Continuing our suggestions about music for a work environment, there are times when you want to encourage a more energetic mood in yourself and in staff.   As we noted in the preceding post on calming music, choosing music that is complex and instrumental (without lyrics) seems to stimulate the brain to perform well at work.

Let’s begin with the andante, which literally means “walking tempo.” This tempo naturally speeds up your body’s internal rhythms.  Here’s a brief example from the start of the second movement of Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony. Listen to the gentle pulse of the andante, filled with warm caressing lyricism.  No wonder Mozart was so popular in Prague!

For livelier rhythms you might also look for movements marked allegretto or scherzo. Here, for instance, is the beginning of the second movement, marked allegretto, of Schubert’s Symphony #3.  There’s a wonderfully sweet, childlike innocence and zest in this music.

For something with really bubbling energy, it’s hard to beat the following two pieces.  First, listen to part of the scherzo (which literally means “joke”) from Felix Mendelssohn’s “Incidental Music to a Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Mendelssohn could be called the Genius of the Quicksilver Style.

This music was inspired by the opening scene of Act II of Shakespeare’s play, where Puck asks one of the woodland fairies: “How now, spirit! Whither wander you?”  The reply is “…over hill, over dale…I do wander everywhere/Swifter than the moon’s sphere.”

Second, for an example from the symphonic master of the scherzo, listen to the opening of the third movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.  Its cascading line, built on a descending major scale, is filled with gentle hints of laughter and mischief.  For the historically curious, it’s worth knowing that in his many scherzos Beethoven transformed the rather staid, generic minuet of the rigid pre-French Revolution social order into something much more lively and distinctively his own.

To find other examples of energy-producing music, Beethoven is a very good place to start.  The third movements of all his symphonies except the Ninth (there it comes in the second movement) have vibrant, sometimes amusing scherzos. One of Josh’s favorite scherzos appears in the third movement of the Fourth Symphony, where the scherzo rhythms remind him of the way the car lurched when he first learned to drive a stick-shift.  Talk about music and memory!

What music energizes your brain without interfering with concentration when you’re working?  Please write in and tell us.

Sometimes everybody could use calming down; sometimes people need to be pumped up; and sometimes they could use support for intensely demanding mental activity.

This particular office, like many, is made up of people of different ages and musical tastes.  Maybe you work in a similar setting. Or maybe you work alone in a home office. In either case, music can be a wonderful resource for fostering an optimal atmosphere to do your best work.

Are there any generalizations we can make that would be helpful in choosing your own “office music”?

Well, you know us. We’ve put on our thinking caps and come up with some ideas.

The audio portion of this post will give you our suggestions, along with a couple of musical examples.

You might have ideas of your own about music for your office, pieces that have calmed you. Please share them with us.

We want this website to become a treasure house of specific information about the power of music to enhance human well-being.  We need your help!

In our next posts we’ll bring you some ideas about music for energy and for concentration.

For streaming audio, click here.  To download to an mp3 player, click here.

To register, click here

What is Music Appreciation for an Ageless Mind?

It’s an ongoing series of educational sessions about music that you can enjoy from the comfort of your home simply by calling in on your own phone. We will send you the bridgeline and PIN number after you register.  Each session can stand alone and will be available to you afterwards as an mp3 recording if you register, whether or not you can attend in person.

On February 21st we will explore the agelessness of the creative musical mind.

Josh will share his broad and deep knowledge of music with you in an interactive format. Lynne will contribute insights about music from research in neuroscience and positive psychology.

Here’s some food for thought:

Do you know how old Paul McCartney was when he wrote “When I’m 64″ and what makes the song a classic?

Do you know the connection between Igor Stravinsky and that old standard “Happy Birthday”?

Do you know what kinds of music tend to relax or stimulate us and why?

Join us to learn the answers to these questions and more.

You will get many benefits from attending Music Appreciation for an Ageless Mind.

• You will get specific information about some of the very best performances of the music we play for you, so you can add them to your own collection.
• While you enjoy listening to the music we feature–some familiar and some new–you will also be stimulating new brain growth.  Learning about music at the same time as you listen to it activates many different parts of the brain, for a “balanced workout.”  (See, for example, Elkhonon Goldberg, The New Executive Brain (Oxford U Press, 2009)
• You can give your body a virtual workout while you listen and learn with us.  To make music all you need is your own heartbeat.  Music appreciation can also be fun!
• You will learn how you can consciously utilize music to strengthen your spirit, mind and body.  Music’s transcendent qualities and its ability to stir profound feelings can help increase overall well-being, especially when you understand how to listen. If you are interested, we can even help you develop a Mindful Musical Practice using specific kinds of music.

