Singing, your key to health and happiness in Ragazzi!

Brian Eno is a multi-faceted artist best known for his collaborations with bands and punk and rock singers. He is an advocate for singing and reminds us that it is good for our health. He celebrates the joy of singing with a group and the satisfaction that comes when everything works together in a group.

 

Your key to health and happiness can be found right here in Ragazzi.

 

Singing: The Key To A Long Life

By Brian Eno

Weekend Edition Sunday, November 23, 2008 · I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

A few years ago a friend and I realized that we both loved singing but didn't do much of it. So we started a weekly a capella group with just four members. After a year we started inviting other people to join. We didn't insist on musical experience — in fact some of our members had never sung before. Now the group has ballooned to around 15 or 20 people.

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor. A recent long-term study conducted in Scandinavia sought to discover which activities related to a healthy and happy later life. Three stood out: camping, dancing and singing.

Well, there are physiological benefits, obviously: You use your lungs in a way that you probably don't for the rest of your day, breathing deeply and openly. And there are psychological benefits, too: Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call "civilizational benefits." When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

Well here's what we do in an evening: We get some drinks, some snacks, some sheets of lyrics and a strict starting time. We warm up a bit first.

The critical thing turns out to be the choice of songs. The songs that seem to work best are those based around the basic chords of blues and rock and country music. You want songs that are word-rich, but also vowel-rich because it's on the long vowels sounds of a song such as "Bring It On Home To Me" ("You know I'll alwaaaaays be your slaaaaave"), that's where your harmonies really express themselves. And when you get a lot of people singing harmony on a long note like that, it's beautiful.

But singing isn't only about harmonizing pitch like that. It has two other dimensions. The first one is rhythm. It's thrilling when you get the rhythm of something right and you all do a complicated rhythm together: "Oh, when them cotton balls get a-rotten, you can't pick very much cotton." So when 16 or 20 people get that dead right together at a fast tempo that's very impressive. But the other thing that you have to harmonize besides pitch and rhythm is tone. To be able to hit exactly the same vowel sound at a number of different pitches seems unsurprising in concept, but is beautiful when it happens.

So I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.

Independently produced for Weekend Edition Sunday by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick. Special thanks to Davia Nelson of The Kitchen Sisters for recording this essay.

 

--
Joyce Keil

Artistic Director

Ragazzi Boys Chorus

Chaperoning with Ragazzi

A Chaperone "Moment" – A Chaperone Creed
--by David Jones, Ragazzi Executive Director and father of Rick, Ragazzi alumnus

A Chaperone "Moment" – A Chaperone Creed

 

There are many "proud papa" moments in my career as parent, volunteer and Ragazzi administrator.  As you might expect, most of them are moments wrapped around my own son's singing exploits.  There are a few, though, that have little to do with him and two in particular that arose from my single longest stint as a chaperone.  Ragazzi undertook a nine-day tour in 2002 (a full Ragazzi generation ago!) to Minnesota where we participated in both America Fest and the World Choral Symposium.

  

I'll relate my second recollection first; the purely chaperone-inspired "proud papa" memory.  It isn't musical, or at least only peripherally so.  America Fest was an annual festival (now defunct) for choruses and choirs of men and boys, where we heard some spectacular boy-choirs (a notable one from the Czech Republic) and equally astonishing adult groups like Cantus and Chor Leone.  At the end of our week in St. Cloud, the festival moved en masse to Minneapolis and joined the World Choral Symposium, a gathering of choral professionals from all over the world.  This was the first one held in North America and having the singers from America Fest participate in the massed choir presentation in Orchestra Hall was an incredible honor.  I was chaperoning our boys (the trebles) just before they were to go on stage, along with hundreds of other children from all over the globe.  There were just a couple of single-thickness doors separating the hordes of children from the performers on stage and the inevitable buzz of excitement caused the Symposium back stage director to ask for quiet.  The children managed to quiet down for about 60 seconds, but then the buzz began growing again.

 

At that point, I put our Ragazzi boys on Code Silence.  As if a switch had been thrown, they each and every one settled down, drawing on the inner resources they had developed over their Ragazzi careers, focusing their thoughts and turning their attention to the imminent task of singing for some of the choral world's biggest big-wigs.  In all honesty, it didn't really do much to reduce the total volume of sound emanating from backstage, but it was truly an astounding thing to see... this pool of Ragazzi serenity amidst the fizzy hubbub.  Picture a flash mob of Zen masters in Grand Central Station.  It still stirs me when I think of how utterly self-possessed and disciplined those boys were.  And I wasn't the only one to notice – the woman who organized America Fest noticed it as well and subsequently made Ragazzi a standing offer to return to America Fest, any summer.

 

How did these boys, from age 9 to 13 manage to do what their peers could not?  The answer is training.  I've told many adults new to Ragazzi that our boys may sing like angels, but… well, they're still boys.  Obviously, that really isn't fair to the older boys who have internalized the discipline Ragazzi teaches and who are capable of uncommon self-control.

