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Learning About Music - Google Arts & Culture

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Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.

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Paint With Music - Google Arts & Culture

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Music in the Schools - Around the World in 30 Minutes - United States Marine Band

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Soleá, the title of the film, is the Spanish term for one of the most basic forms of flamenco music originating in the southern region of Spain. Soleá, or "soleares" is referred to as the "mother of flamenco" since many forms of flamenco derives from it. Soleá comes from the word "soledad", meaning loneliness or solitude.

According to the book Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Popular Culture, the Gitanos, or gypsies living in Andalucía, were fundamental in maintaining the form of flamenco through generations. The Spanish Inquisition of 1492 persecuted and expelled the Gitanos, denying public expression of their culture or beliefs. The Gitanos were able to carry forward a sound that expressed a spirit of desperation, struggle, isolation, and pride reflecting this history of persecution and social exclusion. In the late 19 th century, the flamenco sounds heard on the streets voiced by vegetable vendors were brought into cafés, the "café cantantes", and publicized the form into what is now known as the Golden Age of flamenco.

The original form of flamenco was only a voice accompanied by the rhythm of a wooden cane beating against the floor. Today, the components of flamenco include: singing, guitar playing, dance, and handclaps. One essential part to flamenco is the live interaction between the dancer and the musicians.

UNESCO declared flamenco in 2010 as one of the Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, which raises awareness on cultural heritage.

Poet and playwright García Lorca, who grew up in the southern Spanish city of Granada, published an essay about the oldest strand of flamenco. This article from The New Yorker describes this old form of flamenco and quotes Lorca who said, "I can tell when a guitarist hasn't played for singers, because there's no sensitivity or sweetness. I can hear when a guitarist hasn't played for dance, because there's no rage, there's no anger, there's no power. I can be very musical and very lyrical, but without rage and sweetness you aren't complete."

Explore this article from The New York Times, which highlights people flocking to southern Spain to train as flamenco dancers. These foreigners are helping the local economies and taking flamenco back to their home countries, including England, Germany, Israel, and Japan.

Paco de Lucía, who was mentioned in the film, was acclaimed to be one of the greatest flamenco guitarists. He died in 2014. Read more about his life and listen to some of his music in this NPR story - Paco de Lucía, Modern Superstar of Flamenco, Dies.

How can music, and the history with which it contains, make us feel more alive? Watch this TED Talk with Michael Tilson Thomas - Music and emotion through time.

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Flamenco is an art form rooted in the Spanish culture for generations. Today, flamenco is popular all over the world. This film documents a Colombian flamenco guitarist living in Seville, Spain. Explore the passion and power of flamenco and its cultural influence around the world in this lesson.

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The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra

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Benjamin Britten: (Illustrated) The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra Op.34 - with Peter Pears

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Younger children learning to play brass instruments are often excited about the mechanisms of their new instruments (the valves or slide), so the breathing in and blowing out of air is often underemphasized or completely overlooked. Programs such as The Breathing Gym offer some good suggestions that can help new brass students learn to breathe deeply and properly to effectively use air in their playing. Take a couple of deep breaths and check it out! Want to know about embouchure? Phillip Farkas' book: The Art of Brass Playing has a detailed look at the set-up of the mouth or embouchure! Read it and learn more!

Brass playing exists all over the world in a great many genres! A few current brass groups to check out include Mnozil Brass, Canadian Brass , German Brass, The Westerlies, and Amsterdam Brass. Get your toes tapping and play along!

Do brass horns have a history? Humanity has a long history of blowing air into tubing to produce sound, such as the early example of the two trumpets found in the tomb of King Tutankhamen. For a detailed and academic history of brass playing, author Anthony Baine's: Brass Instruments, Their History and Development is very thorough and describes the evolution of the instruments into their modern-day forms.

Just love music and want to learn more? Here are some "note-worthy" lessons from TED-Ed:
How playing an instrument benefits your brain - Anita Collins
Why we love repetition in music - Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis
Music as a language - Victor Wooten

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What gives the trumpet its clarion ring and the tuba its gut shaking oompah-pah? And what makes the trombone so jazzy? Al Cannon shows how these answers lie not in the brass the instruments are made of, but in the journey that air takes from the musician's lungs to the instrument's bell.

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The ukulele (sometimes abbreviated to uke) is a member of the guitar family of instruments; it generally employs four nylon or gut strings or four courses of strings.
Here's an exhibition about the ukulele at the Museum of Making Music.
You've probably heard this song. Israel Kamakawiwo'ole re-popularized the ukulele with his incredible rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
Music is a powerful communication tool--it causes us to laugh, cry, think and question. Bassist and five-time Grammy winner, Victor Wooten, asks us to approach music the same way we learn verbal language--by embracing mistakes and playing as often as possible.
Like an actor's script, a sheet of music instructs a musician on what to play (the pitch) and when to play it (the rhythm). Sheet music may look complicated, but once you've gotten the hang of a few simple elements like notes, bars and clefs, you're ready to rock. Tim Hansen hits the instrumental basics you need to read music.
Theories about the etymology of ukulele abound. The Metropolitan Museum of Art examines a few of the theories, including the one listed in the video.
This book by Jim Tranquada and John King is a great resource for the various ukulele theories and origin stories.

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Mysteries of vernacular: Ukulele - Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel

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When 19th century Portuguese travelers landed in Hawaii with a small four-stringed guitar, a member of the king's court, nicknamed Jumping Flea, or ukulele in Hawaiian, took to the instrument. Jessica Oreck and Rachael Teel explain how an affinity for the ukulele gave the instrument its name.

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As awesome as this lesson is, we've only really scratched the surface of music notation. There are many excellent websites that go into more detail about other aspects of music notation, including symbols telling a performer how loud or quietly to play (dynamics), how to play the notes (articulation and expressions), or even when not to play (what, you think that all eighty or so members of an orchestra play non-stop from start to finish)? Check out these sites for further information about general music notation:
http://www.teoria.com/tutorials/index.php
http://www.musictheory.net/lessons
http://method-behind-the-music.com/theory/notation
Music is more than just dots on a page: a massive vocabulary has evolved over the centuries to describe all kinds of minutiae within the music. There are oodles of great online music dictionaries, but by far the most comprehensive I've found is the Virginia Tech Music Dictionary. It's especially helpful because each entry has a little audio file telling you how to pronounce the word - very useful since most descriptors in music are in another language!
Feeling like a challenge? A big part of learning an instrument is training your ear to recognize the difference between notes. This is called aural or ear training. There's many websites that aim to help young musicians get their ears into tip-top shape, but this is the one I've found to be most user-friendly.

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Like an actor's script, a sheet of music instructs a musician on what to play (the pitch) and when to play it (the rhythm). Sheet music may look complicated, but once you've gotten the hang of a few simple elements like notes, bars and clefs, you're ready to rock.

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"A Tradition in Hawaiian Music: The 'Ukulele," perhaps the earliest modern exhibit of historic ukuleles, was mounted at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum at Honolulu, Hawaii in 1980 to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Madeiran craftsmen who made the first "jumping fleas" in the Islands. Featuring instruments from the collections of the Bishop Museum and Leslie Nunes, a descendant of ukulele pioneer Manuel Nunes, the exhibit ran for seven months and was memorialized with a modest typescript catalogue printed on a folded legal-sized sheet of paper. Compelling textually for the time, it was-unfortunately-not illustrated.

In September, 1993 the Honolulu Academy of Arts presented "Extraordinary Ukuleles: The Tsumura Collection from Japan," an exhibit that displayed the noteworthy collection of Akira Tsumura but ran less than four weeks. A beautifully illustrated, full-color catalogue was produced comprised of twenty-two pages printed on coated stock. Regretfully for posterity, the accompanying text did little to illuminate the pictures. Other, recent exhibitions on the East and West coasts have produced no catalogues at all, understandable considering the prohibitive costs of photography, preparation, printing, warehousing and distribution.

The Museum of Making Music's exhibit, "The Ukulele & You: America's Love Affair with the Ukulele," was also destined to become just a memory until one passionate collector, Geoff Rezek, stepped up with a monetary gift to enable production of an online catalogue, thereby negating many of the costs associated with traditional print media. However, it should be noted that, like its predecessors, this catalogue is imperfect since it was not part of the plan from the exhibition's inception. Timing played an important role in what is presented here: because the grant was offered after the exhibit closed, many of the instruments had already been returned to their owners and were not photographed. What is left is like found art.

It's necessary therefore to judge the online catalogue on its own merits; any perceived deficiencies are likely to arise only in the minds of those persons who saw the physical installation in Carlsbad. It is neither a chronicle of a definitive historical exhibit nor a sampling of exquisite hand-made one-offs. While the original show contained elements of both, it concentrated mainly on mass-produced instruments marketed to the American public beginning in 1915. The online catalogue preserves this core component and for the first time includes detailed front, back and side images of the collection along with physical descriptions, attributions and probable dates of manufacture.

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"A Tradition in Hawaiian Music: The 'Ukulele," perhaps the earliest modern exhibit of historic ukuleles, was mounted at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum at Honolulu, Hawaii in 1980 to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Madeiran craftsmen who made the first "jumping fleas" in the Islands.

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Rhythm in a box: The story of the cajon drum - Paul Jennings

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Many modern musical instruments are complicated pieces of machinery with many moving parts. But the cajon is simply a drum and a stand and a seat all in one box. Paul Jennings explains the history behind the cajon and how it has become one of the most versatile and popular percussion instruments in the world today.

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Still have some lingering questions or thoughts? Read or listen to this from NPR and think some more! Do Orchestras Really Need Conductors?This link: The fifty greatest conductors of all time will give you more insight into exactly what a conductor means to an orchestra! What Does A Conductor Do? is another great resource!Finally, Demystifying Conducting: The Connection Between Gesture and Music will certainly answer anymore questions you might have!Ever wonder, How do orchestras play in sync? Watch this!

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Still have some lingering questions or thoughts? Read or listen to this from NPR and think some more! Do Orchestras Really Need Conductors?This link: The fifty greatest conductors of all time will give you more insight into exactly what a conductor means to an orchestra! What Does A Conductor Do?

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How do orchestras play in sync? Tom Allen explains!

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The Language of Conducting | Darko Butorac | TEDxUMontana

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Have you ever wondered whether music conductors actually influence their orchestras?

They seem important. After all, they're standing in the middle of the stage and waving their hands. But the musicians all have scores before them that tell them what to play. If you took the conductor away, could the orchestra manage on its own?

A new study aims to answer this question. Yiannis Aloimonos, of the University of Maryland, and several colleagues recruited the help of orchestral players from Ferrara, Italy.

They installed a tiny infrared light at the tip of an (unnamed) conductor's baton. They also placed similar lights on the bows of the violinists in the orchestra. The scientists then surrounded the orchestra with infrared cameras.

When the conductor waved the baton, and the violinists moved their bows, the moving lights created patterns in space, which the cameras captured. Computers analyzed the infrared patterns as signals: Using mathematical techniques originally designed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Clive Granger, Aloimonos and his colleagues analyzed whether the movements of the conductor were linked to those of the violinists.

The scientists hypothesized that if the movement of the conductor could predict the movements of the violinists, then the conductor was clearly leading the players. But if the conductor's movements could not predict the movement of the violinists, then it was really the players who were in charge.

"You have a signal that is originating from the conductor, because he is moving his hands and his body," Aloimonos explained. "And then the players, they perceive that signal, and they create another signal by moving the bows of the violin appropriately. So you have some sort of sensorimotor conversation."

(The research study is part of a larger project where Aloimonos is trying to figure out if human movements share something in common with human language; he suspects both are not only governed by a grammar, but that both may be based on similar processes in the brain.)

Aloimonos said the study found that conductors were leading the violinists - the movement of the conductors predicted the movement of the violinists, not the other way around.

But the study found more: The scientists had two conductors lead the same orchestra. One was a veteran who exercised an iron grip over the violinists. The other was an amateur.

"What we found is the more the influence of the conductor to the players, the more aesthetic - aesthetically pleasing the music was overall," Aloimonos said.

