Editor's Note: The Generation Project's core mission is to expand the range of opportunities available to high-need students. As part of that mission, The Generation Project blog will be featuring several series on the importance of different educational disciplines that are often overlooked in high-need schools. We are currently featuring a series about the importance of music education.
Today's guest post is written by Dr. Michael Hobaugh, a long-time musician, MD/PHD, and a pediatrician who works with low-income youth at at LaRabida Children's Hospital in Chicago. Dr. Hobaugh is also a Generation Project donor: Chicago teachers and students, login to check out the Hobaugh Family Renaissance Scholarship!
Last week, NPR broadcast an interesting story regarding the manner in which musicians and non-musicians are able to distinguish auditory input. Musicians in a noisy, aurally distracting environment are much more able to pick out fragments of meaning whispered below the noise floor. Non-musicians just hear more noise. What might be the implications of this?
This study offers further evidence that music instructs the mind in patterns of analysis and discrimination. Applied broadly, this speaks to the ability to pull meaning and organize ideas out of masses of information of any sort. As we struggle to bring our young people into academic excellence and the joy of its pursuit, this tool is an essential one.
Perhaps it is this very phenomenon that has contributed to my ultimate completion of a PhD in biochemistry, an MD with specialty in pediatric chronic diseases and a career in academic medicine. Throughout this sometimes grueling training pathway, I have had to give many things up and delay opportunities that I might have otherwise taken. However, I have one last surviving hobby that I promised myself I would never give up – playing music.
I went through a few different instruments before settling on the trumpet at age 10. Thirty years later, I still play several days a week and have performed over 100 concerts with my university’s symphony where I’ve gone from student to pediatric resident to faculty member over 18 years, sitting in the same chair. This has been tremendous fun and a great way to meet people (including my wife, TGP board member Alexandra Lee Hobaugh). But the most important things that I have learned from music, I never realized I was getting until recent reflection.
Playing in an orchestra is like cross training for all the challenges of life. The individual musicians work together to achieve the shared goal of an excellent performance. This requires submission of the self to the needs of the ensemble (community) as well as the ability to step up and carry the music along (leadership). Sometimes carrying the music along means playing musical phrases that are beyond (or hopefully just nearly beyond) the capabilities of we amateur musicians. On the trumpet, it sometimes feels like creeping along a narrow ledge above a chasm, fearing that any moment may mean a fall to the death, but nevertheless being driven forward by the musical needs of the ensemble (bravery).
When we “fall” in music, though, no one dies. In reality, nothing terrible happens at all. This is one of the miraculous gifts of musical performance. As we struggle across that ledge, we musicians feel the fear of failure, the fear of embarrassment should all the audience hear our errors, the fear of disappointing colleagues, mentors and family and the fear that maybe we are not “good enough” to take on the challenges we are asked to take on. Yet we go on. We learn to push through the fear and perform. We learn to control our emotions so that they do not trip us up above that precipice. As a physician, I find myself above much the same terrifying chasm when treating a critically ill child whose family have placed their treasured little boy or girl in my hands. But I have been there before and I have learned to perform at my best even while experiencing the terror of failure and its attendant consequences.
What is music education worth? It is where we will plant the seeds of our communities, and grow our future leaders. It is where we foster the individual courage and perseverance that it takes to fight for the things that are good in this world.