 

How does this happen?  It's not accidental and it isn't simply a byproduct of learning to sing.  In addition to teaching the boys the right way to sing the right notes, Ragazzi's faculty teach the right ways to behave.  They spend a considerable amount of time on and attention to how the boys behave, singly and in groups.  But it's not faculty, alone, who have the responsibility to help the younger boys learn how to follow in the older boys' footsteps.  The faculty have partners in teaching – our adult volunteers, the chaperones. 

 

One of Ragazzi's main goals is to see that our boys – all of them – are successful.  In a choral environment where teamwork and individual responsibility are so intertwined, the boys need lots of guidance.  That's where chaperones come in.  They provide the boys with reminders of boundaries and good behavior in partnership with the faculty.  Ragazzi chaperones are an essential element in helping the younger boys become the masters of their own behavior that we expect the older boys to be.

 

You have to remember that boys come into Ragazzi not knowing how to behave to the standards we ask of the older boys.  And most of them come into the program completely unable to do so.  It's a long haul from PG novice to Concert Group and it's not just a matter of keeping up with Theory and learning some music.  Ragazzi's discipline standards are not learned by reading the Handbook (although there's plenty of useful info, there) and they aren't internalized in one telling from a director.  It's something that seeps into boys as they are exposed to good modeling by adults and older boys, and by thoughtful correction by faculty and chaperones over the years as boys work their way up to Concert Group and YME.

 

Just as we ask a lot of the boys, we ask a lot of our chaperones.  In one sense, chaperoning should be pretty simple; you just have to act in loco parentis (in place of the parent).  There is a catch, though, because it's not just any parent we ask you to act in the place of, it's an ideal parent.  A parent who will watch diligently, intervene judiciously, correct firmly (but gently) and be ready to move right on to the next boy who needs help.  Becoming a successful chaperone requires meetings with experienced chaperones, meetings with faculty and knowing the standards.  You also need to be able to follow faculty cues, both explicit and implied.  But it's all about helping every boy who needs reminders and direction. 

 

You wouldn't expect to be able to bake a cake by just tossing all of the ingredients together in a bowl.  No, you need to beat some ingredients together, sift others, blend and mix, but not too much.  And then there's that whole oven thing...  Similarly, you can't expect to make a Ragazzi boy by teaching him some music and stuffing him into a uniform.  It's more complicated and challenging for him and for his teachers – all of his teachers, both faculty and chaperones.

 

A boy's ability to maintain Code Silence in challenging environments (backstage at concerts or even transiting international airports) is really only a marker for the much deeper level of self-discipline we ask of an older boy; that we train him for from the beginning and that we all do our best to help him achieve.

 

Oh!  And the first "proud papa" memory from that trip?  I can remember a night midway through that week in St. Cloud, Minnesota.  It was the upper mid-west in August: hot as Hades and just as humid - but no one was about to miss the daily evening concert.  Oh, the glorious singing we heard that week!  So, it was Ragazzi's turn to sing to a packed house, muggy beyond all reason.  Ragazzi's YME were up and they started out with Palestrina's Super Flumina (By the Waters of Babylon), a standard of Italian Renaissance polyphony (weaving vocal lines), that the majority of this special, trained audience knew.  From the very first note, a haunting, floating, sustained A by the basses; soft, sweet, pure and insistent, I knew they were going to nail it.  And nail it they did – along with the rest of their program.  I don't really recall much of CG's program that week, even though my son was a treble, but that one piece by YME – even that one note – is etched in my memory, and continues to fuel a swelling pride every time I think of it.  Those young men rocked that house.

 

 

 

The Mozart Effect

Music and Cognition: The Mozart Effect Revisited

BY JESSE HAMLIN

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In 1993, researchers at UC Irvine published a study in the journal Nature showing that 36 undergrads temporarily improved their spatial-reasoning IQ scores after listening to part of Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major. The story got blown up and oversimplified in the mainstream media, which trumpeted the so-called Mozart effect, the notion that listening to classical music makes you smarter.

The idea was picked up by politicians and popularized by people like Don Campbell, who wrote the best-selling books The Mozart Effect and The Mozart Effect for Children. He actually trademarked "The Mozart Effect" name, and built a small empire peddling CDs and books that variously claim to heal the body and stimulate your baby's brain. The Irvine researchers, Dr. Francis Rauscher and the late Dr. Gordon Shaw, distanced themselves from all the hype, which they said distorted their findings.

"Generalizing these results to children is one of the first things that went wrong," Rauscher told NPR in 2010. "Somehow or another the myth started exploding that children that listen to classical music from a young age will do better on the SAT, they'll score better on intelligence tests in general, and so forth."

