Steven Spielberg, American Film Director, & Musician: Madeline’s Monthly Musical Tips Blog & Radio Show for June 2026
Our Blog and Radio shares the life and work of Steven Spielberg, American film director and musician.
Many of the world’s film directors, authors, poets, teachers, artist, medical doctors, professors, scientists, researchers, mathematicians, engineers, chemists, physicists, inventors, statesmen, diplomats, printers, architects, and others have studied and played musical instruments since they were children. These eminent individuals have integrated music into their thinking process. Studying a musical instrument develops millions of new connections, synapses, between nerve cells in the brain.
Learning a musical instrument teaches discipline, cooperation, teamwork, motivation, concentration and self-esteem. Having trouble getting your child to do their homework? Play classical music in the background while your child is doing their homework! Try a Mozart Symphony in the background while they are studying.
Included is an article on “Fun learning activities for summer vacation”.
Included is the article “Can Music Help You Study and Focus?” (Updated 2026, Nov.6, 2025) by National University Editorial Contributors.
Our article of the month is “How Compliments Can Save You Cash” by Madeline Frank, Ph.D.
Feature Question for June 2026: How does Classical music play a part of Steven Spielberg’s life as an American film director & musician and what musical instrument does he play?
https://madelinefrankviola.com/one-minute-musical-radio-show/
Early Years: Steven Spielberg was born on December 18, 1946 to Leah Adler (née Posner) Spielberg, a concert pianist and Arnold Spielberg, an electrical engineer involved in developing computers in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the oldest of four siblings.
When his father was hired by RCA in 1952, his family moved to Haddon Township, New Jersey. (Wikipedia Steven Spielberg, note 24)
Music: Steven was raised in a musical household. His Mom was a Concert Pianist. He studied the clarinet and played in the school band. His parents took him to Classical concerts.
He “recalls his parents taking him to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show On Earth (1952). He had never seen a movie before, and thought they were taking him to the circus. He was terrified by the movie’s crash.” He asked for a train for Chanukah. At an early age, “he recreated it with his Lionel trains and filmed it. “He recalls: “The trains went around and around, and after a while that got boring, and I had this eight-millimeter camera, and I staged a train wreck and filmed it. That was hard on the trains, but then I could cut the film lots of different ways and look at it over and over again.” This was his first home movie.” Wikipedia Steven Spielberg, Notes 35,36)
His family moved for his father’s work again in1957 to Phoenix, Arizona .
Every Saturday he would go to the local theater to watch well known movies. Laurence of Arabia, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, Captains Courageous, Walt Disney’s Pinocchio and Fantasia, Godzilla, Bridge On the River Kwai, Dr. Strangelove, 2001:A Space Odyssey, etc.(Wikipedia Steven Spielberg, Notes 46-51)
Steven Spielberg attended Hebrew School for his Bar Mitzvah and he became a Bar Mitzvah at 13 years of age. (A Bar Mitzvah is a Jewish religious ceremony for a boy to reach his “religious adulthood to be responsible for his ethical behavior, accept responsibility, and laws in the Torah.”) Steven’s “family was involved in the synagogue and had many Jewish friends. Of the Holocaust, he said his parents “talked about it all the time, and so it was always on my mind.”“His father had lost sixteen to twenty relatives in the Holocaust.” (Wikipedia Steven Spielberg, notes 28,29, 22)
Spielberg when he was 13 years old, he “made a 40-minute war film, Escape to Nowhere, with a cast of classmates.” His film “won first prize in a statewide competition.” He continued making films through his high school years “about 15 to twenty 8mm adventure films.” (Wikipedia Steven Spielberg, Notes 41,42,43,44)
Spielberg remembers “that my dad told me stories about World War II constantly … I knew, based on the stories my dad and his friends were telling about World War II, that there was no glory in war. And it was ugly, and it was cruel … it was, you know, visually devastating. And so, I thought, someday, if I ever do make a war movie for real, it’s got to be something that tells the truth about what those experiences had been for those young 17-, 18-, 19-year-old boys storming Omaha Beach, let’s say.” (Wikipedia Steven Spielberg, Notes 16)
He became a Boy Scout in 1958 and attained his rank of Eagle Scout by fulfilling “a requirement for the photography merit badge by making a nine-minute 8mm Western, The Last Gunfight.” He used “his father’s movie camera to make amateur features”. On every Scout Trips he “began taking the camera along.” (Wikipedia Steven Spielberg, notes 38, 39)
At 15 or 16 years old, Steven’s parents separated and later divorced. (Fractured family)
In high school he was bullied for being Jewish. “In high school, I got smacked and kicked around. Two bloody noses. It was horrible.” (Wikipedia Steven Spielberg, Notes 30,32,22)
“When I went through that semester of antisemitic bullying, suddenly those stories found a personal meaning for me and that did shape a lot of the stories I would tell in the future.” (The True Story Behind Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Fabelmans’, Harper Lambert, March 3, 2023, TheWrap.)