Music experts who listened to the performance of the orchestra under the control of the two conductors found the version produced by the authoritarian conductor superior. Remember, these experts didn't know which version was being led by the veteran conductor and which by the amateur. All they heard was the music.

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Have you ever wondered whether music conductors actually influence their orchestras? They seem important. After all, they're standing in the middle of the stage and waving their hands. But the musicians all have scores before them that tell them what to play. If you took the conductor away, could the orchestra manage on its own?

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Demystifying Conducting: The Connection Between Gesture and Music | The New York Times

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A great conductor illuminates music you thought you knew in a way that you couldn't possibly have imagined. Here are 50 of the finest, with recording recommendations

Born and raised in Milan, Abbado studied with Hans Swarowsky in Vienna. He made his La Scala debut in 1960 and was the house's music director from 1968 to 1986. He headed the Vienna State Opera (1986-91), London Symphony Orchestra (1979-87) and succeeded Karajan at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic (1989-2002). He founded the European Union Youth Orchestra, Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and re-established the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, and is closely associated with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

Recommended recording

Bruckner Symphony No 9

Lucerne Festival Orchestra / Claudio Abbado (DG)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Marin Alsop has been lucky in ensuring that recording is an integral part of her musical life - in this media-dominated age it's very important to have a calling card and what follows in this special digital edition reveals a very impressive calling card indeed. It also reveals the remarkable breadth of her musical sympathies - not only is she a very fine Brahms conductor but she's totally at home in the music of John Adams; she can conduct Bernstein with a complete grasp of the idiom (and inspire orchestras to do the same) and in the next concert give us Bartók performance alive to every rhythmic subtlety or gradation of colour. And with Naxos a regular recording partner, she has cleverly chosen a label that comes with no baggage or long tradition - it's about uniting music-lovers with great music, and in Alsop's case, invariably very fine performances too. Alsop is currently music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Recommended recording

Bernstein Chichester Psalms

Bournemouth Symphony Chorus & Orchestra / Marin Alsop (Naxos)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Born in London to Italian and French parents, Barbirolli was closely associated with English music, particularly as a wonderful interpreter of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, but he was also a great Mahler interpreter and also superb in Puccini (his set of Madama Butterfly is one of the great recordings). After an unhappy period at the helm of the New York PO where he succeeded Arturo Toscanini, he returned to the UK and headed the Hallé Orchestra for the rest of life, creating a world-class ensemble. He conducted the best-selling EMI disc of Elgar's Sea Pictures and Cello Concerto putting both Jacqueline du Pré and Dame Janet Baker on the musical map.

Recommended recording

Elgar Cello Concerto. Sea Pictures

Jacqueline du Pré, Janet Baker; Philharmonia Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra / Sir John Barbirolli (Warner Classics)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
A child prodigy who played for Furtwängler, Barenboim's professional career goes back 62 years. In his early twenties he recorded all the Beethoven piano sonatas and concertos, works he's returned to throughout his career. He took up conducting in 1966 and has combined a dual career ever since. Posts he has held include heading the Orchestre de Paris, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Staatskapelle Berlin. A Bayreuth regular he now leads Berlin's Staatsoper and Milan's La Scala. He is a co-founder of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

Recommended recording

Elgar Symphony No 1

Staatskapelle Berlin / Daniel Barenboim (Decca Classics)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Apart from his podium skills - which embraced a huge amount of music in numerous different styles - Beecham was one of British music's greatest patrons, spending a number of fortunes on orchestras and concerts. He founded both the RPO and LPO, and recorded extensively for EMI.

Recommended recording

Delius Orchestral Works

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Sir Thomas Beecham (Warner Classics)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Like no other musician of his age, Bernstein was able to straddle the extremes of the musical world - an intellectual, a composer who wrote complex symphonies and 12-tone music but who was equally happy playing piano and writing Broadway musicals, able to take his adoring public with him down most of the roads he chose to travel.

Recommended recording

Bernstein Candide

Sols; London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus / Leonard Bernstein (DG)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
A noted interpreter of the music of Mozart, Strauss and Wagner, Böhm is most closely associated with the Vienna State Opera where he appeared frequently.

Recommended recording

Beethoven Symphony No 6 Schubert Symphony No 5

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra / Karl Böhm (DG)

With his meticulous conducting technique and phenomenal ear, Boulez championed the music of fellow French composers, and performed a vast repertoire, old and new.

Recommended recording

Ravel Piano Concertos

Krystian Zimerman; Cleveland Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra / Pierre Boulez (DG)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Boult was one of the UK's greatest conductors with a repertoire that embraced a huge amount of new music. An exponent of Elgar's music, Boult also gave UK premieres of music by Bartók, Stravinsky and the Second Viennese School.

Recommended recording

Elgar Symphonies Nos 1 & 2. In the South

London Philharmonic Orchestra / Sir Adrian Boult (Warner Classics)

Romanian-born and Berlin-trained Celibidache pursued an unusual career, largely due to his refusal to make any commercial recordings. Since his death, numerous radio broadcasts have been issued commercially.

Recommended recording

Mahler Kindertotenlieder

Brigitte Fassbaender; Münchner Philharmoniker / Sergiu Celibidache (Münchner Philharmoniker)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Music Director of Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra and Music Director designate of La Scala, Milan, Chailly is one of today's great conductors. His very broad musical sympathies have been honed with the Berlin RSO (1982-88) and Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (1988-2004), and, in the opera house, Bologna's Teatro Comunale (1986-93). He has recorded for Decca since 1982.

Recommended recording

Brahms The Symphonies

Gewandhausorchester / Riccardo Chailly (Decca Classics)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Davis led many of the world's great orchestras, including the BBC SO, LSO, Bavarian RSO and Staatskapelle Dresden, as well as leading Covent Garden from 1971 to 1987. A noted Mozartian, Davis's repertoire also embraced Tippett, Sibelius, Berlioz and Nielsen. His discography was focused on Philips, RCA and LSO Live.

Recommended recording

Berlioz Symphonie fantastique

London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Colin Davis (LSO Live)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Laurence Equilbey is the conductor and Musical Director of Insula Orchestra and the choir accentus. The two 'Transcriptions' albums of choral music, Fauré's Requiem (with Sandrine Piau) and the album 'Schubert: Nacht & Träume' are all excellent. The Fauré was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award in 2009: 'Equilbey shapes and caresses every single phrase, every line, every note with the kind of loving care few conductors ever lavish on such a well known and technically undemanding score. The result is a genuinely revelatory reading.'

Recommended recording

Fauré Requiem

Sandrine Piau; Stéphane Degout; Accentus & Members of Orchestre National de France / Laurence Equilbey (Naive)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
JoAnn Falletta is the Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and Music Director Laureate of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. Falletta's numerous recordings for the Naxos label with the Buffalo PO have received many awards and range across a wide repertoire, from John Corigliano ( Mr Tambourine Man, which won two Grammys in 2008) to Respighi's Roman Trilogy and Josef Suk's Fairy Tale.

Recommended recording

Respighi Vetrate di chiesa

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra / JoAnn Falletta (Naxos)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
One of the conducting giants of the first half of the 20th century, Wilhelm Furtwängler was also a composer. His life-long devotion to the music of Beethoven resulted in a series of almost legendary recordings. He worked with a number of German orchestras before heading - concurrently - the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (1922-28) and the Berlin Philharmonic (1922-45, and 1952-54). He remained in Nazi Germany during the war, a move that stirred up a controversy that continues to rage, and which was explored in Ronald Harwood's play Taking Sides (1995, and subsequently filmed).

Recommended recording

Beethoven Symphony No 9

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth Höngen, Hans Hopf, Otto Edelmann; Bayreuth Festival Orchestra / Wilhelm Furtwängler (Warner Classics)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
One of the great advocates of period-instrument performance, Gardiner's interpretations have revitalised many people's appreciation of the great choral and symphonic repertoire. He founded the Monteverdi Choir in 1966 and followed it in 1978 with the English Baroque Soloists (and later, in 1990, with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique). His recordings have been hugely successful and in 2000 he toured (and recorded) all of Bach's sacred cantatas. He has received more Gramophone Awards than any other living artist. He conducts a broad repertoire, often with orchestras other than his own, and has a great reputation in French repertoire (particularly Berlioz) of which he has recorded much.

Recommended recording

Beethoven Missa Solemnis

Charlotte Margiono, Catherine Robbin, William Kendall, Alastair Miles; Monteverdi Choir, Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique / John Eliot Gardiner (Archiv)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Probably the world's busiest conductor, Valery Gergiev has held a number of formal conductor positions, including with the London Symphony Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Mariinsky Theatre, Kirov Opera, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra, and is a prolific recording artist and guest conductor.

Recommended recording

Tchaikovsky Piano Concertos Nos 1 & 2

Denis Matsuev; Mariinsky Orchestra / Valery Gergiev (Mariinsky)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
A former viola player in Rome's Santa Cecilia Orchestra, Giulini played for many of the greats before taking up the baton himself. Legendary opera productions and recordings (sometimes with Maria Callas) established his theatrical credentials, but later he concentrated on the symphonic repertoire.

Recommended recording

Mozart Don Giovanni

Sols; Philharmonia Orchestra / Carlo Maria Giulini (Warner Classics)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Jane Glover's recordings of the Mozart and Haydn symphonies with the London Mozart Players (of whom Glover was Music Director from 1984-91) put her on the musical map. She was Music Director of Glyndebourne Touring Opera from 1981-5 and Director of Opera at the Royal Academy of Music from 2009-2016.

Recommended recording

Mozart Symphonies Nos. 25, 29 & 33

London Mozart Players / Jane Glover (ASV)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla's tenure with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has produced several outstanding recordings, but perhaps none finer than the album of Weinberg's Symphonies Nos 2 and 21 which was Gramophone's Recording of the Year in 2020. In his review of that album, David Fanning wrote: 'The appearance of these two symphonies on an illustrious label is another clear pointer to Weinberg's 'arrival'. Unsurprisingly, the depth and realism of DG's recording are superb, and the all-important spatial distancing of the soloists in the Kaddish Symphony is beautifully captured. All in all, this has to be one of the most important symphonic releases of the year.'

Recommended recording

Weinberg Symphonies Nos. 2 & 21

Gidon Kremer; Kremerata Baltica, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (DG)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Emmanuelle Haïm is the founder and Artistic Director of Le Concert d'Astrée and has made several brilliant recordings with them for Erato and Warner Classics, including Handel's Italian Cantatas with Sabine Devieilhe and Léa Desandre, which was Gramophone's Recording of the Month in December 2018 and 'Arcadian Duets', which won a Gramophone Award in 2003.

Recommended recording

Handel Italian cantatas

Sabine Devieilhe, Léa Desandre; Le Concert d'Astrée / Emmanuelle Haïm (Erato)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Bernard Haitink, one of the great conductors of our day, headed the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from 1961 to 1988, establishing his reputation in the core works of the repertoire.

Recommended recording

Bruckner Symphony No 9

London Symphony Orchestra / Bernard Haitink (LSO Live)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
One of the great pioneers of the period-instrument movement, Harnoncourt founded his Concentus Musicus Wien in 1953 and, recording extensively, helped create a new audience for this historically informed approach. He later took these lessons back to tradional ensembles, regularly conducting the VPO, BPO and Royal Concertgebouw orchestras, as well as forging a fruitful relationship with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (with whom he recorded the Beethoven symphonies, winning them Gramophone's Recording of the Year in 1992).

Recommended recording

Beethoven Complete Symphonies

Chamber Orchestra of Europe / Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Teldec)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
The son of conductor Arvīds Jansons, Jansons Jnr studied in St Petersburg with Mravinsky and then with Swarowsky and Karajan. His Tchaikovsky symphonies with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra (whose music director he was from 1979 to 2000) put him on the map and in 1997 he took over the Pittsburgh Symphony. He became music director of the Bavarian RSO in 2003 and chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra the following year.

