Teaching the Whole Musician

This book offers applied music instructors a practical guide for supporting their students’ wellness by integrating holistic techniques into their pedagogy. The main argument in this book is that the mentorship dynamic within the applied studio situates pedagogues in a unique position to guide and mentor their students toward a healthy and satisfying artistic life. Wellness, as a relatively new dimension within health education for musicians, can be intimidating for applied instructors. Many teachers lack the training and confidence to enter conversations in this arena. Grounded in recent research, coupled with extensive in-person interviews with students, faculty, and healthcare professionals, this book demystifies the causes, challenges, and limiting factors around maintaining a healthy artistic practice, while revealing practical solutions for achieving and maintaining wellness as a performing artist. Each chapter includes a toolkit of practical exercises and activities that can be easily integrated within the applied lesson. Topics covered include injury prevention, alignment and the breathing mechanism, mental health, contemplative practices, Laban Movement Analysis, nutrition, and sleep.

Rethinking the Engagement of Ethnomusicologists with Performance and Applied Music Curricula

Music schools and conservatories in the United States and abroad focus primarily on training performers; one of the reasons ethnomusicologists have had such difficulty expanding their employment opportunities in such institutions is because they have not given enough thought to how they can productively contribute to performance curricula. The field of ethnomusicology has engaged creatively with many subdisciplines in the humanities and social sciences, of course. But while this focus has resulted in insightful publications, it has typically held little immediate relevance for performers. A surprising number of ethnomusicology programs do not encourage applied music-making of any sort as a required part of training in the discipline. In general, ethnomusicology does not dialogue sufficiently with applied music faculty or students. This chapter begins with reflection on what aspiring performers of the twenty-first century need to know in order to be professionally successful and continues with a consideration of how coursework offerings by ethnomusicologists can be retooled so as to contribute directly to the requirements of students in BM programs: to ear training, music theory, orchestration, junior and senior recitals, and so on. Lastly, the chapter covers an approach to teaching world music courses that focuses both on applied performance and on pressing contemporary issues (community outreach, social justice, financial exploitation, etc.) that link world traditions to other repertoires and make their relevance immediately apparent.

Changing Praxis and Ethical Practice

Performances of specific meaningful music and dance are often integral parts of emergent national and transnational social processes. Conflict within and between groups, nostalgia for lost homes and families, reactions to changing climate and damage to ecosystems, and adaptation to new circumstances all can find their expression and magnification in music and dance. Although such horrors are not new, ethnomusicologists have become increasingly aware of the conflicts surrounding the musical traditions they study and become increasingly involved in community engagement with the issues themselves. While ethnomusicological research and community intervention may seem laudable and obvious, practitioners need to be careful to evaluate what effect their activities have on local circumstances and on our research and understanding of music and of the social processes of which it is a part. The practical, ethical, and theoretical challenges of changing praxis in the study of music require careful ethnographic study and honest reporting. We are not the first field to face these challenges, however. Anthropologists and folklorists have been involved in many similar issues since the nineteenth century. This chapter focuses on the challenges, successes, and failures in the field of applied anthropology in the United States and Brazil over the past century in order to highlight the ethical challenges and practical implications of this history for activism and community engagement in music and dance. The implications of this history for success or failure of musical projects may be very important for understanding current applied music projects and forging recommendations for the future.

On the Therapeutic Applications of Music in Persian Medicine

Music history is as old as human history and it has been used as a way to reduce human suffering. Persian Medicine (PM) scholars as one of the oldest traditional medicines applied music for health and disease management. This study aims to introduce some of the views and recommendations of PM sages about importance and application of music in disease improvement. Definition and applications of music were collected from main PM medical text books and then databases including Science direct, PubMed, Scopus and Google scholar were searched to evaluation the efficacy of PM recommendations in conventional medicine from 1980-Jan-1 to 2020-Nov-1. PM used music and melody with several instruments to calm and soothe mind and body. Great PM scientists like Rhazes (10th), Farabi (10th) and Qutb o Din (14th), were dominant figures in terms of musical knowledge. They used music for treatment of several conditions including nervous system diseases (headache and epilepsy), sleep disorders, heart weakness and palpitation, digestive system disorders (gastrointestinal ulcer and appetite), sexual dysfunction, and also for pain management. Nowadays, some of their suggested applications are examined in research studies and are used in academic healthcare environments against several diseases. According to PM, to achieve the maximum impact of music effects in mind and body, several points should be considered including coordination of rhythm and melody with physical and mental characteristics and temperaments (Mizaj) of the listener and his/her illness. The duration of listening to the music can also be important. Attention to these points in today’s research may lead to interesting results.