“Spielberg played clarinet in his high school bands, and in 1964, at 17, he scored his own feature-length debut, Firelight, composed on clarinet and transposed for his high school orchestra with help from his mother. “If I weren’t a filmmaker,” Spielberg once confessed, “I’d probably be in music. I’d be a starving composer somewhere in Hollywood right now—hopefully not starving, but I probably would not have been successful.” (Vanity Fair, August 26, 2025, “When Steven Spielberg Met John Williams, “Everything Changed” by Tim Greiving)
After graduating high school, he became a student at California state University in Long Beach. His interest was in filmmaking.
Steven Spielberg in 1968, began an” apprenticeship on the Universal lot. Spielberg directed a romantic short film, Amblin’. He brought a record player and a stack of his soundtrack albums into the editing room, and for two weeks, day and night, he would pace the room listening to music while constructing his movie. Amblin’ earned the teen whiz a seven-year contract at Universal.” (Vanity Fair, August 26, 2025, “When Steven Spielberg Met John Williams, “Everything Changed” by Tim Greiving)
“A year later, he dropped out of college to begin directing television productions for Universal, making him the youngest director to be signed to a long-term plan with a major Hollywood studio. Spielberg returned to Long Beach in 2002, where he presented Schindler’s List to complete his Bachelor of Arts in Film and Electronic Media.”(Wikipedia Steven Spielberg, Notes 63,64,65)
Steven Spielberg’s meeting with John Williams:
“In the fall of 1972, John Williams—40 years old, the father of three teenagers, a serious, old-soul musician with nearly 20 years in the business—found himself seated across from an excitable, nerdy director, 25 years old, who had just been offered his first feature. John, who never paid much heed to the films or TV of his own youth, was encountering a kid from Arizona who worshiped movies—who had been collecting soundtracks since he was 10, and who whistled “Make Me Rainbows” (a song John wrote for the 1967 movie Fitzwilly, starring Dick Van Dyke) to a bemused John during lunch.” (Vanity Fair, August 26, 2025, “When Steven Spielberg Met John Williams, “Everything Changed” by Tim Greiving)
“Spielberg’s early education permanently shaped his taste in music—how extroverted and tuneful and dominant it could be in a film—separating him from many of his peers in the 1970s.”
Spielberg, “I’ve always made movies about the things that scare me and, musically, I was attracted to the kind of music that frightened me when I was three, four, five years old,” he explained. He was a traditionalist, in that he wanted scores “to make my movies bigger than I had made them.” (Vanity Fair, August 26, 2025, “When Steven Spielberg Met John Williams, “Everything Changed” by Tim Greiving)
When John Williams, film composer, “needed a clarinetist for the Jaws’ soundtrack, Spielberg volunteered” to play on his clarinet. “At the opening of the Polish version of Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List”, he plays in the Klezmer band on his clarinet. (Classicalfm.com/discover-music/historical-figures-classically-trainedmusicians/)
Some of Steven Spielberg’s Films of the 20th and 21st centuries: The Color Purple, Close Encounters of the third kind, Jaws 1, E.T., Extra -Terrestrial, Jurassic Park trilogy, Schindler’s List, and the Indiana Jones trilogy.
Steven Spielberg is an American film director, husband, father, grandfather and musician.
Fun learning activities for summer vacation:
- Are you planning to take your child on vacation this summer? How about having a journal for your child to write in about their vacation? Ask them what they learned about each place they visited and what did they enjoy most about each place? (Two or three line.) Go with your child to the library to find a book to read about the place you are visiting!