Recommended recording

Beethoven The Symphonies and Reflections

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra / Mariss Jansons (BR Klassik)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Recipient of Gramophone's 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award, Neeme Järvi appeared on the musical scene at about the same time as the CD, and the timing couldn't have been better. In BIS and Chandos he had record companies who, in those days of the headily blank canvas of the CD catalogue, decided to do something a bit different. Rather than take on the Karajans and Soltis in the central repertoire, they decided to explore music that the majors would take some time getting around to, if at all. And so it was the Sibelius and Prokofiev symphonies rather than the Beethoven and Brahms, Stenhammar rather than Schumann. And in Järvi they had a conductor who simply thrived in the recording studio, and his producers would go home after a session with hours of music-making rather than yards of tape of the conductor lecturing the players. Järvi's modus operandi would be to say to his players, as they confronted unfamiliar music, 'Watch me. Follow me' - and they did, often playing better than they ever thought was possible.

Recommended recording

Prokofiev Symphonies Nos 1-7

Royal Scottish National Orchestra / Neeme Järvi (Chandos)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
For all the achievements of Edison, and Fred Gaisberg, and Compton Mackenzie, to name a few, in creating records and a market for them, classical music's industrial revolution was born on 19 January, 1946 when Walter Legge met Herbert von Karajan in Vienna. The wheel stopped turning, to the chagrin of record executives the world over, on 16 July, 1989, when Karajan died at his home in Anif, outside Salzburg. Listeners have moved on, even if not all record companies have, to a more pluralistic age and perhaps one, in Karajan's prophecy, where 'we shall be overwhelmed with things that are tenth-rate'. His story is the story of that 'classical record industry', its self-aggrandising triumphs and moments of sublimity as well as grotesquerie.

Recommended recording

Mahler Symphony No 9

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / Herbert von Karajan (DG)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Son of the great German conductor Erich Kleiber, Carlos - because of the rarity of his performances and his superb musicianship - achieved legendary status during his lifetime. He conducted fewer than 100 orchestral concerts in his entire career. He left a small but critically admired recorded legacy with Beethoven's Fifth (DG) arguably his most celebrated disc.

Recommended recording

Beethoven Symphonies Nos 5 & 7

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra / Carlos Kleiber (DG)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Despite a hugely successful early career, Klemperer's reputation lies on the remarkable Indian Summer during the 1950s and 1960s when he recorded with the Philharmonia Orchestra for EMI whose principal conductor he was from 1959 until his death. As a young man he worked with Mahler: he conducted the off-stage brass in a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony and assisted at the premiere of the Eighth Symphony. He worked at a number of European opera houses: Hamburg, Bremen, Strasbourg, Cologne and Wiesbaden, before headed the Kroll Opera in Berlin where he gained a reputation for champion new works. Forced out of Germany by the Nazis, he became music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1939 but illness robbed him of the top job, though he continued to appear as a guest conductor. After the war he joined the Budapest Opera but left when the Communist regime was established. He undertook a lot of guest work before being invited by Walter Legge to work with the newly established Philharmonia Orchestra.

Recommended recording

Beethoven Symphony No 9

Aase Nordmo-Løvberg, Christa Ludwig, Waldemar Kmentt, Hans Hotter; Philharmonia Chorus & Orchestra / Otto Klemperer (Testament)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Son of violinist Jan Kubelík, Rafael trained in Prague and made his professional debut aged 19. He headed the Chicago SO for three unhappy years from 1950, then moved to Covent Garden (1955-58) before becoming music director of the Bavarian RSO, a collaboration that resulted in some glorious music-making.

Recommended recording

Mahler Symphony No 1. Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra / Rafael Kubelík (DG)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
A child prodigy - he first conducted at the age of nine - Maazel went on to become one of the leading conductors of our time. Among his many posts, he was Music Director of the New York Philharmonic (2002-09), of the Bavarian RSO (1993-2002) and of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (198896); he also held positions at Vienna State Opera (1982-84), Orchestre Nationale de France (1977-91), Cleveland Orchestra (1972-82) and Deutsche Oper Berlin (1965-71). When, following Karajan's death in 1989, he was passed over in favour of Claudio Abbado as the Berlin Philharmonic's Principal Conductor, he took umbrage and never conducted the orchestra again.

Recommended recording

Ravel L'enfant et les Sortileges & L'heure Espagnole

Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de la RTF, Berliner Philharmoniker / Lorin Maazel (DG)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
A supremely versatile conductor, the Australian Mackerras was a specialist in the music of Handel, Mozart, Dvořák and Janáček, the latter for whom he was the composer's greatest advocate.

Recommended recording

Mozart Symphonies Nos 38-41

Scottish Chamber Orchestra / Sir Charles Mackerras (Linn Records)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Susanna Mälkki is the Chief Conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Mälkki's Bartók recordings for the BIS label are particularly outstanding: Bluebeard's Castle, The Wooden Prince, The Miraculous Mandarin Suite and Piano Concerto No 3 (with pianist Andreas Haefliger). Of The Wooden Prince recording, Andrew Farach-Colton wrote: 'We've had some superb accounts of this ballet over the years - Kocsis (Hungaroton, 6/07) has been a personal favourite - and Mälkki stands with the best of them. Indeed, given the excellence of BIS's engineering, hers is easily a prime recommendation.'

Recommended recording

Bartók The Wooden Prince & The Miraculous Mandarin Suite

Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra / Susanna Mälkki (BIS)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Founder, in 1958, and conductor of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Marriner has also held posts with the Los Angeles Chamber, Minnesota and Stuttgart Radio orchestras. With the ASMF, he has probably made more recordings than any other conductor.

Recommended recording

Mozart Piano Concertos

Alfred Brendel; Academy of St Martin in the Fields / Neville Marriner (Decca Classics)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Still the only Indian musician to achieve major international renown in the classical music world, Mehta is music director for life of the Israel PO. Vienna-trained, he has headed orchestras in Montreal, Los Angeles and New York.

Recommended recording

Puccini La fanciulla del West

Carol Neblett (Minnie), Plácido Domingo (Dick Johnson), Sherrill Milnes (Jack Rance) Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden / Zubin Mehta (DG)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
A man who played for and met Brahms, made music with Saint-Saëns, worked with and premiered the music of Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel, and was remembered by the late Sir Georg Solti in his recently published memoirs as 'one of most brilliant conductors of the first half of the twentieth century'. A musician is unlikely to have a reputation founded on anything other than recordings. But for Monteux, recording was no substitute for the real thing, since the method, as he saw it, precluded spontaneity. Fortunately there were enough moments during Monteux's 40-odd years of venturing into the studio where conditions allowed his illuminating and enlivening art to thrive. Early recording triumphs included the first-ever completed recording of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, prompting, in March 1930, the cherishably quaint Gramophone reaction, 'the whole thing is amazingly thrilling, if in parts, rather horrible'.

Recommended recording

Franck Symphony in D minor
Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Pierre Monteux
Muti was Music Director of the (New) Philharmonia from 1973-82, the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1980-92 and La Scala from 1986-2005. He has conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 2010.

Recommended recording

Shostakovich Symphony No 13, 'Babi Yar'

Alexey Tikhomirov (bass) Chicago Symphony Orchestra & Chorus / Riccardo Muti (CSO Resound)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Born and trained in Hungary, Ormandy is famed for his long tenure at the helm of the Philadelphia Orchestra where he created a sound and style that is still discernible in the ensemble today, 21 years after his death.

Recommended recording

The Columbia Legacy

Eugene Ormandy (Sony Classical)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Seiji Ozawa chalked up his first Gramophone appearance in September 1968 with a warmly received pairing of Messiaen's Turangalîla-symphonie and Takemitsu's November Steps; and in a review of Ozawa's The Rite of Spring with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Edward Greenfield, in March 1969, pretty much set the tone for how Ozawa has been assessed in this magazine ever since: 'I have never known a more balletic performance than this,' he wrote, 'balletic in the sense that Ozawa makes the music dance.'

Recommended recording

Rachmaninov Piano Concertos Nos 1 & 2

Krystian Zimerman; Boston Symphony Orchestra / Seiji Ozawa (DG)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Music Director of both the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, and Rome's Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Pappano will replace Simon Rattle as Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra in 2023.

Recommended recording

Verdi Aida

Sols; Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia / Antonio Pappano (Warner Classics)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Liverpool-born Rattle made his name during his long tenure at the helm of the CBSO, creating an ensemble of world class and with whom he recorded extensively for EMI. In 2002 he succeeded Claudio Abbado as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and has been the Music Director of the London Symphony Orchestra since 2017. He will leave the LSO to lead the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2023.

Recommended recording

Gershwin Porgy and Bess

Sols; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Glyndebourne Chorus / Simon Rattle (Warner Classics)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
For the audience the podium manner was outwardly impassive; for the players it was electric with inner vitality; a minutely contained and controlled but rich variety of body language that optimally communicated all Reiner's intentions. In 1953 he became Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which, under him, according to Stravinsky, became 'the most precise and flexible orchestra in the world'.

Recommended recording

Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Hungarian Sketches

Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Fritz Reiner (RCA Living Stereo)

Sir Georg Solti was one of the most respected and - through his ground-breaking recordings with producer John Culshaw - influential conductors of the 20th century. A pupil of Bartók, Weiner and Dohnányi in Budapest, Solti worked with Toscanini in Salzburg. He headed the opera in Frankfurt before taking over the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In 1969 he became music director of the Chicago SO, a post he kept for 22 years; he also held positions with the LPO and Orchestre de Paris. An exclusive Decca artist he left a vast discography of which the complete Ring is perhaps the jewel.

Recommended recording

Mahler Symphony No 8

Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Georg Solti (Decca)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
Few conductors have enjoyed as long and fruitful a career as Leopold Stokowski, to say nothing of his impact on the development ot twentieth-century orchestral playing. On the podium he exuded equal doses of glamour and showmanship. His mesmerizing, baton-less hands were shaken on screen by Mickey Mouse in Fantasia and brilliantly lampooned by a bewigged Bugs Bunny in the Warner Bros. cartoon Long Haired Hare. He premiered many important works, including Varèse's Ameriques, Schoenberg's Piano Concerto and Ives's Symphony No 4.

The Hungarian conductor's greatest legacy is the Cleveland Orchestra, which he raised to the pinnacle of virtuosity and ensemble. Already one of Europe's leading conductors, Szell took over the Ohio orchestra in 1946 and, until his death in 1970, made a series of outstanding recordings of the core repertoire. He was also an admired guest conductor (both in concert and in the studio).

Recommended recording

Brahms Double Concerto for Violin & Cello

Mstislav Rostropovich (cello), David Oistrakh (violin) Cleveland Orchestra / George Szell (Warner Classics)

Celebrating 20 years at the helm of the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas has held posts with the London Symphony Orchestra and founded the New World Symphony in Miami. He has recorded extensively for DG, RCA and the SFS's own label.

Recommended recording

Copland The Modernist

San Francisco Symphony Orchestra / Michael Tilson Thomas (Red Seal)
Read the review in the Reviews Database
After making his debut aged 19 swapping his cello for a baton and conducting Aida - to huge success - his career never faltered. He led the premieres of La bohème and Pagliacci, and later headed La Scala (1921-29). He worked frequently in the US and, after the Fascist take-over of Italy settled in New York where NBC created an orchestra for him and he broadcast and recorded extensively, playing much American fare.

Recommended recording

Beethoven Symphony No 5 & 7

New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra / Arturo Toscanini (Naxos)

Walter made his debut in Cologne and later worked in Hamburg where he met Gustav Mahler. He fled to the US in 1939, where he enjoyed a revitalised career at the helm of the Columbia SO, formed especially for him to record with.

Recommended recording

Bruno Walter - The Complete Columbia Album Collection (Sony)

The Australian Simone Young has held posts at a number of orchestras: Principal Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic (1998-2002); Artistic Director of the Australian Opera (2001-2003); Principal Guest Conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon; Artistic Director of the Hamburg State Opera and Chief Music Director of the Hamburg Philharmonic (2005-2015). Young's Bruckner symphony-cycle with the Hamburg Philharmonic is certainly a career highlight, with the recording of the First Symphony being a Gramophone Editor's Choice in 2011. Of that album, Rob Cowan wrote: 'Here is a Bruckner conductor who understands where the music is going and the contextual significance of detail. Young seems at one with Bruckner's sound world, how the music breathes and how to balance weighty brass without letting them overwhelm the rest of the orchestra. And she feels the First Symphony's abundant poetry, especially in the first movement's second subject and that wonderful moment towards the end of the Adagio where there are such vivid premonitions of the Ninth's Adagio.'

