You step into the classroom. Immediately you're embraced by sound—the scuffing of a chair, the clack of an instrument case opening—and washing through it all, the sweet, random sounds of lively chat and laughter.
You finger the clarinet in your hands. It was your daughter's. After all those years of paying for lessons and attending school concerts, now it's your turn. You've dreamed of making your own music—of playing songs you love, songs that make people tap their feet and hum along. And here you are, ready to purse your lips and make your first sound, play your first notes.
You are a musician.
Sound impossible? Far from it. No matter what your age or background, you can take up an instrument tomorrow. And according to the latest research on the many benefits of music, you should—for the good of your body, mind, and spirit.
Getting started isn't as difficult as you might think. Individual and group lessons targeted toward older adults abound at senior centers and community schools for the arts. Senior choruses, many of which started small in residential facilities or senior centers, are growing in size and number. There are even bands and other ensembles created just for elders who are beginning musicians.
The fact is, there's never been more opportunity for you to make music a rich and rewarding part of your life.
More than soothing the savage breast
"If the FDA knew how powerful music was, they'd make it the FDMA," jokes Karl Bruhn, a former marketing executive at Yamaha Music Corporation and often called the father of the music making and wellness movement. "It's healthful," he says, "and there are no side effects."
We know intuitively that music can challenge us as well as move us. But research over the last 20 years has shown how extensively music engages our brains, and on a number of levels. When scientists in the late 1980s began to explore how the brain processes music, they unearthed several immediate connections, most notably the correlation between music and spatial reasoning in children, and the well-publicized Mozart Effect, which prompted type-A parents to see blasting Beethoven as a shortcut to academic excellence.
But music is not just good for kids, it turns out. The Music Making and Wellness Project found that retirees who took group keyboard lessons showed better mental and physical health than their non-keyboarding cohorts. The majority of keyboardists not only demonstrated decreased anxiety (which is linked in turn to better cognitive performance, learning, and decision-making), but they also experienced decreased depression and loneliness. In addition, there was an increase in the levels of human growth hormone [hGH]; an hGH decline is associated with osteoporosis, energy levels, wrinkling, sexual function, muscle mass, and aches and pains.
Even degenerative conditions such as dementia appear to be offset by making music. A 1999 study showed that patients with Alzheimer's disease who engaged in four weeks of structured music therapy (interactive sessions that combined drumming and singing along with favorite old and new songs), showed marked rises in melatonin, a neurohormone linked with sleep regulation and believed to influence the immune system. The novice drummers became more active, slept better, and were more cooperative with their nurses.
A year later, another study on drumming pointed to further body benefits. Group "composite" drumming classes, which incorporate a variety of rhythmic activities, appear to boost the function of natural killer cells, which find and destroy cancer and virus-infected cells in the body, according to Dr. Barry Bittman of the Mind-Body Wellness Center in Meadville, Pennsylvania, the study's lead researcher and an advocate of the mind-body benefits of music. "Composite drumming enables people to enjoy myriad psychological and physical benefits," Bittman says. "While immersed in this form of music making, their tension is rapidly transformed into a joyful, moving, and enlivening experience."
The more researchers uncover these multilayered links connecting music and memory, language, reasoning, and overall health, the more we see how deeply rooted in the brain music is. And as many elders can testify, music can be a key to unlocking all kinds of doors.
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"Playing the dulcimer lights the memory of the songs I heard as a child," says Shelbiana Rhein, 70, a retired English teacher living in Columbus, Ohio. Growing up in southeastern Kentucky, she was surrounded by folk music; her mother played the dulcimer. As a girl Rhein never learned to play, but one day when eyeing the offerings at her local senior center some 50-plus years later, the prospect of a dulcimer class leaped off the page at her. After nearly three years of group lessons, Rhein now strums and plucks old folk tunes like "Wayfaring Stranger" and "Pretty Saro," and instantly she feels the presence of her mother and grandmother. "I envision the landscape where I grew up," she says, "and the people." At this age, Rhein says, it feels important to draw up her past. "We want to remember," she says, "as well as be in the present, because it makes us a whole, well-rounded person."