Yet for all the debate about the effect of music listening and training on general cognitive ability, a growing body of research strongly suggests that studying musiccan enhance a child's learning skills, including reading. A significant new Canadian study shows that preschoolers who participated in a computerized musical training program improved their verbal intelligence scores after only 20 days.

"Music and language have common biological mechanisms. Musical training strengthens them," says Dr. Nina Kraus, a noted neurobiologist who runs Northwestern University's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, via e-mail.

"Hear" Training

Kraus' research has shown that musicians, who memorize sounds and patterns, can process music and language better than people who don't have musical training. Over time, she says, musical experience fundamentally changes how the nervous system responds to sound. Among other things, musicians are better at hearing speech in noise, an important skill for kids trying to learn in a bustling classroom.

"Music and language have common biological mechanisms. Musical training strengthens them." – Dr. Nina Kraus

Kraus argues that music should be taught in schools in part because it could engage attention and memory skills, strengthening kids' "phonological processing" and enhancing their reading skills. As she puts it, reading and music both involve mapping sounds to meaning.

"In addition to contributing to great amusement and well-being, practicing music does, in fact, appear to make you smarter — at least smarter when it comes to how you hear," Kraus and her Northwestern colleague, Dana Strait, wrote in a recent study, published in Music Perception, titled "Playing Music for a Smarter Ear: Cognitive, Perceptual and Neurobiological Evidence."

Kraus, whose lab is in the midst of a four-year study on music education and adolescent brain development, was impressed by a study published in October by researchers at York University in Toronto. It showed a rise in verbal IQ scores among young kids who took an interactive music-training program.

Exploring the Link Between Music and Language

The study's title echoes its conclusion: "Short-Term Music Training Enhances Verbal Intelligence and Executive Function."

Directed by Dr. Sylvain Moreno, now the lead scientist at the Center for Brain Fitness at the University of Toronto's Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest, the study focused on 48 kids between the ages of 4 and 6. Half of them participated in an interactive, computerized music-training program; the other half took part in a similar program about visual art. Both software programs were designed by Moreno, using the same cartoon characters, graphics, and tone.

The music kids learned about rhythm, pitch, melody, singing, and basic theory. The art kids learned about line, color, shape, dimension, and perspective. None of the kids had studied music or art before, and none of their parents were professional musicians or artists. The kids participated in the training for two hours a day over a 20-day period.

"The more the music training induced changes in the brain, the more the children improved their intelligence scores." – Dr. Sylvain Moreno

Before and after completing the programs, each child took the oral Vocabulary and Block Design subtests of the standardized Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of the Intelligence test (the vocabulary to measure verbal ability, the block design to gauge spatial ability). The children were also given a "go/no-go" task — pushing a button when a white shape flashed on a computer screen, or refraining from pushing it when a purple one appeared — while electrodes were attached to their heads to record their brain activity.

There was no appreciable difference in IQ scores between the music kids and art kids before the training. But afterward, more than 90 percent of the music kids improved their verbal scores — some by 14 points — while the art kids showed no significant improvement in verbal ability, and only slight improvement in their spatial skills.

Similarly, the music kids showed greater accuracy on the "go/no-go" task after the training. And their brain waves had notably larger peak amplitudes, showing an increase in brain activity. The task, which engages the fronto-parietal networks of the brain that deal with attention, measures what the brain people call executive function.

Skills That Transfer

"Through this musical training, we were able to stimulate a special brain area, and through this stimulation, we were able to raise the verbal intelligence of these kids," says the French-born Moreno, on the horn from his Toronto lab. "It's astonishing that we can do that after 20 days!"

He calls the study, published in Psychological Science, a scientific breakthrough. It's the first to show a causal relationship between musical training and improved intelligence scores and attention, he says, and it demonstrates that the transfer of one cognitive skill to another can occur in early childhood.

"We had brain plasticity in children after 20 days," he says. "The brain behavior changed after the musical training. And what we found that was crucial was that the change in intelligence was correlated with the change in the brain: The more the music training induced changes in the brain, the more the children improved their intelligence scores."

Moreno thinks these findings have important implications for people involved in education and the study of brain plasticity.

The results tell him that "music training is incredibly powerful, and there is a special link between music and these core skills of the brain. ... This curriculum, through the power of music, is like a switch button for the cognitive development of children. You turn the switch on to learn."

Nina Kraus, whose research Moreno and his colleagues cite in their report, gives high marks to the Canadians' work. "It's a very important study," she says. "The effects in verbal IQ scores is a significant discovery."

The causal effect of Lady Gaga on teen literacy awaits further study.

Jesse Hamlin has written for The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications over the past 30 years on a wide range of music and art, covering jazz musicians and symphonic conductors, sculptors, poets, and architects. He has also written for The New York Times, Art & Auction and Columbia magazines, as well as liner notes for CDs by Stan Getz and Cal Tjader.

--
Joyce Keil

Artistic Director

Ragazzi Boys Chorus