Recommended recording

Bruckner Symphony No 1

Hamburg Philharmonic / Simone Young (Oehms)
Read the review in the Reviews Database

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A great conductor illuminates music you thought you knew in a way that you couldn't possibly have imagined. Here are 50 of the finest, with recording recommendations Born and raised in Milan, Abbado studied with Hans Swarowsky in Vienna. He made his La Scala debut in 1960 and was the house's music director from 1968 to 1986.

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How playing an instrument benefits your brain

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How playing an instrument benefits your brain

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The connections between brain research and music have been ongoing for the past two decades, but there are actually a lot of different areas within the research, and it is easy to confuse them.

Firstly there is the area of music and the brain, which is about how we process music in our brains. Daniel Levitin wrote a great book called This is Your Brain on Music ( http://daniellevitin.com/publicpage/books/this-is-your-brain-on-music/) which is all about how we process music.

Then there is the area of music therapy and the brain, which is about how we can use music to assist people who have had brain injuries, physical trauma or have been born with a disability, to improve their physical and cognitive function. It is also being used extensively with people who are suffering from dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Oliver Sacks wrote a great book called Musicophillia ( http://musicophilia.com) and Norman Doige has a book on brain plasticity called The Brain that Changes itself ( http://www.normandoidge.com/normandoidge.com/MAIN.html) that talks about the power of music therapy.

Then there is the area of music education and the brain, which is about how music learning can impact on general brain development in children and adults. In the research it is called music training and is generally understood to be the formal and sequential learning of music, through playing music as well as appreciating and listening to it. There are a number of research institutes that are working in this part of the field, the Dana Foundation ( http://www.dana.org), the BRAMS Institute ( http://www.brams.org/en/) and the Music, Mind and Wellbeing Institute ( http://cmmw.unimelb.edu.au).

Keeping up with the research is tricky if you are not a neuroscientists. Here is a resource that can keep you up to date with the research, and here is a list of the references that were used to support the writing of the script for this lesson.

Research into the nature of how the corpus callosum impacts on the brains functions, and how learning a musical instrument impacts on this, is ongoing. Recently, neuroscientists have dug deeper and found that changes in the corpus callosum may be dependent on the type of musical training a musician does and could be localized to the anterior corpus callosum. This area has shown an increase in bi-manual coordination (where the brain coordinates simultaneous multiple movements like using a knife and fork). Here is some of the latest research.

Sometimes it is hard to explain all of this research to someone else so here is a short video you can share with parents, teachers and students about how music education can enhance brain development.

Learning to sing or play a musical instrument can help disadvantaged children improve their reading skills, US research suggests.

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How playing an instrument benefits your brain - Anita Collins

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When you listen to music, multiple areas of your brain become engaged and active. But when you actually play an instrument, that activity becomes more like a full-body brain workout. What's going on? Anita Collins explains the fireworks that go off in musicians' brains when they play, and examines some of the long-term positive effects of this mental workout.

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The benefits of music education has been researched for decades. Most recently neuroscientists have been excited about the significant differences they have seen between the brain functions of musicians, when compared with non-musicians. It has become clear that music education before the age of 7 has the greatest benefits to brain development. Furthermore it has been found that it only takes, at the very lest, an hour a week of structured, formal music education to make permanent and positive changes to the brain functions of every child. This film has been made for music educators, parents, principals and policy makers to help get across the importance of music education in every child's education.

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Musical Training Can Improve Language & Reading

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Musical Training Can Improve Language & Reading

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After two years of musical training, the results showed the musical group was faster and more accurate at distinguishing one sound from another, particularly when there was background noise, compared to a group that did not participate in any musical activity.

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Musical training 'can improve language and reading'

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After two years of musical training, the results showed the musical group was faster and more accurate at distinguishing one sound from another, particularly when there was background noise, compared to a group that did not participate in any musical activity.

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Michael Tilson Thomas: Music and emotion through time

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In this epic overview, Michael Tilson Thomas traces the development of classical music through the development of written notation, the record, and the re-mix.

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Who exactly was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? Read a bit of his biography here and watch a mini-bio at: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Interested in learning more about Mozart and his connection with Freemasonry? Visit this site.

What is the complete version of the Magic Flute like? Don't have time for that? Try a synopsis of Magic Flute! Click here.

Mozart's Magic Flute is full of symbolism. Unlocking Magic Flute's Mysteries by Peter G. Davis will help you sort it all out. Now, take a moment and listen to and read NPR's: Mozart Meets The Masons: 'The Magic Flute.' For more on the symbolism, listen to this.

Interested in an animated version of the Magic Flute? Then, click here! Songs from this opera are so popular, you probably have heard or experienced them before somewhere. THE MAGIC FLUTE IN POP CULTURE may just prompt your memory enough so that you might recall when and where.

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The secrets of Mozart's "Magic Flute" - Joshua Borths

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Die Zauberflöte" ("The Magic Flute") is widely regarded as one of the most influential operas in history. And while it may seem like a childish fairytale at first glance, it's actually full of subversive symbolism. Joshua Borths explains how many elements of "The Magic Flute" were inspired by Mozart's somewhat controversial involvement with Freemasonry.

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The Magic Flute by W A Mozart  BBC Animation (Full 30 mins)

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Pianist & Composer | Mini Bio | BIO

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Enthralled by this wonderful music? Want to learn more about its creator and the music itself? Here's a link to an Encyclopedia Britannica article about Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. The article was written by Professor Betsy Schwarm, who also wrote, and provided the voice for this Ted ED lesson. It includes the full texts of the poems that were published with the music; these tell us what seasonal scenes Vivaldi had in mind for the music. The poems are given both in the original Italian and also in English translations. With the poems in hand so as to have even greater detail, listen again to one (or all) of The Four Seasons, and try to determine when the music has moved on to the next line - or the next verse - of the poem.

Here's a YouTube video of all of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, played in concert by the Dutch violinist Janine Jansen with an orchestra called the Amsterdam Sinfonietta. The entire video is about forty minutes long, as each of the concertos is roughly nine minutes long, and all four are performed. However, Spring comes up first, so let's begin with that; you can go on to the others if you have time. Watch the performance with attention, noticing things such as intensity, body language, eye contact between performers, and so on. How does watching - rather than just listening - bring out more about what's happening in the music?

Additionally, notice the small keyboard instrument in the middle of the ensemble. It's a " harpsichord," which is a predecessor of the piano. Although their keys are laid out in the same way, harpsichords sound different from pianos due to having a different mechanism. The strings inside the instrument are plucked, rather than being punched, which gives the instrument a rather light sound that can be hard to hear in louder music. By watching the Jansen video again, you can likely pick out the sound of the harpsichord, at least occasionally; he doesn't play every single moment, but it's there. This was a very popular feature in most music of Vivaldi's time in history, which in music is called the Baroque Era.

Here's a YouTube video of a composition by one of Vivaldi's contemporaries. Take some time to listen and compare. It's the Brandenburg Concerto no. 4 by Johann Sebastian Bach, and it has some commonalities with Vivaldi's Spring. Both have three movements - a fast one, then a slow one, then a fast one - and both begin with a "ritornello" form. However, the instruments are not all the same, and the Bach piece isn't "program music", so there's no story to be told. Also, the two composers had different reputations in their time; one was a major pop star, the other a composer with a more intellectual reputation. Can you theorize as to which was which and why? What do you see and hear that's different from one piece to the other? You might especially compare the third (last) movements of the two concertos, as the differences are most noticeable there.

The version of The Four Seasons played throughout this video comes from the European Archive, which you download here.

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Why should you listen to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"? - Betsy Schwarm

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Light, bright, and cheerful, "The Four Seasons" by Antonio Vivaldi is some of the most familiar of all early 18th century music, featured in numerous films and television commercials. But what is its significance, and why does it sound that way? Betsy Schwarm uncovers the underlying narrative of this musical masterpiece.

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Natalya would like to acknowledge the amazing support of her friends Wendy Cho, Carolyn Meldgin, Antoinette Evans, Will McFaul, Aaron Williams, and her fantastic students and colleagues at Countryside School and Math Zoom, especially Chris Antonsen, Kim File, Harold Reiter, Jeffrey Huang, Kashyap Joshi, and Priscilla Wang.

Frequency and Music
Our abilities to recognize patterns in music using sine waves help to "see" innovative ways of problem-solving. For teachers, a great introduction to teaching frequency theory can be found here ( http://illuminations.nctm.org/Lesson.aspx?id=2359). Students might enjoy discussing the activity found in NCTM Illuminations to explore more with the mathematics of music.

Sound travels through energy in the form of wavelengths, which can be described using the function of the form f(x) = A sin (B x). For a nice overview of sine waves, watch The Math of Music.

Frequency theory has many interesting and unique properties, some of which lead to harmonic analysis in upper-level math classes. Where Math Meets has more exploration and analysis.

Not all frequency theories hold true. Read this webpage: The Complication with Consonance for more analysis and exploration.
Patterns and Music
A great overview of geometry of triads, along with reflection and rotation, can be viewed here the Geometry of Consonance . Some Fibonacci fans might be delighted to know this intricate and beautiful pattern can be found on piano keyboards.

Music theory studies how to use patterns to create music. An excellent analysis of Moonlight Sonata can be found here.

The final piece in this video plays a Bach piece. More information about the Fugue can be read about in a fascinating exposition, G ö del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. The "Baroque" ("broke") style has introduced hundreds to the idea of composing music using patterns, and some would argue Bach's pieces are more mathematical in nature than artistic.
About the Composer
As indicated, Beethoven was going deaf when he wrote Moonlight Sonata. Listen to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata here. The piece was widely received by his audience partly because of its moving harmony combined with a gorgeous series of triads. The movie, Beethoven Lives Upstairs, is a classic that explores the story of the musician who composed it.

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Music and math: The genius of Beethoven - Natalya St. Clair

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How is it that Beethoven, who is celebrated as one of the most significant composers of all time, wrote many of his most beloved songs while going deaf? The answer lies in the math behind his music. Natalya St. Clair employs the "Moonlight Sonata" to illustrate the way Beethoven was able to convey emotion and creativity using the certainty of mathematics.

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Elvis Presley: Rock 'n' Roll Legend | Mini Bio | BIO

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Classical ballet has been ranked as the most physically demanding professions in a recent analysis of job data. How did this tradition, which demands so very much from its participants, begin and evolve into one of the most beloved artforms in Western culture? We must look 400 years ago to the Renaissance courts of France and Italy where ballet traces it origins. Ballet began as a pastime for courtiers, kings and princes, who would perform dances in court and then invite the audience to participate. In an effort to both codify and disseminate this new dancing tradition, Louis XIV asked choreographer Pierre Beauchamp to write down the positions, which are the building blocks of classical ballet. Ballet grew in appeal and for a time was paired with singing in opéra-ballet productions. Beginning in the 1770s, ballet masters began experimenting with removing the vocal component to create a ballet d'action, harkening back to the Roman pantomime tradition. As with so many artforms, the evolution of ballet mirrored the social and cultural changes happening in Europe. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, a wealthier middle class began to emerge and desire entertainment that reflected the trend towards Romanticism. With its enormous emotive capacity, ballet fit the bill. The years between 1830 and 1850 are considered by many to be the golden age of ballet and saw the emergence of a strong preference for female dancers, or ballerinas. Women's ballet technique became increasingly virtuosic due in large part to the development of pointe work. Near the end of the 19th century, the epicenter of ballet development moved to St. Petersburg, Russia. Russian composers such as Pyotor Ilich Tchaikovsky began to work closely with choreographers to compose ballet and training programs developed what became known as the Russian school of ballet, which dominated ballet during the 20th century and produced phenoms such as Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova. The social and political upheavals of the 20th century affected and were reflected in the evolution of ballet, with a rift developing between traditional and contemporary ballet that mirrored, in part, the split between East and West after the end of World War II. Today, ballet companies around the world continue not only to preserve classical tradition, but also expand the ballet repertoire into more modern realms. Many dancers and companies are working to break down not only some of the strict hierarchies of the ballet world but also the racial and gender stereotypes that have been passed down the ballet tradition. Dancers such as Raven Wilkinson and Misty Copeland are credited with breaking barriers for women of color in ballet. For more information about the evolution of ballet, You can view this video series and visit this TedEd lesson on the origins of ballet.

