Music education in Guyana

October 13, 2012 By admin

Dear Editor,
Music education in Guyana needs resuscitation. It was left in a state of chance for too long and currently the redress is slow, but positive, and this we must be thankful for. Guyana has recently seen the establishment of the National School of Music and the National Steel Pan Programme under the Music Development Programme.
Galileo became an accomplished lutenist and would have learned early from his father the value of well-measured or quantified experimentation, an appreciation for a periodic or musical measure of time or rhythm, as well as the illuminative marriage of mathematics and experiment. Art Garfunkel actually studied art, history and mathematics in college, graduating with a master?s degree in both from Columbia University. Sting, after he graduated from high school, worked as a bus conductor, a construction labourer, and in a tax office. Eventually he attended Northern Counties College of Education and graduated with a teaching degree, where he got the inspiration for, ?Don?t Stand So Close to Me?.
It seems inseparable then that music education and learning is the corollary to solid academics, but we need more support for this thrust, and we get this from actual research. ?Children exposed to music tuition, involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers,? says a 2009 study, published in the journal,? Psychology of Music.
The aim of the study was to look at two specific reading sub-skills: ?those of vocabulary and verbal sequencing, which, according to the authors, are ?cornerstone components? in the continuum of literacy development, and a window into the subsequent successful acquisition of proficient reading and language skills, namely decoding and reading comprehension.
According to the data from this study, the role of music study on cognition was positive as regards enhanced school performance in language and literacy. Several other studies have also reported positive associations between music education and increased abilities in non-musical (example, linguistic, mathematical and spatial) domains in children. These authors say there are similarities in the way that individuals interpret music and language and, because neural response to music is a widely distributed system within the brain, it would not be unreasonable to expect that some processing networks for music and language behaviours, namely reading, located in both hemispheres of the brain, would overlap.
In the case of BBC?s 2012 Health Reporter Anna-Marie Lever Health, she found out that children who take music lessons have better hearing as adults. She confirmed this via a study in the Journal of Neuroscience, which posits that children who played an instrument, even for as little as one to five years, had enhanced brain responses to complex sound
This kind of insight should really get local educators to stop and think. There is need to re-assess not only when to teach, but also what to teach, since probing differential neural pathways and investigating their associative cognitive substrates is now firmly established and the hope is music.? ?Since the study of music assists in cognitive development, it should help local education practitioners go beyond the sometimes routine hazy methods and provide careful and credible instructional approaches that use the rich and complex conceptual structure of music and its transfer to other cognitive areas. Further afield, researchers from Hong Kong have found that children who are given musical training have better verbal memories than those who have not had. They say their findings could even help people recovering from a brain injury as well.
So now that Guyana has the National School of Music and the National Steel Pan Programme, we should respond to the local situation, especially based on what we know about the impact of music. ?We now see and understand the need for a music programme in our schools and, since not very many people know how to read music, these two schools can now give attention to both theoretical and practical training, hence certifying persons to teach in schools, even if only part-time.
Yours truly,
Bhidmattie Toolaram

Source: http://www.guyanatimesgy.com/?p=1777

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