- Ask your child to help you cook dinner for the family by having them help you with a recipe. Pick a recipe from the place you and your children are visiting. They will be reading and assisting in measuring out ingredients, which will help them in both math and science.
- The local science and history museums offer classes for children. Find one that will be most interesting to your child. Buy and build models of Rockets, planes, or ships….
- Go to the beach with your children and build sand castles, and Rockets from sand, sea grass, sea weed, and shells. Don’t forget the mot on the Castle.
- Have your child help you make up Flash Cards in bright colors and letters to learn multiplication tables and vocabulary words.
“How Compliments Can Save You Cash” by Madeline Frank, Ph.D.
Dale Carnegie was a highly sought-after American lecturer, author, teacher of public speaking and personal development in the early 20th century. He was scheduled to give 20 lectures at a New York grand ballroom that he had rented to hold the lectures.
“The hotel suddenly informed him that he would have to pay almost 3 times as much as he had paid before.” Dale Carnegie said, “the news reached him after the tickets had been printed and distributed, and all announcements had been made. He knew that the hotel was interested only in what they wanted. So, a few days later, he went to see the manager telling him “I was in shock when I read your letter. But I don’t blame you at all. If I were in your position, I should probably have written a similar letter myself. Your duty as the manager of the hotel is to make all the profits possible. If you don’t do that, you’ll be fired and you ought to be fired. Now let’s take a piece of paper and write down the advantages and the disadvantages that will accrue to you, if you insist on this increase in rent.” (p.80-p.81)
“Dale Carnegie, then took out a letterhead and ran a line through the center and headed one column advantages, and the other column disadvantages. Under advantages, he wrote “Ballroom Free.” Continuing on “you will have the advantage of having the ballroom free to rent for dances and conventions. That is a big advantage, for affairs like that will pay you much more than you can get for a series of lectures. If I tie up your ballroom up for 20 nights during the course of the season, it is sure to mean a loss of some very profitable business to you.”
“Now let us consider the disadvantages. First, instead of increasing your income from me, you are going to decrease it. In fact, you were going to wipe it out because I cannot pay the rent you are asking. I shall be forced to hold these lectures at some other place.” (P.81)
“There’s another disadvantage to you also. These lectures attract crowds of educated and cultured people to your hotel. That is good advertising for you, isn’t it? In fact, if you spend $5000 advertising in the newspapers, you couldn’t bring as many people to look at your hotel as I can bring by these lectures. That is worth a lot to a hotel, isn’t it?”
Carnegie continued, “As I talked, I wrote these two disadvantages under the proper heading and handed the sheet of paper to the manager saying: “I wish you would carefully consider both the advantages and the disadvantages that are going to accrue to you and then give me your final decision.” (p.81)
Carnegie said, “I received a letter the next day, informing me that my rent would be increased only 50% instead of 300%”.(P.82)
“Mind you, I got this reduction without saying a word about what I wanted. I talked all the time about what the other person wanted and how he could get it.” (PP. 81-p.82 ,Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job”)
When you are faced with a problem, think the way Dale Carnegie thought, and write down the advantages and disadvantages to the other person. Think about both sides of the equation.
It is totally understandable to focus on what you want, but when you tune in to what others want and help them get it…you will have unlimited opportunities coming your way.
The other technique he used was visualization. Many people will resonate with something that they can see rather than something that they hear.
Rent reduction:
“O. L, Straub, an engineer, wanted to get his rent reduced. And he knew his landlord was hard to deal with. “I wrote him,” Mr. Straub said in a speech before Dale Carnegie’s class, “notifying him that I was vacating my apartment as soon as my lease expired. The truth was I didn’t want to move. I wanted to stay if I could get my rent reduced. But the situation seemed hopeless. Other tenants had tried—and failed. But I said to myself: ‘I am studying a course in how to deal with people, so I’ll try it on him—and see how it works.’”
“He and his secretary came to see me as soon as he got my letter. I met him at the door with a regular Charlie Schwab greeting. I bubbled with good will and enthusiasm. I didn’t begin talking about how high the rent was. I began talking about how much I liked his apartment house. Believe me, I was ‘hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise’. I complimented him on the way he ran the building, and told him I should like so much to stay for another year but I couldn’t afford it.”