Composers and Choreographers
Composers and choreographers have worked together closely throughout ballet history to create their collaborative art. Pytor Ilich Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa worked closely together on The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. The unique collaboration between composer, Igor Stravinsky, and dancer/choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky, produced perhaps one of the greatest scandals in ballet history. Their 1913 Paris premiere of Rite of Spring drew crowds because of the collaborative combination of virtuosic dancing by Ballet Russes, a company founded by impresario Sergei Diaghilev; Nijinsky's status as a ballet superstar; and Stravinsky's growing success as a composer. Though no one will really ever know exactly what took place that night, one thing is for sure--audiences were shocked. Stravinsky's score broke every rule of musical convention with its harsh, loud, and deliberately cacophonous sounds. One critic wrote, ''The music always goes to the note next to the one you expect.' The dancers seemed to convulse and jerk rather than dance in Nijinsky's ultra-modern choreography. Some say there were boos, some say there was a riot, some say missiles were thrown. Regardless of the scandal caused by Rite of Spring, the experience highlighted the power of the combination of music and movement that is central to the power of ballet. Read more about the Rite of Spring, watch excerpts of the ballet, or visit this TedEd lesson to see what all the fuss was about!

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What's the point(e) of ballet? - Ming Luke

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A baby cursed at birth. A fierce battle of good and evil. A true love awoken with a kiss. Since premiering in 1890, "The Sleeping Beauty" has become one of the most frequently staged ballets in history. So what makes this piece so beloved? And what exactly does ballet bring to this- or any other- story?

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Listen to Jennifer Homans, author of Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet, as she discusses her book and why she wrote it. Visit NYU Arts and Sciences Department to learn more about Jennifer Homans and the articles she has written.

Listen to this uplifting Fresh Air Story from NPR: The Tutu's Tale: A Cultural History Of Ballet's 'Angels,' as it discusses this amazing book and its relevance to ballet today. Find out some facts about ballet that you probably didn't know! Thinking about reading this book? Read an excerpt from Apollo's Angels here.

Love ballet? Listen to Jennifer Homan's TEDx Talk: Apollo's Angels: Why Ballet Matters. So inspired that you want to watch a ballet? Click here, sit back, and enjoy!

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The origins of ballet - Jennifer Tortorello and Adrienne Westwood

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Can you imagine a party where every movement and every visual detail were governed by a complex system of rules and procedures? For centuries, such rituals were commonplace for European nobility. And while they've gone out of fashion, we recognize the components under a familiar label: ballet.

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This interview was originally broadcast on December 13, 2010. Apollo's Angels is now available in paperback.

It is ballet season, which means many companies are performing The Nutcracker for the holidays and preparing their big shows for the winter months. Everywhere you turn these days, you can see toe shoes - but there is a deep and fascinating history to the art form that few people know.

In her new book Apollo's Angels, historian Jennifer Homans - a former professional ballet dancer herself - traces ballet's evolution over the past 400 years, and examines how changes in ballet parallel changing ideas about class structure, gender, costume, the ideal body and what the body can physically do. The book chronicles ballet's transition from the aristocratic courtier world in Europe through its place as a professional discipline in the Imperial Court of Russia, and finally as a technique performed on stages throughout the world.

Ballet's origins, Homans explains, grew out of the Renaissance court cultures of Italy and France. Dancers would perform at the royal courts - and then invite the audience members to participate.

"It was a dance that was done by courtiers and kings and princes at court in social situations," she says. "It was not a theatrical art set off from social life."

The first ballet dancers did not wear tutus or dance in satin shoes, but they did formalize the footwork patterns - known as first, second, third, fourth and fifth position - that are still used today.

"Louis XIV realized that if his art form was going to be disseminated throughout his realm and even to other European countries, he would have to find a way to write it down," Homans explains. "So he asked [choreographer] Pierre Beauchamp to write some these positions. The positions themselves are the grammars of ballet, they're the ABC's, the classical building blocks of ballet."

In ballet's early days, men were expected to perform the more extravagant and intricate footwork. It wasn't until years later, during the French Revolution, that female dancers became stars.

"During the French Revolution, the aristocratic male dancer was really discredited," she says. "The hatred and bitter animosity toward the aristocracy had direct consequences for ballet. Why should you have this aristocratic art? If you're going to take down the aristocracy, why not take down ballet, too?"

It was given an elevated form, so instead of stomping around, it became an image of the ethereal, a wispy sylph or somebody who can leave the ground or fly into the air.

By the 1830s, men were actually reviled onstage, she says.

"They're thought to be a disgrace," she says. "Female dancers take the ideals that existed in the aristocratic art form and turned them into a feminine and spiritual ideal of which they are the masters. Then you get this image of the ballerina on toe, in these more romantic-era ballets of sylphs and unrequited love and the romantic themes that carried ballet into the 19th century."

Apollo's Angels was recently named one of the top five nonfiction books of the year by the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Jennifer Homans performed with the Chicago Lyrica Opera Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet during her career as a professional ballet dancer. She is currently the dance critic for The New Republic, and teaches the history of dance at New York University, where she is a distinguished scholar-in-residence.

Interview Highlights
On Apollo's relationship to dance
"From the earliest moments of ballet, the idea was to create some kind of Apollonian image - an ideal sort of body. Even the technique allowed you to modify your, perhaps, imperfect proportions. If you're too tall, maybe you would lower your arms a bit - maybe so you don't appear so high up."
On the fear of being dropped
"I never was thinking that, because within the flow of the movement, you have complete confidence in the partner that you're working with, and so those kinds of considerations are not to the fore. Now, if you're working with somebody you don't quite trust or there's a lift that's particularly difficult, then I think there can be a certain tension. And that's something you want to try to get rid of in a performance. One of the great ballerinas once told me, 'When you start to have a dialogue in your head while you're performing, that's when you know it's gone wrong.' In a way, you want to get rid of those words and enter a different way of existing for the time that you're onstage."
On the transition from dance as an aristocratic pastime to a professional discipline
"You start to have a more difficult technique that even the most diligent aristocrats can't keep up with by the end of the 17th century. And then dancers are becoming professionals, and that's when you have more and more separation between the aristocrats who are watching the dance and the people who are performing it. And the dancers at that point are much more exclusively drawn from the lower orders of society. They are learning, in a way, to become aristocrats. On stage, they appear as noblemen, even if in society they're emphatically not."
On dancing en pointe
"It's really the point in which popular traditions feed into a high operatic, high balletic art. Marie Taglioni is the ballerina we most associate with en pointe work. She was working in Vienna at the opera house, but a lot of Italian troupes were passing through. These troupes often did tricks, and one of the tricks they'd do was to climb up on their toes and parade around. This kind of trick was then incorporated into classical ballet. It was given an elevated form, so instead of stomping around, it became an image of the ethereal, a wispy sylph or somebody who can leave the ground or fly into the air."

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Tracing Ballet's Cultural History Over 400 Years

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Ballet's history is not just about choreography and technique - it's also a history of nationalization, the changing ways we view the body, shifting gender norms and class struggles. Historian Jennifer Homans chronicles the art form in a cultural history, Apollo's Angels.

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The physics of the "hardest move" in ballet - Arleen Sugano

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The Rite of Spring has one of the richest and strangest production histories in modern ballet. View photos of some vivid performances through the years here.

The ballet is particularly famous for its unsettling opening scene, a version of which you can watch here. You can also listen to the full score here along with a graphical score to guide you through the different instruments playing.

Stravinsky himself talks about his process of inspiration, doubt and determination in his autobiography, which you can preview here. You can read Stravinsky's candid remarks about working with Vaslav Nijinsky, the choreographer and dancer. While the combination of Nijinsky's wild choreography and Stravinsky's eerie score made The Rite of Spring even more radical, Stravinsky voiced his doubt over Nijinsky's moves. Reminiscing about the choreography in his autobiography, he wrote of "Nijinsky's lack of consciousness of what he was doing in creating it." Perhaps, it was this inharmonious relationship that elevated the strangeness of the final production. Read more about the colorful life and radical art of Nijinsky here, who as this article argues was "the embodiment of a new kind of dancer"

Another key collaborator was the costume and set designer Nicholas Roerich. View some of his distinctive sets for The Rite of Spring here. Then, visit this page for a detailed discussion of his weird and wonderful costumes.

The entire production caused immediate shock on opening night - but the political and cultural shockwaves radiated through the years. This article offers much insight into the effects and legacy of the ballet which turned the genre on its head.

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The ballet that incited a riot - Iseult Gillespie

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Ballet is typically thought of as harmonious, graceful and polished- hardly something that would trigger a riot. But at the first performance of Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," audience members were so outraged that they drowned out the orchestra. People hurled objects at the stage, started fights and were arrested.

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Music in the Schools - Why I Love Playing Music - United States Marine Band

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Let's Begin...

Have you ever been waiting in line at the grocery store, innocently perusing the magazine rack, when a song pops into your head? Not the whole song, but a fragment of it that plays and replays until you find yourself unloading the vegetables in time to the beat? Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis explores earworms - a cognitive phenomenon that plagues over 90% of people at least once a week.

Create and share a new lesson based on this one.

About TED-Ed Animations

TED-Ed Animations feature the words and ideas of educators brought to life by professional animators. Are you an educator or animator interested in creating a TED-Ed Animation? Nominate yourself here "

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Earworms: Those songs that get stuck in your head - Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

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Have you ever been waiting in line at the grocery store, innocently perusing the magazine rack, when a song pops into your head? Not the whole song, but a fragment of it that plays and replays until you find yourself unloading the vegetables in time to the beat?

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Using this tonematrix and the magic of looping, you can create music just by clicking squares. See what you can create!

This Aeon Magazine article probes further into the mysterious relationship between music and repetition. Do you think music can exist without repetition? How would you feel about a song that didn't have some type of repetition?

If that's not enough, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, is an entire book that examines the psychology of repetition in music. Listen to this NPR story on Dr. Margulis with excerpts from her work on the "mere exposure effect." In what other areas can the "mere exposure effect" be applied?

In 1995, Diana Deutsch determined that a phrase repeated over and over begins to sound as if it was sung not spoken. Read about and listen to Diana Deutsch's Speech to Song Illusion effect here.

Philip Glass on finding repetition in his music.

Why songs have choruses.

From Pitchfork, Ten Meditations on Repetition in Music, With Soundtrack.

If you're interested in learning more about music cognition, try these blogs:

Henkjan Honing's Music Matters
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis's Looking at Listening
Victoria Williamson's Music Psychology Blog

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Why we love repetition in music - Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

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How many times does the chorus repeat in your favorite song? How many times have you listened to that chorus? Repetition in music isn't just a feature of Western pop songs, either; it's a global phenomenon. Why?

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A couple of years ago, music psychologist Elizabeth Margulis decided to make some alterations to the music of Luciano Berio. Berio was one of the most famous classical composers of the 20th century, a man internationally recognized for the dramatic power of his compositions. But Margulis didn't worry much about disrupting Berio's finely crafted music. After loading his most famous piece into a computer editing program, she just randomly started cutting.

"I just went in and whenever there was a little pause on either side of something, I grabbed that out and then I'd stick it back in - truly without regard to aesthetic intent," she says. "I wasn't trying to craft anything compelling."

The idea behind this vandalism was simple: Margulis wanted to see if she could make people like Berio's music more by making it more repetitive.

Margulis knew that 90 percent of the music we listen to is music we've heard before. We return again and again to our favorite songs, listening over and over to the same musical riffs, which themselves repeat over and over inside the music, and she'd become obsessed with understanding why repetition is so compelling.

This is why she was razoring the music of Berio - because, though his work is considered brilliant (as you can hear from the sample below of his Sequenza IXa for clarinet), his music isn't at all repetitive. In fact, he was part of a musical school that actively wanted to move music away from too much repetition.

So Margulis took Berio's music and randomly looped it ...