For Rhein, her weekly dulcimer classes not only bring back the soothing melodies of her Appalachian childhood, but challenge her brain, as she keeps track of strumming, picking, and keeping time, all while reading the notes. "If you work it, it will grow," says Kenneth T. Cole, associate director of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts. "The brain develops throughout one's life. There's this idea of a sense of mastery, when people understand that they can continue to learn."
Marcia Bornhurst Parkes, Ph.D., chair of the New Horizons program for adult musicians at Eastman Community Music School in Rochester, New York, maps it out. "We know there is a connection between mind and body," she says. "We know rehearsing and performing require higher level thinking skills. Especially when you're performing with an instrument, you're thinking about what you're doing physically. [With a woodwind or brass instrument], you're breathing, using your tongue, you're thinking about what your fingers should be doing, you're keeping a steady pulse inside of you, thinking about things on the printed page, you're watching the conductor and interpreting his gestures. You're listening to everyone around you. It's a very deep thing."
And while that may sound like more than your brain can handle, the fact is that people can do it, even if they've never been musicians. "That's the secret of why I keep at it," says Dick Curtis, a 75-year-old trumpet player in Santa Barbara who had bugled in his Boy Scout days, but never dealt with pushing down valves and playing with others until 10 years ago. "It's not just the love of making music," the retired aeronautical engineer says, "it's the fact that it keeps me mentally working all the time."
Come join the band
While research continues to tease apart the varied, remarkable benefits of individual music making for the brain, another reward is becoming increasingly clear. While making music alone is great, making music together is even better. That fact crystallized for Roy Ernst, a professor of music education at Eastman School of Music at Rochester University, New York, in 1991. "I was thinking that being involved in a musical group could do a lot to improve the quality of life in retired people," he says. "Being part of a group, having events to look forward to, would be very healthy, along with the chance to do something that is challenging and to feel a sense of accomplishment. I also saw the need for older people to get started on something substantial—something that would give them a brand-new purpose in life."
Ernst, now age 69, put his notion to work, and founded the New Horizons program at Eastman Community Music School, also at Rochester University. His vision was simple if not a bit audacious—he would create bands and instrumental ensembles populated by older folks who had no previous musical experience.
As Ernst formed ensembles at Eastman and quickly through other community-based centers, schools, and even music retailers, he found that elders had every capability of handling the rigor of lessons and practice sessions, and that they loved the sociability and connections they formed. "You have all these new friends that you share a common interest with," he says. "It's a social life as well as the commitment to music." And it pays off. In 2006, the NEA-sponsored Creativity and Aging Study examined mental health measures among seniors participating in group cultural programs at community centers and found marked improvements in overall morale, depression, and loneliness.
Overcoming obstacles from the past
With so many benefits—from a healthier brain to a richer social life—what's stopping elders from picking up an instrument and getting started? Professionals like Ernst say that any older adult has the capability to learn the skills. "I met a woman in Colorado Springs in a New Horizons band who started clarinet at age 89," he says, "and she's doing just fine." The greatest hurdle may be our own fear that we're not good enough to play, often planted by cavalier music teachers from long ago.
Everyone who teaches music to adults has heard the story. Karl Bruhn can remember one vividly. "We were working at a senior facility," he remembers, "and a woman came up to me and said she'd loved the piano but her teacher told her mother she had no talent.
I've heard variations on that everywhere I've gone. Consider the impact of that—the idea that people are trained to think that they don't have talent." "I've heard so many stories," Ernst says. "People had negative experiences in their youths. But it was surprising that the spark of desire survived all these years."
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Sometimes an avid musician hasn't been thwarted by negativity, but simply the wrong instrument. When offered music lessons at his elementary school, Silvio Di Loreto dreamed of the clarinet, but a teacher assigned him the cello. The boy struggled to haul the heavy instrument across town to his lessons, and abandoned it as soon as he could.