“He had evidently never had such a reception from a tenant. He hardly knew what to make of it.”
“Then he started to tell me his troubles. Complaining tenants. One had written him fourteen letters, some of them positively insulting. Another threatened to break his lease unless the landlord kept the man on the floor above from snoring. ‘What a relief it is,’ he said, ‘to have a satisfied tenant like you.’ And then without my even asking him to do it, he offered to reduce my rent a little. I wanted more, so I named the figure I could afford to pay, and he accepted without a word.”
“As he was leaving, he turned to me and asked: ‘What decorating can I have done for you?’
“If I had tried to get the rent reduced by the methods the other tenants were using, I am positive I should have met with the same failure they encountered. “It was the friendly, sympathetic, appreciative approach that won.” (PP. 139-140, Dale Carnegie’s “How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job”.)
Start with a positive, friendly manner! Think about what the other person wants.
Everyone in life wants to be acknowledged, treated with respect, shown appreciation, care, and liking.
Dale Carnegie said in his book, “How to Won Friends and Influence People”, Don’t criticize people, Don’t condemn, and Don’t complain.” ( “The 3 Cs not to do.”)
What can the power of an honest sincere compliment do for you?
“I can live for two months on a good compliment.” ― Mark Twain
“Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying, ‘Make me feel important.’ Never forget this message when working with people.” – Mary Kay Ash,
“You Can Have Everything in Life You Want, If You Will Just Help Enough Other People Get What They Want.” ― Zig Ziglar
What are some areas that you can use these tactics when negotiating with others? © 2026 Madeline Frank If you need a speaker or video speaker contact Madeline at: [email protected]
“Can Music Help You Study and Focus?” (Updated 2026, Nov.6, 2025) by National University Editorial Contributors.
“Music activates both the left and right brain at the same time, and the activation of both hemispheres can maximize learning and improve memory,” says Dr. Masha Godkin, a professor in the Department of Marriage and Family Sciences at National University.
“Music has a profound effect on our mood, blood pressure, and heart rate. “Music has the potential to take a person from the Beta brainwave state to deeper Alpha, and then Theta brainwave states, depending on the music,” she says. For the best music to focus and study, choose songs that keep you awake but won’t cause you to dance to the beat.”
“Instead of relying on the radio or a random mix on Pandora or Spotify, it can help to create a playlist of the best study music for concentration. You can plan a set amount of uninterrupted music, which serves as a built-in timer for studying. When the music is up, you’ve earned a break.”
“Go Classical: You may not want to go to a symphony concert, but the soothing sounds of classical orchestra music seem to increase mood and productivity, which makes it great for studying.” Try a Mozart Symphony playing softly in the background to help you study.
“The Secret of Teaching Science & Math Through Music” shares scientific evidence, medical evidence, test results, and true stories of the world’s scientists, medical doctors, and mathematicians who have studied and played musical instruments since they were children by Madeline Frank, Ph.D. Click below:
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“Musical Notes On Math” by Dr. Madeline Frank teaches your child fractions and decimals, the fun easy way, through the rhythm of music, Winner of the Parent To Parent Adding Wisdom Award is available in book form, newly updated as an e-book on Kindle, Nook, or iBook.:
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“Madeline’s Midnight Melodies- Music From around the World”. This CD complements her books with a blend of dance music, gigues, tangos, ballet and favorites including “Danny Boy”, Puccini’s “O Mio Babbino Caro”, Debussy’s “Claire De Lune” and others. “Madeline’s Midnight Melodies” CD is now available for purchase by downloading a song, downloading the album click below:
Wishing you and your family a Happy Father’s Day from your Non-Invasive Medicine…Music Expert, Madeline
For over 30 years, Dr. Madeline Frank has helped children and adults overcome problems through Classical music. Madeline Frank, Ph.D. is an award-winning teacher, author, researcher, speaker, conductor, and concert artist. She has discovered a scientific link between studying a musical instrument and academic and societal success. Madeline Frank earned her Bachelor and Master’s degree from the Juilliard School of Music. Her education has included scholarships at the Juilliard School, Indiana University, and the University of Cincinnati and she has a violin performance diploma from the North Carolina School of the Arts. (C) 2026 Madeline Frank