... and then had all kinds of people evaluate the two excerpts, comparing the work of one of the most famous composers of the 20th century with the work of a music psychologist from the University of Arkansas with access to digital editing equipment.

But it wasn't even close.

"They reported enjoying the excerpts that had repetition more," Margulis says. "They reported finding them more interesting, and - most surprising to me - they reported them as more likely to have been crafted by a human artist, rather than randomly generated by a computer."
What's So Seductive About Repeats?
We are drawn to repetition. It surrounds us, not just in modern American pop music, Margulis says, but everywhere.

"Musical repetitiveness isn't really an idiosyncratic feature of music that's arisen over the past few hundred years in the West," she says. "It seems to be a cultural universal. Not only does every known human culture make music, but also, every known human culture makes music [in which] repetition is a defining element."

Why?

One part of the answer, Margulis says, is what's known as the mere exposure effect.

Psychologists have found that people tend to start off wary of - or even hostile to - new things, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. But then the act of mere exposure - nothing more than further exposure - changes our feelings. We typically feel more warmly toward things we encounter again and again.

"Let's say you've heard a little tune before, but you don't even know that you've heard it, and then you hear it again. The second time you hear it you know what to expect to a certain extent, even if you don't know you know," Maugulis says. "You are just better able to handle that sequence of sounds. And what it seems like [your mind is saying] is just, 'Oh I like this! This is a good tune!' But that's a misattribution."
Why Political Ads Work (In Part)
And the power of repeated exposure isn't just limited to music. Research has shown that the mere exposure effect makes stockbrokers feel more warmly toward stocks they've seen before; it also works when looking at art or fashion or random geometric shapes. And, as the psychologist Robert Bornstein, of Adelphi University, points out, the mere exposure effect is part of the reason we see so many political ads before elections.

"It doesn't matter what's in the ads," Bornstein says. "It's the repetition. You keep seeing the face and you keep hearing the name and that causes some degree of attraction. And the fact that they know that you're making dinner and not really attending closely ... that is all to their advantage. They like that you are being repeatedly exposed without thinking too hard about the fact that you are being repeatedly exposed."

So mere exposure is one of the reasons we respond so well to repetition - both of music and in music - but Margulis clearly doesn't think it's the whole story. She says repetition also allows us to shift our attention around, from the surface aspects of the music to other aspects.

And in that way, she says, it allows us to shift our experience of the reality around us.

"You can experience this yourself," Margulis says, "by just having someone repeat a word to you a number of times over the course of a minute. After about a minute or so, you lose the semantic association that those sounds normally have ... [and] what's really salient [instead] is strange things about the syllables and the sounds themselves."

So basically, part of what the repetition in music allows us to do is leave ourselves. In some small way, it allows us to shift and adjust our reality.

And reality (let's be honest) can often use some adjusting.

So in the spirit of offering you "news you can use" to make your life at least temporarily better, we leave you with this. Adjust away:

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A couple of years ago, music psychologist Elizabeth Margulis decided to make some alterations to the music of Luciano Berio. Berio was one of the most famous classical composers of the 20th century, a man internationally recognized for the dramatic power of his compositions. But Margulis didn't worry much about disrupting Berio's finely crafted music.

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Can't get that new song out of your head? You've probably got an earworm, which "tends to be this little fragment, often a bit of the chorus of the song, that just plays and replays like it's stuck on loop in your head," says Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas and author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. The quirky YouTube hit "What Does the Fox Say?" by Ylvis, Starship's "We Built This City," and The Baha Men's "Who Let the Dogs Out?" are just a few tunes known to spawn earworms, according to Margulis. (Check out this SciFri segment for more on earworms.)

The phenomenon is quite common. For instance, a study from the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition found that more than 91 percent of people reported having an earworm at least once a week, while about a quarter had them more than once a day.

As frequent as earworms may be, however, what triggers them and why they occur still remain mysteries. That's mainly because earworms-which tend to last eight seconds-are by definition involuntary, and therefore tracking them in a scientific setting can be a near-impossible task. Researchers have yet to develop consistent methods of inducing earworms in test subjects. The data that researchers have culled on the subject so far come from surveys of a few thousand people or from small diary studies-but participants can be unreliable in recalling how often they get earworms, for how long, what they were doing at the time, what might have caused the earworm to disappear, and so on.

Music cognition research suggests that earworms could have something to do with how music affects the brain's motor cortex, according to Margulis. When people listen to music, "there's a lot of activity in the motor planning regions," she says. "People are often imaginatively participating even while they're sitting still."

[Is MSG actually bad for you?]

Repetitive listening could also breed earworms. Indeed, 90 percent of the time, we listen to music we've heard before, says Margulis, and "when you've heard [a song] the fourth or fifth time, [one] note carries with it just so clearly the implications of the next note. You can almost feel exactly what's going to happen next."

A song's structure might contribute to brain burrowing, too. "There are general patterns of characteristics for songs that frequently get stuck, such as being simple, repetitive, and having some mild incongruity," James Kellaris, a professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati who's conducted research on the influence of music on memory, wrote in an email.

"Fundamentally, an earworm is your brain singing."

In one study, researchers led by Victoria Williamson, a visiting professor at Switzerland's Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and a fellow at the University of Sheffield, analyzed more than 50 different musical features and found that earworm songs-tunes that were mentioned by at least three different people in her survey-tend to have notes with longer durations but smaller pitch intervals. This makes sense, she says, because these are two main features that make songs easier to sing, even for the musically untrained. "Fundamentally, an earworm is your brain singing," Williamson says. Earworm songs also have a certain amount of built-in predictability, coupled with enough novelty to pique a listener's interest.

While almost everyone gets earworms at some point, Williamson's research has found that people with neuroticism and non-clinical levels of obsessive compulsion experience them more often, and for longer periods of time. "These people tend to have more repeated thought processes in general, so it's perhaps not a huge surprise that these are reflected in their experiences of mental music as well," she says.

[ Meet the unsung women of science.]

Earworm susceptibility also has an idiosyncratic component-experiencing them seems to involve being in the right mood (or wrong one, depending on your opinion of the earworm) at the right time. "In addition to traits of songs and traits of people (such as being mildly neurotic or having high exposure levels to music), situation comes into play as a third factor," Kellaris wrote. "It appears that earworms are more likely to bite when the victim is tired, stressed, or idle."

Despite the complaints of sufferers, however, the majority of our earworms are actually somewhat enjoyable or neutral experiences, according to Williamson. Her research has shown that people consider only about 30 percent of earworms to be "annoying." "We're more inclined to remember the things that annoy us," she says. "So if you ask somebody about an earworm, they'll tell you about the one that annoyed them yesterday. They won't tell you the three or four they briefly had in their head which they didn't really notice, or [which] just kept them company as they walked around."

Once an earworm lodges in your psyche, how do you get rid of it? Williamson says the best method is for people to distract themselves with other music or to do something that involves language-perhaps tackle a crossword or start a conversation with somebody. A second technique seems counterintuitive: Engage with the earworm song itself by listening to it repeatedly so as to exhaust the earworm or "complete it," says Williamson. Because earworms are only fragments of music, listening to the entire track might relieve a person of repeating the same part in her head.

So go ahead, interact with that earworm! And let us know which are your favorite or least favorite ones. We'll try to keep them out of our heads.

Below is a playlist of some earworm songs you've already told us about through Twitter and Facebook. Listener beware!
*This article was updated on May 28, 2014 to reflect the following correction: The original text stated that a study led by Victoria Williamson found that "91 percent of people reported having an earworm at least once a week, while about a quarter had them more than once a day." That finding was actually reported in a study led by Lassi A. Liikkanen.
Meet the Writer

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Can't get that new song out of your head? You've probably got an earworm, which "tends to be this little fragment, often a bit of the chorus of the song, that just plays and replays like it's stuck on loop in your head," says Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas and author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind.

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The secret lies in how your brain processes sound: People love repetition.

It is not hard to estrange the idea of the chorus. Why should songs have some parts that are repeated and others that are not? Imagine other works of art in which a quarter or half of the work is repeated: a movie that shows the same 10-minute sequence every 20 minutes, or a book that repeats every other chapter.

Yet, in popular music, the chorus seems necessary. It is, in many cases, the point of the song.

And now, in a wonderful essay on Aeon, Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, argues that repetition is the point of music. The chorus is merely our culture's embodiment of a deeper human desire to play it again.

The ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl at the University of Illinois counts repetitiveness among the few musical universals known to characterise music the world over. Hit songs on American radio often feature a chorus that plays several times, and people listen to these already repetitive songs many times. The musicologist David Huron at Ohio State University estimates that, during more than 90 per cent of the time spent listening to music, people are actually hearing passages that they've listened to before.

In fact, Margulis argues, it is repetition itself that cues us to listen musically, even if what we're hearing isn't (designed to be) music. "No matter the constituent material, whether it's strings of syllables or strings of pitches," she writes, "it seems that the brute force of repetition can work to musicalise sequences of sounds, triggering a profound shift in the way we hear them."

Wonderfully, this also seems to explain that process whereby if you keep saying a word out loud, it begins to sound strange: lollipop, lollipop, lollipop, lollipop lollipop. Margulis argues this is because the meaning we attach to the word begins to come unmoored and we hear its sonic and qualities instead.

This is the semantic satiation effect, documented more than 100 years ago. As the word's meaning becomes less and less accessible, aspects of the sound become oddly salient - idiosyncrasies of pronunciation, the repetition of the letter l, the abrupt end of the last syllable, for example," she writes. "The simple act of repetition makes a new way of listening possible, a more direct confrontation with the sensory attributes of the word itself.

Margulis' essay takes a fascinating turn to explain what it is about repetition that makes it so key to music. The secret, the evidence suggests, is that listening to music is an active process: We're making the music in our heads as the sounds play our brains.

"[Repetition] captures sequencing circuitry that makes music feel like something you do rather than something you perceive," she concludes.

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The secret lies in how your brain processes sound: People love repetition. It is not hard to estrange the idea of the chorus. Why should songs have some parts that are repeated and others that are not?

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Until recently, nonhuman primates were thought to prefer silence over music based on research with, e.g., New World monkeys such as cotton-top tamarins and marmosets. In several studies the monkeys' living space was enriched with differend kinds of music. However, they preferred the areas with silence over these with music or other types of sound: a repertoire ranging from techno to Mozart and German lullaby's. Mozart was disliked most.

The study from Emory University that came out last week used a selection of African, Indian and Japanese music to see whether chimpanzees would prefer any of these musical styles. A sample of each style was presented for forty minutes for eight days in different sections of their normal habitat. The question was: would they prefer to hang out in any of these areas? Or would they choose the quieter or silent areas?

The study reports that the Chimpanzees stayed significantly longer in areas where African or Indian music was played, and avoided those with Japanese music or silence. Conclusion of the researchers: Chimpanzees prefer some musical styles over others, suggesting it was the regular rhythm of the Japanese music that put them off. They write in a press release from APA:

"Chimpanzees may perceive the strong, predictable rhythmic patterns as threatening, as chimpanzee dominance displays commonly incorporate repeated rhythmic sounds such as stomping, clapping and banging objects"

Sounds reasonable, not?

Well, the experiment was not designed such that it could show that it is indeed the rhythmic structure that these chimps were attending to. In fact, there is no convincing evidence as yet that chimpanzees, or any other nonhuman primate, can actually perceive rhythmic regularity (see earlier entry).

Although it is suggested that apes (as opposed to monkeys) might have some of the neural circuitry that is needed for beat perception (Merchant & Honing, 2014), it has never been shown that any of the great apes can perceive the beat in a rhythmically varying stimulus such as music.