So we invite you to join us for Music Appreciation for an Ageless Mind as we begin our voyage into the infinite world of great music in exciting performances.

When:  Sunday evening February 21st from 7:30 to 8:45 PM ET

Where:  on your own telephone (*see note below).  We will send you the bridgeline and PIN number after you register.

Cost: $20.00 per session.  (You will be entitled to the recording whether or not you attend in person.)

To register:  click here.  Or if you prefer, contact us here and let us know you will be sending a check made out to Joshua Berrett, PhD, 55 East Way, Mt Kisco NY 10549-3504.

Subscribe to our newsletter to become part of our mailing list for future phone seminars and in-person programs.

Questions?  Contact us.

*note:  if you have never attended a teleseminar, you will be pleasantly surprised at how easy and enjoyable it is to participate. We have presented versions of our program to enthusiastic participants through the phone, in libraries, and at the 3rd National Conference on Positive Aging in 2009.

To register for the teleseminar “Music as Brain Food,”  February 14th, 2010 from 9:00 to 10:15 P.M. Eastern Time (8:00 to 9:15 Central Time; 7:00 to 8:15 Mountain Time; 6:00 to 7:15 Pacific Time), please click  here

Give a special Valentine’s Day Gift to yourself or someone you love this year!

You know the old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  More and more research supports this ancient wisdom.

That’s why we have created MUSIC AS BRAIN FOOD, a program dedicated to promoting the health of your brain (and with it, your mind, body and spirit) through music.

HOW DOES THE PROGRAM WORK?

• Each session is on a separate topic. We have planned a variety of 75 minute teleseminars you can participate in by phone from the comfort of your own home.

• In each session we will introduce you to stimulating information and activities around music. The group interaction we encourage adds special energy to this experience, whether you attend in person or can only listen to the recording.

• We will guide you to listen to music so that your brain is challenged to stretch and grow. Continually expanding your horizons helps develop neuroplasticity, a major contributor to brain health.

• We will lead you through exercises which spark the mind-body-spirit connections so crucial to a high quality of life at any age.

• We will show you how listening to the right music consciously, with intention, can boost the inner strengths that foster authentic happiness.

• We will help you develop a personal Mindful Musical practice that can easily fit into your daily life and continuously nourish your total well-being.

First Session:  see description below for details

When:  Sunday, February 14, 2010 from 9 to 10:15 PM ET.

Where:  All you need is a telephone.  When you register, we will send you the contact phone number.

Cost:  $20 per session.   To register, click here.

Whether or not you can attend, when you pay you will have access to a recording of the session.

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First Session Information:

The good news these days is that we now know our brains don’t have  to deteriorate as we grow older.

But the realistic news is that we need to call on curiosity and other personal strengths to to keep our dendrites growing and synapses firing.

Amazingly, there are longitudinal studies of people whose brains, after death, were found to to show signs of Alzheimer’s Disease even though they didn’t manifest cognitive decline even in old age. This is most probably because they were able to call on extra cognitive reserves for protection.**

The possibility that exercising your mind, body and spirit as a whole can delay the onset of brain diseases is reason enough to make the effort.  Using music is one of the easiest and most natural ways to do just that.

Our first session explores the topic of the aging brain (aging starts earlier in life than you might imagine) by bringing you relevant music and activities that incorporate the good news about aging.

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**See E. Goldberg, The New Executive Brain (Oxford U. Press, 2009).  Dr. Goldberg advocates activating  many different parts of the brain through a “balanced workout.”

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MUSIC AS BRAIN FOOD is a brainchild of http://musicandhappiness.com.  To register, click here!

Subscribe to our newsletter to become part of our mailing list for future workshops and teleseminars.

Questions or comments?  Contact us at musicandhappiness@gmail.com.

The preconference Life Planning Network meetings were opened and closed by the singer/songwriter Barbara McAfee, who writes from a unique perspective and sense of mission.

Music was around us all the time at the conference. In a moving tribute to Dr. Gene Cohen of the National Center for Creative Aging, who was a major influence on many of the researchers and, sadly, died very recently, we sang together “This Little Light of Mine” (click to listen),  which lent itself wonderfully to additional verses celebrating his life.

Thank you to the enthusiastic participants in our workshop: Music and Happiness for the Mature Body, Mind and Spirit. Talk about good vibes!  Your willingness to follow our lead wholeheartedly helped us demonstrate some of the many ways the mindful practice of music can nourish the character strengths most associated with well-being (gratitude, zest, curiosity, love, and hope ).  Using your own favorite music can easily make this practice part of daily life.

