of Medicine Center for Neurologic Diseases.
Gupta says, he plans “to change the world through music. This performance art has the singular and unique power to not only reach our deepest emotional core and move us, but music serves as physical and psychological medicine, as an educational guide and asocial glue. As we discover more about the human brain, we uncover more miracles about music’s affect on us; music gives us hope and channels our imagination and dreams. Music changes the lives of young people, and above all, right now, our young people, our world, need music.”
“MOZART, MUSIC, BABIES & HEALTH” (Jan. 24, 2010) by Robert A. Wascher, MD, FACS from the Men’s News Daily.com Clinical research studies in adults with epilepsy have compared Mozart’s music with that of Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, Chopin, Hayden, and Liszt, among others, and found that Mozart’s music was more effective in reducing seizure activity than that of the other titans of Classical music.Thus, some experts in brain physiology have concluded that Mozart’s compositions may particularly resonate with the human brain’s circuitry, and may potentially affect brain function in clinically significant ways.” Playing the music of Mozart for underweight babies helps them gain weight and “the metabolic rates of the babies exposed to Mozart’s music decreased by 10 to 13 percent within 10 minutes of starting the Great Composer’s music (compared to the infants in the control group).”
“Thinking Outside the Music Box” (February 8, 2010) from laboratoryequipment.com. At BRAMS,” the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research, scientists from five Canadian universities are unlocking the mysteries of the brain through music and sound. Dr. Robert Zatorre, McGill University neuroscientist shares directorial duties at BRAMS with Université de Montréal psychologist Isabelle Peretz.” They are “co-directors” of the BRAMS Laboratory .
“BRAMS brings together researchers-drawn from neuroscience, psychology, music, audiology, education, computer science and engineering-from McGill, Concordia Univ., McMaster Univ., the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and Université de Montréal (U de M). Since forming in 2004, the collaborative lab has earned high praise, being called “an unbeatable team” and “number one by a long shot” in Science magazine.”
When Dr.Robert Zatorre is “asked whether there is a musical region to the brain”, he says, “Everything above the neck.” He goes on to say, “Music taps into so many processes, hearing, memory, planning, motor control, timing, emotion. The breadth of music’s reach across the topography of the brain makes it ideal terrain for research… Unlike speech, playing an instrument is a specialized skill, and it offers a perfect opportunity to examine the learning process.” Zatorre says, “We can bring people in and use different training procedures, train them at different ages, with different instruments. It’s very powerful from the research perspective, because we can control it in the laboratory.”
This March if you have a question about the power of music for education and healing … what would your specific question be? Click on the link below and look on the left side to where it says ask Madeline a question:https://www.madelinefrankviola.com