What has been shown, however, is that monkeys can be sensitive to the rhythm structure or rhythmic grouping. Hence it is more likely that it is the rhythmic structure (or rhythmic grouping) that the chimpanzees use to distinguish between the musical fragments, instead of the perceived regularity: the beat. Nevertheless, it could also be any of those many other features of music that makes the difference for them: dynamic contour, timbre, note density, melodic contour, timing, etc, etc.
Mingle, M., Eppley, T., Campbell, M., Hall, K., Horner, V., & de Waal, F. (2014). Chimpanzees Prefer African and Indian Music Over Silence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition. DOI: 10.1037/xan0000032 Merchant, H., & Honing, H. (2014). Are non-human primates capable of rhythmic entrainment? Evidence for the gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7 (274) 1-8. DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2013.00274. McDermott, J., & Hauser, M. (2007). Nonhuman primates prefer slow tempos but dislike music overall. Cognition, 104 (3), 654-668. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2006.07.011

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Until recently, nonhuman primates were thought to prefer silence over music based on research with, e.g., New World monkeys such as cotton-top tamarins and marmosets. In several studies the monkeys' living space was enriched with differend kinds of music.

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Vincent Moon and Naná Vasconcelos: Hidden music rituals around the world

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Vincent Moon travels the world with a backpack and a camera, filming astonishing music and ritual the world rarely sees -- from a powerful Sufi ritual in Chechnya to an ayahuasca journey in Peru. He hopes his films can help people see their own cultures in a new way, to make young people say: "Whoa, my grandfather is as cool as Beyoncé."

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Wooten, now a five-time Grammy winner, hit the worldwide scene in 1990 as a founding member of the super-group Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Continuing to blaze a musical trail with the band, Victor has also become widely known for his own Grammy nominated solo recordings and tours. http://www.victorwooten.com/
Watch Victor jam. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVQEe8OI3zk
Borrowing proven skills, techniques, and philosophies from his Nature teachers, and combining them with many years of learning Music from his brothers, Regi, Roy (Future Man), Rudy, and Joseph, Victor developed a new, unique approach to Music; an approach that not only caused him to immediately play better, but also directly improved his Life. Now cruising into its twelfth year, Vix Camps continue to be the perfect setting for Victor Wooten to share his musical approach with students from across the globe. With a collection of the world's most innovative instructors, they have directly helped hundreds of musicians better themselves and their Music. http://vixcamps.com/
Victor played with Béla Fleck and eventually helped start Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. Béla Fleck has won 14 Grammy Awards since 1998, and he has received 30 nominations. He has been nominated in more different categories than anyone in Grammy history. http://www.belafleck.com/

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Music is a powerful communication tool--it causes us to laugh, cry, think and question. Bassist and five-time Grammy winner, Victor Wooten, asks us to approach music the same way we learn verbal language--by embracing mistakes and playing as often as possible.

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To learn more on circular perceptions of rhythm with specific reference to African music, read this paper and then watch this
Five(ish) Minute Drum Lesson on African Drumming. How has drumming played an essential role in African culture? What do specific rhythms represent?

Interested in the software applications of a circular rhythmic approach? What are the pros of representing rhythm with a circular representation as opposed to using a more traditional linear representation? This article will help you learn more.

What exactly is rhythm? Rhythm is a key ingredient in all types of music but do you know exactly what it is? Want to learn more about rhythm? Watch: How Music Works 2-Rhythm Part 1 and Part 2. Get a more diverse idea of its importance and some insight into what exactly rhythm is! What is it about a rhythm that causes you to tap your toes and want to sing along? Read this Smithsonian Blog post and find out.

How does the beat of a song differ from its rhythm? Check out this video and find out! Then watch The Rhythm of Music and Life. Learn how rhythm permeates your everyday life! Can you think of a rhythm in your life? This TED Talk: Rhythm is everything, everywhere focuses on this question too. Look around your life and find what brings rhythm to it! Is it the tick of the clock on the wall, your windshield wipers or an instrument that you love?

As seen from this TED Ed lesson, different cultures share similar rhythms. Different cultures also share the same musical scales. For fun, check out this TED clip as Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the pentatonic scale, a musical scale found in varied cultures and genres of music. Try this demonstration with a group of friends!

Rhythm and Math are related? Check out this TED-Ed Lesson: A-rhythm-etic. The math behind the beats.

Just love music and want to learn more? Here are some "note-worthy" lessons from TED-Ed:

How playing an instrument benefits your brain - Anita Collins

Why we love repetition in music - Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

Music as a language -Victor Wooten

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A different way to visualize rhythm - John Varney

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In standard notation, rhythm is indicated on a musical bar line. But there are other ways to visualize rhythm that can be more intuitive. John Varney describes the 'wheel method' of tracing rhythm and uses it to take us on a musical journey around the world.

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Web site dedicated to the study of Music Theory. Articles, reference, interactive exercises.

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Who were the Muses?As we’ve mentioned, there is some debate still going on today as to how many muses there were and what they did, but generally scholars agree today that there were nine principle muses. But who were they? There’s a wealth of information about the Muses out on the web, but one of the most straightforward yet detailed pages is on www.greekmyths-greekmythology.com. This webpage lists the Muses by name, their discipline, and gives a thorough account of the mythology surrounding them. Furthermore there’s other great links to the history of Greek mythology, which is a wealth of fascinating stories guaranteed to get your creative juices flowing! www.greekmyths-greekmythology.com/nine-muses-in-greek-mythology/
Texts vary slightly on this information, and I encourage you do to your own research on the topic, but the list I settled on in the end is as follows:
Calliope, the muse of philosophy and epic poetry
Erato, the muse of love poetry and the lyre
Euterpe, the muse of secular song and the aulos (an ancient Greek flute),
Polyhymnia, the muse of sacred song or hymns
Terpsichore, the muse of dance
Thalia, the muse of comedic theatre and writing
Melpomene, the muse of tragic theatre and writing
Clio, the muse of history,
Urania (or Ourania), the muse of Astronomy.

Greek MythologyThe Muses are a tiny part of the incredibly rich ancient Greek mythology. Stories from ancient Greece continue to be as entertaining and insightful as they were when they were first told thousands of years ago. These stories would have been sung in verse when they were first conceived, but here, on this great website, you can find ancient Greek stories retold for us today in written and spoken word. http://www.storynory.com/category/educational-and-entertaining-stories/greek-myths/

What did ancient Greek music sound like?The ancient Greek world faded over two thousand years ago, and this presents some pretty obvious difficulties for us today when we try to answer the question, “what did ancient Greek music sound like?”. Luckily we have some clues: we know what instruments they used, and some nearby cultures still use techniques that scholars suspect were used by the ancient Greeks. We also are lucky enough to have some tiny scraps of written music from all those centuries ago. This great article outlines how scholars have figured out what they believe music in ancient Greece sounded like, and even includes a recording from a song thousands of years old. The song that is. Not the recording. Obviously. (Teachers: please see additional resources for more guidance on this site) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24611454
Further Reading:
•Anderson, WD. Ethos and Education in Greek Music: the evidence of poetry and philosophy (1966). Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass.
•D’angour, A. “How did ancient Greek music sound?” BBC News Business. Published 22nd October 2013. Web 26th November 2013.
•Grout, DJ. & Palisca, CV. A History of Western Music (4th ed.) (1988). Norton & Co. Inc: New York.
•Plato Republic. Trans. A.D. Lindsay (1969). Dent: London.
•Price, AW. Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle (2011). Clarendon Press: Oxford
•West, ML. Ancient Greek Music (1992). Clarendon Press: Oxford
If you elect to get one book on this list, I thoroughly recommend getting a copy of Grout and Palisca’s A History of Western Music. This book has been my go-to music bible for a decade, and I am indebted to the authors for inspiring in me a lifelong passion for music history. Their chapter on Music in Antiquity is especially interesting, and is the basis for this lesson.
In researching supplementary material for this lesson, I stumbled across a great article on the BBC website discussing what ancient Greek music sounded like.
Finally, a thanks to Elizabeth Minchin, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the Australian National University, who read over my lesson to make sure my terminology about all things ancient and Greek were correct. One of a few things I learned: the Romans wore togas; the Greeks wore tunics. Always learning!

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Music and creativity in Ancient Greece - Tim Hansen

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You think you love music? You have nothing on the Ancient Greek obsession. Every aspect of Greek life was punctuated by song: history, poetry, theater, sports and even astronomy. In fact, music was so important to Greek philosopher Plato that he claimed the music we listen t…

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Mentored by Gregory Hines, Andrew is considered one of the most hardworking and diverse tap dance artists today. Whether playing with Nat Adderley Jr., directing CPD PLUS, or co-founding the Tap Legacy™ Foundation, Inc., Andrew has garnered a reputation for impeccable musicianship and sensitivity and respect for the craft that he loves. http://andrewnemr.com/The Tap Legacy Foundation, Inc., was established in 2002 by tap dancers Gregory Hines and Andrew J. Nemr with a mission to preserve and advance the art of tap dance. With a vision to continually promote tap dance's vast history and varied contributors, the foundation's ultimate goal is the building of a cultural center in New York City dedicated to tap dance. A tap solo by Andrew: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aU0lZZ743c0#!The Copasetics was formed in 1949 by twenty-one men in and around show business in memory of one of the greatest black entertainment icons, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson. The Copasetics was a vital force in Harlem since its inception and contributed to many charitable and community activities. The Copasetics was a major force in the revival of tap dancing in the late 1970's and 80's. Remembering a Hoofer, An Interview with Donald O'Connor http://danceviewtimes.com/dvny/features/2003/o%27connor.htmlA tap dance solo by Donald O'Connor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rx5_IEmzpoNobody could have predicted that the collision of cultures in the New World centuries ago would result in tap,a uniquely American dance form. Yet the fusion of British Isles Clog and Step dancing with the rhythms of West African drumming and dancing in colonial times created an ever-evolving art form that continues to flourish today.
Welcome to the International Tap Association - the only worldwide service organization for tap dance and tap dancers. http://www.tapdance.org/
TED Blog with Andrew Nemr: http://blog.ted.com/2012/07/20/cat-paying-dues-fellows-friday-with-andrew-nemr/ Savion Glover (born November 19, 1973) is an American tap dancer, actor, and choreographer. As a learning prodigy, he was taught by notable dancers from previous generations. Glover is currently interested in restoring African roots to tap. http://www.saviongloverproductions.com/

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Tap dance, born out of the marriage of African and European dance traditions, went from extremely popular to barely existent to grand revival, all in under a century. Professional tap dancer and TED Fellow Andrew Nemr taps into the history of this truly American art form.

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How to practice effectively...for just about anything - Annie Bosler and Don Greene

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Mastering any physical skill takes practice. Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement, and it helps us perform with more ease, speed, and confidence. But what does practice actually do to make us better at things? Annie Bosler and Don Greene explain how practice affects the inner workings of our brains.

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The history of opera in Western culture dates back 400 years to Renaissance Italy where a group of musicians, known as the Florentine Camerata, decided to revive the Greek tradition of melodrama and theater, telling a story with musical accompaniment. Composers in the Baroque period saw opera as a medium through which they could integrate all artforms into a single work thereby appealing to an audience's every sense and sensibility. At its heart, opera relies on music and drama working in tandem to communicate narrative, emotion, and character. Opera continued to gain popularity and evolve until by the end of the 18th century, it was an international phenomenon. As operatic productions grew larger and more advanced, vocal training and pedagogy for opera singers necessarily followed suit. Singers were, and are still, categorized by their voice type and trained accordingly for specific styles of singing. For a long time, women were not allowed to sing on stage, giving rise to the tradition of the castrato soprano voices. While during much of opera history, castrati were treated like superstars, this tradition fell out of favor and the last castrato singer died in 1922. Opera singers work for decades to hone the specific skills necessary to both project and emote their roles. You can watch a master teacher and singer in action to learn more about these techniques and learn more about the physiology of the operatic voice. Ready to go see an opera, but want to brush up on and understand all the lingo? Check out this resource for Opera 101 and learn more about the production of specific operas on this opera podcast.

Science, Math, Music and Pythagorus
Legend has it that Greek philosopher and mathematician, Pythagorus of the famed Pythagorean theorem was walking past a blacksmith when he paused to listen to the pounding of the hammers. He heard that some pitches were higher than others so he went to investigate. He found that the sizes of the hammers determined their pitch and that they were in direct proportion to each other. While this legend has been largely debunked, Pythagorus is credited with discovering that a string exactly half the length of another will play a pitch exactly one octave higher and that if you divide the same string into thirds, you raise the pitch an octave and a fifth and so on. This discovery gave rise to the study of the overtone series and the mathematical ratios that determine the specific harmonics in the series and greatly contributed to how we understand Western musical theory, notation, and acoustics today. Watch this video to see how Pythagorus extended his philosophy to contend that the entire universe is in a constant state of vibration and sound, otherwise known as the Music of the Spheres.

