Classical Music Serves As A Welcoming Transition

What better way is there to welcome a brand new, fellow human being into the world than with the resonance of beautiful and temporal classical music? Numerous studies have proven time and time again that classical music is capable of providing the most calming of all environments - not only in the workplace or in schools, but also in the home and nurseries across the nation. The curious aspect of this phenomenon of course, is why.

From soft slow melodies gently pouring from a violin solo - to upbeat tempos played by a simple stringed quartet, the human heart naturally beats in rhythmic harmony with each note, each pause, and each vibrato of this musical genre. To the newborn, these classical rhythms simulate the rhythmic beat of mother's and father's heart, while the synthesis of stringed instruments emulate the partnership between mother and father - bonding as one - effectively validating the birth of this music's youngest audience.

Classical music is on one hand, a manifestation of mathematics - a series of numbers arranged in such a way that manipulates the physics of our environment to a state that's comforting through prediction and repetition. With regular use, it will ultimately generate familiarity within the environment with calm and validating trust. On the other hand, classical music is an arrangement of fun, playful and creative melodies - an inviting playground for the imagination of a newborn to flow from past ethereal experiences to a new world physical sights and sounds.

Learn Guitar Easy With Classical Music Notes

The first time I heard Gabriela Lena Frank's music live - with Gabriela herself improvising on a piano at an intimate gathering in Berkeley, California - I was surprised and a little embarrassed to find tears streaming down my face. I know next to nothing about contemporary classical music, and I often find it too dissonant and challenging to truly enjoy, but that evening, Gabriela's music just knocked me out. Of course, I'm not alone. The Los Angeles Times calls her work "luminous... bursting with fresh originality" while the Washington Post notes its "unself-conscious craft and mastery."

In 2009, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Latin American Grammy for "Inca Dances," and was featured in a PBS documentary on her collaboration with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Clearly, Gabriela is an artist in the full bloom of her creative powers, and one of the major new musical voices of her generation.She is also a wonderfully rich, realized human being, without a zot of the pretention or preciousness that could easily accompany her rare musical gifts, as you'll see for yourself, in this conversation with Gabriela over a long dinner at my home in Richmond, California, in July 2009.

YO: As ignorant as I am about what you've done musically, I do have this strong sense that you are one of those rare people who can successfully integrate your individual personal genius with your energy and your actions, creating a great...

GLF: I think a lot of it comes from discomfort, and discomfort with accepting my training in music, accepting the vision that other people had for me, of music. I didn't disrespect my teachers necessarily. For a long time I thought I wasn't good enough, that I didn't fit in in a certain way. Then, I started to start to live with the discomfort and say this discomfort is good, this is who I am, so I'm in that feeling all the time now and it's just a rewiring. It's not changing your feelings, it's changing your intellectual appraisal of it.

I think it's very important for teachers to do to young developing spirits, when they're creative or intellectual -- to trust their instincts and to go deep with it. We all have these ways of bucking the norm, we all have this potential. I got lucky in that whatever risk-taking spirit I have in me - I just chucked the normal path very suddenly, very early, and almost totally. Although I love certain composers in classical music. I'm not a total classical music aficionado, which is a great irony. It's where I could get the best training, but I had to fit it into a different kind of mold.

Listening to Classical Music Will Not Make Your Child More Intelligent

Will listening to classical music, make your child smarter? That question has been around for many years. Years ago when these studies began to be conducted, they were only done on adults. The results were that they only had a small effect on short term memory.

While there is no dispute that listening to classical music is very relaxing, it will not make your child smarter. Past studies have concluded that listening to classical music has increased the motor skills in children. However, other studies have also been conducting with reading, memory exercises and consistently putting puzzles together with the same result.

Independent studies have also been conducted that show that listening to this type of music has had an effect on the intelligence of children. It is not reliable and the result have been too insignificant for this theory to be fact. The test have only shown to make a difference for about 20 minutes. Talk about short term memory.

Whether your intention is directed towards unborn children, infants or toddlers making them smarter will simply not happen in this way. Does this mean that classical music is useless for children? Absolutely not! Classical music is most definitely soothing and relaxing. We can all use a little relaxation in our lives. This also applies to children. A misconception is that children do not have stress in their lives. That is simply not true. It is just a different kind of stress than us adults deal with on a daily basis.