At age 70, retired from his real estate career and living in Santa Barbara, California, Di Loreto went to the Salvation Army and laid out $35 for a clarinet. He put in another $60 to bring it up to snuff. When a trombone-playing friend mentioned a newly forming New Horizons band. Di Loreto checked it out. "I didn't even know how to put my clarinet together," he says. But the director's slow and welcoming approach, combined with the tremendous sense of humor and support among his fellow bandmates, hooked Di Loreto. He stayed, and he practiced. He also managed to win the heart of fellow clarinetist Mary MacDonald. The two have been together 10 years.
The attitude, exemplified by New Horizons and other programs like it, is all that is needed. "Recreational music making is not based on mastery or performance," says Bruhn. "It unites people despite their challenges or backgrounds." Indeed, bands can become extended families for retirees who often feel increasingly isolated from family members, or deprived of social interaction due to the deaths of close friends and loved ones.
J.B. Vander Ark, age 74, a founding director of The Prime Time Band, a New Horizons band in Santa Barbara, California, speaks warmly of the constant support throughout the group. "When we first started, everyone just wanted to play all night, and I said, ‘No, we should take a break now and then.' Now we take a break, and it's hard to get them back because of all the socializing!" Vander Ark says the group also rallies around sick or hospitalized members.
Finding your voice
That sense of community also pervades the many senior choruses that are sprouting up like wildflowers throughout the country. A 2003 study commissioned by the non-profit organization Chorus America found that singing in groups is associated with a host of positive life attributes, including volunteerism, political activism, public awareness, and sociability.
For Lou Chapman, finding his voice has changed his life. Last year, the 64-year-old United Auto Workers union representative spent a long, cold Ohio winter watching public television with his wife and found himself hooked on opera. "I wanted to be engaged," he says, "rather than a spectator. I liked to sing. But I didn't know anything about how to read music." Chapman did some research at his local music store (see "It's Play Time!" [0] for more tips on finding music in your community), and discovered private instruction through the outreach program at Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music in Berea, Ohio.
In short time, Chapman learned to read music and understand elementary theory. Four months later he auditioned for the Baldwin-Wallace Men's Chorus—and made it. "If I can do this," he says, "then anyone can do this."
Chapman not only plans to continue his study and sing with the chorus, but also to refine his skills enough to go out and sing in everything from union halls to nursing facilities. "I wanted to have a gift that I could pass along, that was purely mine," he says, "that I could give to someone else. We ought to be able to stand up and help each other. To sing, to embellish love and death and suffering and passion and all those things. That's what it's about."
For elder musicians like Chapman, music is redefining and sharpening their lives. For William Taylor, age 75, just knowing he can express himself on his trumpet gets him out of bed in the morning. A lifelong music lover, Taylor (pictured above) has had his instrument by his side, but he feels like at this point, he is for the first time a serious student. "I'm retired now," he says. "So I practice. A lot. I practice as much as I can." Taylor plays with a New Horizons band at the Third Street Music School Settlement in New York City. "My colleagues at New Horizons, they know a lot about the history of music and they all have this great love of music," he says. "Just talking about it is thrilling."
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For Mildred Rebennack, learning the harmonica has tied her back to girlhood roots filled with family singing as she was growing up poor in Alabama and Indiana. It also drew the 80-year-old into joyful group lessons at the Indianapolis Senior Center, after her husband's death in 1985 and her retirement in 1990 left her feeling lonely.
But perhaps best of all, her humble instrument ties her to the future, and especially to her grandson. A natural showman, Rebennack loves to dress up in a red, white and blue vest, don an Uncle Sam hat, and perform a set of patriotic songs, including "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Last Veteran's Day, she made an appearance at her grandson's elementary school, in full dress and song. Did she make a splash? You bet. Did she love it? Absolutely.
Rebennack puts it as simply as a three-chord tune, but it's all you need to know. "When you get old, you can do things."