Sound amplification and architecture
The shape and design of a concert hall can greatly impact how opera singers and musicians are heard without amplification. Most of us have been in poorly designed spaces in which presenters or performers sound muddy or overly loud or soft (think of band concerts in a typical high school gym). You may have found yourself wondering how a better design might produce more favorable acoustics. In 1895, physicist Wallace Clement Sabine, a young physics professor at Harvard, wondered the same thing when it became clear that the new Fogg Lecture Hall rendered voices indiscernible because of its poor acoustics. He took a scientific approach and through experimentation with a pipe organ and stopwatch, created a formula to measure the reverberation of a space. Now considered the father of architectural acoustics, Sabine helped to pioneer the field of quantitative acoustics that has led to the building of some of the best concert halls in the world. Read more about Sabine's work here and learn more about the intersection of art, science and engineering the design of concert halls here.

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What's a squillo, and why do opera singers need it? Ming Luke

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An orchestra fills an opera house with music, but a singer's voice soars above the instruments. Its melody rings out across thousands of patrons- all without any assistance from a microphone. How is it possible that a single voice can be heard so clearly? The answer lies in the physics of the human voice.

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Quixotic Fusion is an ensemble of artists that brings together aerial acrobatics, dance, theater, film, music and visual fx. Watch as they perform three transporting dance pieces at TED2012.

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Interested in some more of the history of social dance in the black community? This article has some great references and video clips showing the dances described and discussed in this lesson: From juba to jitterbug to jookin: Black dance in America.

The educator of this lesson has a wonderful site that will further inspire you to learn more about social dance. Take a look here.
History does really connect with culture through social dance. Here are two amazing references from Camille A. Brown that illustrate those connections. Black Girl: Linguistic Play and Mr. TOL E. RANCE. Both guides were created by Heather McCartney.

Interested in seeing a video clip from Mr. TOL E RANCE? Watch: Camille A. Brown's Mr. TOL E. RAncE "reel talk." There is also A TEDx Talk featuring Camille A. Brown that discusses Black Girl: Linguistic Play. Watch it here.

Photo credit for Camille A. Brown headshot: Whitney Browne.

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The history of African-American social dance - Camille A. Brown

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Why do we dance? African-American social dances started as a way for enslaved Africans to keep cultural traditions alive and retain a sense of inner freedom. They remain an affirmation of identity and independence. In this electric demonstration, packed with live performances, choreographer, educator and TED Fellow Camille A.

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To learn more about the project that José Antonio Abreu helped start, check this out: The Simón Bolívar Music Foundation (FundaMusical Bolívar) is the governing body of the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras and Choirs of Venezuela, commonly known as 'El Sistema'. It was founded by maestro José Antonio Abreu, for the purpose of systematizing music education and promoting the collective practice of music through symphony orchestras and choruses as a means of social organization and communitarian development. Are you not yet convinced that we can hear and learn from music? Check this out: Music is a powerful communication tool--it causes us to laugh, cry, think and question. Bassist and five-time Grammy winner, Victor Wooten, asks us to approach music the same way we learn verbal language--by embracing mistakes and playing as often as possible. Maybe you want to start learning to read music. You're in luck! Start with this TED-Ed Lesson: Like an actor's script, a sheet of music instructs a musician on what to play (the pitch) and when to play it (the rhythm). Sheet music may look complicated, but once you've gotten the hang of a few simple elements like notes, bars and clefs, you're ready to rock. Tim Hansen hits the instrumental basics you need to read music. Are live arts events important? Are thy compelling? See for yourself by watching this TEDx Talk: Arts administrator and live-theater fan Ben Cameron looks at the state of the live arts -- asking: How can the magic of live theater, live music, live dance compete with the always-on Internet? In his talk, he offers a bold look forward. (Filmed at TEDxYYC.) Maybe you don't play a typical musical instrument. That shouldn't stop you from expressing yourself. This TED-Ed Lesson shows us that we all have the inherent capacity to play an instrument: There's no need for instruments to make music; you can use the greatest instrument of all, your own body. Members of BEAT NYC teach the basics of beatboxing (think trumpets, bass drums, and everything in between), all while driving around New York City picking up a few friends. Here are two famous success stories from El Sistema: Gustavo Adolfo Dudamel Ramírez is a Venezuelan conductor and violinist. He is the music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He is honorary conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony in Gothenburg, Sweden. Edicson Ruiz is a Venezuelan double-bass player. At age 17, Ruiz became the youngest member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the second in the Philharmonic history after a harp player in the 19th century; he is also the first Hispanic-American musician to join the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

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The El Sistema music revolution - Jose Antonio Abreu

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Jose Antonio Abreu is the charismatic founder of a youth orchestra system that has transformed thousands of kids' lives in Venezuela. Here he shares his amazing story and unveils a TED Prize wish that could have a big impact in the US and beyond.

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Robert Gupta: Music is medicine, music is sanity

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Robert Gupta, violinist with the LA Philharmonic, talks about a violin lesson he once gave to a brilliant, schizophrenic musician -- and what he learned. Called back onstage later, Gupta plays his own transcription of the prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1.

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Robert Gupta: Between music and medicine

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When Robert Gupta was caught between a career as a doctor and as a violinist, he realized his place was in the middle, with a bow in his hand and a sense of social justice in his heart. He tells a moving story of society's marginalized and the power of music therapy, which can succeed where conventional medicine fails.

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World's Largest Flute: the Subcontrabass

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A quick look at the manufacturing process of a Vincent Bach Mouthpiece.

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Watch a professional clarinetist make a clarinet reed from scratch. This step-by-step video gives a clear depiction of the clarinet reed making process.

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Jay Metcalf visited the Rigotti reed production facility in the South of France for a tour and to learn exactly how saxophone reeds are made.

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Why are Saxophone Reeds So Expensive? | Rigotti Reed Factory Tour

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Discover the work done in the factory for Buffet Crampon's outstanding student range oboes.

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In the Factory: Making Buffet Student Oboes | Buffet Crampon

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The good folks over at Pro-Mark and D'Addario were kind enough to give us a tour of their factory so we could learn exactly what goes into making the perfect drumstick. You'll see the processes for cutting, grading, sorting, drying, grinding, finishing, inspecting, and pitch matching (yeah... There are a lot of steps).

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Attilio Berni plays the giant J'Elle Stainer sub-contrabass saxophone

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Pipe Organ (An instrument the size of a building)

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What Is A Basset Clarinet? | Discover Instruments | Classic FM

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An Introduction To The Trumpet | Discover Instruments | Classic FM

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Effective Practice of Musical Instruments

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Transforming Noise Into Music | Jackson Jhin | TEDxUND

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Hey, cool cats--if you need to know the basics of jazz, from its origins in New Orleans to the birth of bop, this BrainPOP movie is the place to start!

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Miles Davis: Recorded Best-Selling Jazz Album of All Time | Biography

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How architecture helped music evolve - David Byrne

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Getting started as a DJ: Mixing, mashups and digital turntables - Cole Plante

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DJ and producer Cole Plante is only 17 years old, but he's already worked alongside industry superstars Skrillex, Avicii and Major Lazer (to name just a few). In this combination talk and DJ set, Plante shows off his mixing magic and gives tips to aspiring DJs.

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THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF DAVE BRUBECK - Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis

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Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 5, an appreciation by Leon Botstein | Music | Khan Academy

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The Making of a Steinway - A Steinway & Sons Factory Tour Narrated by John Steinway

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What Does The Sitar Sound Like? | Discover Instruments | Classic FM

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Introducing the Baroque Trumpet with Alison Balsom | Classic FM

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How Does The Trombone Work? | Discover Instruments | Classic FM

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Why Is The Bass Drum The Instrument Of The 21st Century? | Discover Instruments | Classic FM

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How The Violin Works | Discover Instruments | Classic FM

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Sheku Kanneh-Mason | Cello | Discover Instruments | Classic FM

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How Does The Accordion Work? | Discover Instruments | Classic FM

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Wintergatan - Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles)

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How It Works - Part 1 (Wintergatan Marble Machine)

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Theremin – Lydia Kavina plays 'The Swan' (Saint-Saëns) | Discover Instruments | Classic FM

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How The Theremin Works | Discover Instruments | Classic FM

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Inventing Instruments that Unlock New Music

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Tod Machover + Dan Ellsey: Inventing instruments that unlock new music

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Tod Machover of MIT's Media Lab is devoted to extending musical expression to everyone, from virtuosos to amateurs, and in the most diverse forms, from opera to video games. He and composer Dan Ellsey shed light on what's next.

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Beatboxing is a form of vocal percussion primarily involving the art of producing drum beats, rhythm, and musical sounds using one's mouth, lips, tongue, and voice. It may also involve singing, vocal imitation of turntablism, and the simulation of horns, strings, and other musical instruments. The term beatboxing is sometimes used to refer to vocal percussion in general. B.E.A.T.'s mission is to transform the lives of youth in under-served areas through engaging, exciting and culturally relevant music, dance and writing programs which include beatboxing, B-boying/B-girling (breakdance), music production/composition, and creative writing. By engaging, challenging and teaching students in our programs through music, writing and dance, B.E.A.T. aims to help mold a new generation of leaders and creative thinkers who themselves will inspire and impact the generations to follow. Beat Rockers is a beatboxing music program for blind and visually impaired students at the Lavelle School for the Blind in the Bronx by Head Instructor Taylor McFerrin and Instructors Chesney Snow and Beatsmyth. By using beatboxing as the main tool for vocalization and self-expression, students are taught a new way to communicate, socialize and express themselves through rhythm and beats. Music is expressed as a form of empowerment and language. Here's a video from the Beatbox Battle World Championship 2012. You can see the world largest archive of Beatbox videos here. For an online community of beatboxers, check out Humanbeatbox.com. Beatboxers from all over the world share their videos, their tips and tricks, comments, support and love, and their constructive criticisms. TED-Ed was thrilled to work with world renown and award winning beatboxer KRNFX (Terry Im). He was a contestant on Canada's Got Talent. Here's a video of KRNFX on the Ellen Show, and here's his website. TED-Ed also had the privilege to work with the amazingly talented Kaila Mullady. If you want to be schooled in the art of beatboxing, watch her videos. They are crazy good! Also, a special shout out to Beatsmyth's mom (we dubbed her Momma Beats). Her cameo made the whole project worth it. She was a pleasure to work with, and she's a testament that to the fact that anyone can beatbox. In her own words, "If I can do this, anyone can!" Music is a powerful communication tool -- it causes us to laugh, cry, think and question. Bassist and five-time Grammy winner, Victor Wooten, asks us to approach music the same way we learn verbal language -- by embracing mistakes and playing as often as possible. The same applies to beatboxing. Anyone can do it, and it can be done anywhere.

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There's no need for instruments to make music; you can use the greatest instrument of all, your own body. Members of BEAT NYC teach the basics of beatboxing (think trumpets, bass drums, and everything in between), all while driving around New York City picking up a few friends.

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Musician and researcher Charles Limb wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation -- so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds.

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The euphonium, with its sweet brass sound, is rarely heard outside of traditional brass bands. Cutting loose on the euph, prodigy Matthew White performs Nat McIntosh's hip-hop-inflected "The Warrior Comes Out to Play."

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Eric Lewis, an astonishingly talented crossover jazz pianist -- seen by many for the first time at TED2009 -- sets fire to the keys with his shattering rendition of Evanescence's chart-topper, "Going Under."

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Vishal Vaid: Hypnotic South Asian improv music

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Vishal Vaid and his band explore a traditional South Asian musical form in this mesmerizing improv performance. Sit back and let his music transport you.

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David Holt: The joyful tradition of mountain music

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Folk musician and storyteller David Holt plays the banjo and shares photographs and old wisdom from the Appalachian Mountains. He also demonstrates some unusual instruments like the mouth bow -- and a surprising electric drum kit he calls "thunderwear."

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How to manage your time more effectively (according to machines) - Brian Christian