Music is of the mind and the ear
Ralph Middenway explains how listening and learning to play music may be an investment in health in the later years of life
DEMENTIA has a tragic impact on too many people and families in our ageing society.
But recent neurological, epidemiological, educational and behavioural evidence has led me to hypothesise, in the first part of an ongoing academic literature search, that teaching children to make music, and its continued practice through life, could reduce the incidence and/or severity of dementia in later life.
Proving this assertion as a whole is impossible (it would take 150 years or more and cost a fortune) but, fortunately, it can be broken down into manageable parts, which can be examined individually.
Of particular interest to me is the work of teams of researchers in Normandy, California and Ontario — neurologists, behavioural scientists, child psychologists and music educators.
Neurologists, using PET, CAT and MRI technologies, have confirmed that intensive training and the acquisition of any kind of expertise leads to structural changes in specific parts of the brain, but they have also identified changes musical training makes across the entire brain, beginning with the foetus in the third trimester of pregnancy, and continuing seamlessly through infancy, childhood, youth, maturity and age.
Musicians’ brains, it turns out, are physically different and function differently from those of non-musicians in some surprising ways, by no means purely music-linked.
The earlier the start, the harder the work, the longer the training and practice, and the greater the expertise attained, the more grey matter there seems to be in key brain areas, including those for executive functions, memory, and emotion.
It can also improve communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and thus between right and left parts of the body, between intellect and emotion and between detailed analysis and holistic synthesis. Overall this amounts to an increase in cognitive reserve, a useful buffer against age-related mental deterioration.
Composers and conductors tend to improve with age. Performers also seem to retain significant lifelong mental capacity, however much their physical capacity to perform may decline with age.
Interestingly, once musicians reach a working level of competence, music may be imagined so vividly that the physical reality is no longer necessary and the “internal ear” becomes more or less autonomous.
At a personal level, like Beethoven, I’m very deaf, and can’t hear music any more, but that doesn’t stop me writing it, playing it back in my head when I read it, or remembering it in colourful detail from long-gone recorded or live performances.
The positive effects of music are enhanced when combined with movement, such as playing an instrument, or singing in character, and dancers, like musicians, have music wherever they go.
What does music education entail? There is no one answer, the possibilities are endless.
At one extreme, singers learn to vocalise from single lines of music, using just their voices, usually with one or more other people — listening is critically important.
At another extreme, organists learn to play multiple lines of music, using all 10 fingers on up to five or six terraced manual keyboards with several sets of registration buttons to select which sets of pipes are immediately available. They use heels and toes on a pedal keyboard with more registration buttons, and one or more pedals to increase or decrease the overall volume. But, with the pipes being some distance from the organ console, the time delay from when they strike a note to when they hear it means they must often ignore the sounds they are generating, a procedure alien to that of all other musicians. And when organists perform with others, like a choir or an orchestra, the mental gymnastics they must perform are astonishing to lesser mortals.
Music education has flourished in the Suisse Romande, Bavaria, Hungary and Finland for decades. But in Australia, successive state and federal governments have established and then abandoned general music education, reaching a high
point under Whitlam, and low points under Dawkins, Howard and Abbott. In some parts of the country the idea commands token respect, but STEM-ideologues appear to have the upper hand for now.
It is clear that expanding general education early in life can reduce risk of dementia late in life, by building multiple neural pathways and thus adding cognitive reserve; and music education in particular enhances development of musical and general life skills.
Universal music education through preschool, primary and secondary school, certainly invaluable in its own right, could also turn out to bring with it, as a bonus, an immeasurable lifelong benefit to society at large.