Music and Musical Ability
Exposure to music and active participation in music making can enrich a child's life both immediately and over the long term, fostering creativity and self-expression, transmitting cultural values, and contributing to physical, intellectual, and social development. After years of cutbacks, school districts throughout the country are restoring programs in music and the other arts. In 1980 only two states mandated instruction in the arts as a requirement for graduation; now 28 do. Research has shown that listening to music has beneficial short- and long-term effects on abstract reasoning ability. The most publicized study is the one associated with the so-called "Mozart effect," in which college students who had listened to a Mozart piano sonata scored eight points higher than a control group on portions of an IQ test. In other research, the cognitive skills of preschool and elementary school-age children have shown improvement in response to music instruction. The renewed interest in integrating music into the school curriculum has also been influenced by the work of psychologist Howard Gardner, who, in his groundbreaking study Frames of Mind, challenged the limitations of traditional concepts of intelligence, listing musical ability as one of seven basic types of intelligence that need to be nurtured and exercised.
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