If you would like to have the self-help tips we offered at the workshop to begin making music into a powerful mindfulness practice that supports daily well-being, just contact us using the form on this page.

You don’t need to formally meditate to become more fruitfully mindful. But you do need to practice paying attention to–and learning to savor–the good inside you and your environment.  Music is a natural way to foster this kind of practice.  Stay tuned as we explore all the ramifications of this thought in future newsletters.

Moon River/Wider than a mile/  I’m crossing you in style someday/

Old dream maker/ You heartbreaker/ wherever you’re goin’/

I’m goin’ your way…….

November 18, 2009 marked the 100th birthday of this quintessentially American lyricist and composer, Savannah Georgia’s most famous musical son.

Josh was privileged to attend the festivities marking this centennial in Atlanta as a keynote speaker at the international conference that celebrated Mercer’s rich musical legacy.  Georgia State University, which hosted this event, is the home of his collected papers.

We’re reminded of the great number of Johnny’s songs that still sing to us, such as:

Ac-cent-uate the Positive

Jeepers Creepers

Lazy Bones

Blues in the Night

In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening

One for My Baby

There is an enduring attraction in the music of this child of the South, who was so often inspired by the beauty and fragrance of the landscape he knew as a child.

It would be hard to resist the romance of these words he wrote about his boyhood summers in the country: “The roads were still unpaved, made of crushed oyster shell, and as they wound their way under the trees covered with Spanish moss, it was a sweet, indolent background for a boy to grow up in. Savannah was smaller then and sleepy, full of trees and azaleas that filled the parks which make it so beautiful….”

Mercer has a great gift for making us smile with him at his fun with language and respond with complex emotions to the memories he evokes.  His lyrics bring out the message of the music so fully that it’s almost impossible to imagine these songs sounding right with any other words.

Listen to specially chosen renditions of two of his songs here. One is sung by Johnny Mercer himself, the other by Barbra Streisand.

We are organizational members of the National Center for Creative Aging and the Life Planning Network.  One of our missions is to offer people in the second half of life new ideas about intentionally using the arts, particularly (but not limited to) music, to increase and maintain their well-being as they grow older.  Because music is enjoyed by almost everyone, it is the perfect vehicle for keeping us more active, alert, and happy.

Click on the links above to find out more about these organizations.  We hope to meet some of you in Florida.

Music has an ability to help us viscerally feel this order and stability…often, surprisingly, through very simple means.  Today we hope to give you a fuller understanding of how this happens.

For instance, did you know that some common pitch relationships–just 2 or 3 pitches a certain distance or interval apart–can evoke  strong positive feelings in human beings? Did you know that these sound intervals appear again and again in a broad range of musical styles, over many cultures and centuries? There is something about them that resonates profoundly in the ear, heart, and mind.

To give you a demo of this phenomenon, let’s start with Johnny Cash’s 1956 hit song, “I Walk the Line.” Even before beginning the first verse, Cash gets himself (and us) musically and psychologically oriented by humming in the pitch of F. Then we hear the bass line of the guitar oscillate between the 2 pitches of F and C, which are 5 steps apart. Here’s how it sounds in the song. This is a very basic interval in music called the Perfect Fifth.

It’s almost impossible to get the two pitches of the Perfect Fifth out of your head once you hear them together. They keep repeating, following the refrain “Because you’re mine,” solidly anchoring the song’s 5 verses, even though each verse is sung in a different key.  The Perfect Fifth actively embodies the comfort and stability this relationship creates for the singer.

Listen to “I Walk the Line” with this in mind.

What makes the Perfect Fifth so universally effective? One way to explain it is this: the Perfect Fifth (5 tones apart), its close relative the Perfect Fourth (4 tones apart), and the Octave (8 tones apart, as in C to C) are all called Primary Intervals. These are actually pitches (or overtones)  generated by any vibrating string, column of air, and the human voice.  These each vibrate as a whole and in sections.

Pythagoras, the great Greek mathematician (you may recall him from high school geometry) is usually credited with first demonstrating that precise numerical ratios define the relationship between the pitch and the vibrating length of anything making a sound. Try this with your own voice. Make an “m” sound first, then add an “o” to make “om.”  Hear the difference?

