Originally Posted by rharv
I once wrote an essay in college about how much a musicians brain works while playing
It's amazing how much we do without even thinking about it.

That was really the draw for me to this thread initially, hoping people appreciate how intertwined we are with music, and how music helps our brains.
I know it sounds silly in this day and age but we need to keep music in our schools.
I agree that we need to keep and even increase music in our (US) K-12 schools. Personally, I had next to none in school and none as an adult. It would be interesting to hear from folks in Canada, Europe or Australia on this subject from their school perspective.

The problem is that there are only so many hours in a school day and so many school days in a year. Imho we also need to prioritize, STEM, history, civics, language and critical thinking skills so that youngsters are prepared for jobs, careers and citizenship in the 21st century, beyond just music.

Care to share your essay?

Levitin doesn’t spend a lot of time on music “education” per-se but he does say:

Many of the greatest musicians of our era lacked formal training, including Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Eric Clapton, Eddie Van Halen, Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell. And in classical music, George Gershwin, Mussorgsky and David Helfgott are among those who lacked formal training, and Beethoven considered his own training to have been poor according to his diaries.

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BiaB 2026 Windows
For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.