From the Middle Ages on, these discoveries of Pythagoras were developed into a theory poetically called “The Music of the Spheres” : a view of the entire cosmos that put the earth at the center of the planets and other heavenly bodies which moved around Earth in precise ratios, emitting their own individual musical sounds. Shakespeare uses this image in the world of his plays.  As the Shakespearian scholar G.B. Harrison explain, “It was believed that the planets in their motion each made a musical note, the whole forming a perfect harmony.” The natural order in general, and the fate of mankind in particular, was believed to be determined by these movements in the heavens.

While the earth isn’t the center of the universe any more, it is still profoundly true that something exists which we might call “the quiver of life”: there are universal rhythms or pulses in everything from the stars to our own heartbeats, which underlie and connect the micro- and macro- cosmos.

Richard Strauss draws on this connection with thrilling effect in his “Introduction” to Thus Spake Zarathustra (1896), inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s poem of the same name. You’ll immediately recognize the music from the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s class movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In his poem Nietzsche addresses a great human dilemma: the conflicting needs for solitude and for human community. When Zarathustra (aka Zoroaster, who becomes the founder of a religion) had the 30-something crisis, he went out to live in a cave in the mountains. But after 10 years of isolation, he has a change of heart and feels, in Nietzsche’s tender words, “a need of outstretched hands.” That is, he wants to return to life with others, without losing the wisdom gained from time spent alone contemplating the cosmic order of things.

Strauss conveys this burning desire to integrate the two worlds by calling on music to ask the big cosmic question posed by Zarathustra, who cries out to the rising sun: “You mighty star! What happiness would be yours if you did not have those for whom you shine?” With this  question Nietzsche underscores the crucial importance of  human life in the cosmic order.  This is expressed musically by the sound of four unison trumpets playing a rising three-note motif consisting of  a  Perfect Fifth (C-G) interlocking with a Perfect Fourth (G-C).  This powerful motif is stated three times. Listen to savor how much is conveyed by such simple means in about 2 minutes’ worth of music.

To help you understand overtones, Josh has added a brief explanation and piano demonstration which you can listen to here.

If you listen closely to your own favorite great music, you’ll start to notice that many pieces employ the Perfect Fifth and Perfect Fourth for precisely the same reason Johnny Cash and Richard Strauss do. Pay attention to the effects on your nervous system and imagination. This is one of easiest ways to increase your awareness of  how music  moves us so profoundly for the better.

If you have questions or comments, leave them in the box below and we’ll gladly respond to them there.

Written in the mid-1930’s for George Gershwin’s folk opera Porgy and Bess, it’s sung very early in the opening scene as Clara, one of the poor residents of Catfish Row,  soothes her baby with a lullaby.

What’s amazing is how often–and differently–this song has been recorded over the intervening seventy-plus years.  It’s one of the most widely performed numbers in The Great American Songbook and is available on iTunes in over a hundred different versions. You can find vocal renditions by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Sonny and Cher, Mahalia Jackson, Janis Joplin, Willie Nelson, Jerry Garcia, Paul McCartney, Booker T, and on and on; as well as purely instrumental treatments by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, John Coltrane, to name just a few.  So look up your favorite artists and see if “Summertime” shows up on their playlists.

What is it about this song that touches us so?

To learn an answer and hear the original version of “Summertime” as well as two other gorgeous treatments by Miles Davis and Jascha Heifetz, click here or download to your mp3 player here.

What music do you think of as your own “classics”?  Send us your lists and we’ll feature them in future newsletters and posts.

Great music can also help us laugh, a vital ability to cultivate especially as we age.  Recently in a New York Times interview, Lorin Maazel, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, who has just completed his final season with the orchestra at 79, talked about Giuseppe Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff, which premiered at La Scala in 1893 when Verdi, like Maazel, was nearly 80!

This comic opera, adapted from parts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor, is a major accomplishment for any composer, let alone one so advanced in years. (Verdi died at 88.)

Verdi’s own life was filled with both tragedy and transcendence. Married in 1836 at 23, he lost his wife and 2 children to sudden illnesses all within the next 4 years. Devastated, he found it hard to keep working, but music ultimately helped him not only to survive but thrive.

In 1842 Verdi’s career suddenly took off with the opening of his opera Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar), based on the biblical story of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. The premiere was an electrifying event, since it came at a time of growing Italian nationalism.  Italian patriots of the day immediately identified with the enslaved Jews and reviled the detested Hapsburg rulers of Italy as tyrants like Nebuchadnezzar and his court.

The stirring chorus from that opera, “Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate,” (“Go, my thoughts, on golden wings”) quickly became an anthem of the patriotic movement and helped make Verdi a national hero.

To learn more about Verdi’s achievements in his later years and hear the grand finale of Falstaff–his celebration of laughter  in old age–listen to our audio or download it here.