AH: In this episode, I’m talking with the authors of a new book called ‘Resident Minds: The Transformative Power of Music, One Note at a Time’. It explores how we can use the powerful response that our brain has to music with intention, to feel more, focus better, connect deeper and lead more resonant lives. Sara Leila Sherman is a classical musician, educator and co-founder of Mozart for Munchkins, and her co-author and father, Mort Sherman has held senior positions in education in the States and is a founding member of the Public Schools for Tomorrow. He also serves on the Goldie Hawn Foundation Board, a charity set up to equip children with social and emotional skills through a range of education programmes. So welcome both and what interesting conversations you must have at family gatherings.
SLS: That’s true.
MS: And almost every day, not just at family gatherings. Writing a book as father/daughter has been a wonderful experience.
AH: So I guess my first question is, how did you come to be writing a book together?
SLS: I had the privilege of shaping professional development days for the United Federation of Teachers. Probably right out of the pandemic in early 2021 and it was in partnership with the Goldie Hawn Foundation and using music as a vehicle for mindfulness. And my father is on the board of the Goldie Hawn Foundation, and has also been an educator superintendent for over 50 years, as has my mother been an educator, and I used to call them when I was workshopping all of this, and said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And I’m going to do this’. And my father said, ‘You’re writing your book’. And I said, ‘No, I’m not, not without you’. And so it was really this beautiful collaboration of ideas and music has been this cornerstone of my life, of our lives, and the way in which I was brought up. So it’s been this anchor for us, and the way that this book has grown from, really my childhood into the book, if you have it, or this work that we’re bringing out into the world, has really been almost like the story of our lives, on how we have come to write the book together.
MS: Yeah, and one more piece Anita that I would add as a school administrator and even as a teacher, I always had music as part of the work I did and part of the communication I use, whether it’s at a graduation at a high school or at a professional learning day, as Sara just described in her work in New York City. And I always was fascinated by the striking response that I had from folks when I played music. And through this growth, I’ve learned so much, and I always wondered what it all meant, and not just that it was nice to have, but now that we’ve come to believe it’s essential, and writing this book has helped us both clarify our sense of music and its importance in our lives and the possibility for all people everywhere.
AH: Mort, I just wanted to ask you, because I’ve mentioned that Sara is a classical musician and an educator, what’s your musical background? Did you give up music at a certain time, or are you still playing music?
MS: The answer to that question has led us to this moment and to this book. I’ll tell you two or three very quick stories. One, in third grade in elementary school, there was an announcement over the intercom, ‘All those who want to learn to play the French horn come down after school and audition’. And so I did. I was excited. I just loved the French word. I loved the music, the sound, and it was playing on something, an album, an Alan Sherman album, a comedy album in the 60s. And so I went down to audition, and I forget what exactly the first line was that I supposed to sing, but maybe the first line of the national anthem. I sang it, and the music teacher looked at me and said, drums. It was an awful experience, but I started playing the drums, and then I played the clarinet, and then I played some piano. And the second story is that I never was able to take any of those music lessons and make them rich or fulfilling. And it had to do – I’m very accomplished, I’m very happy in life, I love Sarah and her sisters, yet I was never able to memorise. And you can imagine, as a superintendent in schools for over 25 years, giving 1000s of speeches, I never memorised script. And I’ve learned that, early on actually, in ninth grade when the English teacher told us to go home and memorise one of Shakespeare’s soliloquies ‘To be, or not to be’, and I couldn’t do it. And I have since found out how many others can’t do it. And so my mild learning disability, which has not held me back in life, helped me focus more on appreciating music in a different way. And then here’s the third story. When I was in elementary school, I remember the teacher having to sit in roles, hold the book a certain way, the music book, and sing songs, and it just felt strange, felt uncomfortable, and none of those experiences diminished my love for music. In fact, probably enhanced it, because I so much wanted to make music part of who I am and what started us as an adult and did as a child,. And yet I never became a musician, except I’m really good at playing the radio.
AH: You must be so delighted then that your daughter is so musical and that you’ve been able to write this book together, that’s absolutely amazing. Thank you for sharing those stories of your first experiences with music, because I think for a lot of people who aren’t working in music, those will resonate. And Sara, I didn’t ask you what your instruments are?
SLS: So I’m a pianist. I started playing, I think, around five years old, and it wasn’t something that my parents asked if I wanted to do until I started doing it anyway. My sister was taking piano lessons. She’s two years older than I am, and after all her lessons, I would go in and play whatever she had learned with her teacher without lessons, and I would play it with my nose, I would play it with my toes or my elbow. And it just came naturally and easily to me, and I loved it. And so my parents started lessons with me around then. I’ve had the privilege of studying in Ukraine, performing in France and in Italy and across the country. I played flute for eight years in band, and I sing. I took voice lessons for many years, and while I’m not a vocalist, I can carry a tune.
AH: It’s a huge undertaking making a book, and making a book like this, which is so full of deep learning and also beautiful stories, and you’ve got playlists connected to it, it’s written in a really engaging way, and gives so many different perspectives on music. And I haven’t even got through the whole book yet. So can you tell me why you felt there was a need for this book?
MS: So I think you’ve heard some of our stories that have brought us together in writing this book, and our love for music and our love for each other through the father/daughter relationships. We’re fortunate that we could have these close moments and also get really irritated. And it’s through these conversations that we have a thread in life. And that thread has made, I think both of us – I don’t want to speak for Sara – but I’ll take a guess that it does, has given both of us this thought about, if we have this joy and this love, how can we bring it to others? How can we help share it? And what we’ve seen across the country is that people think about creative musicians or classical music is for a certain group of people. Or certain people want to listen to United States country music. Or certain people might like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Ed Sheeran and others not. And so this idea of music is founded in respect for, admiration and acceptance of others. And music, through neuroscience, we know the connections that could be made, and so this is kind of a life’s calling for us, given our mutual experiences or our different experiences, or brought us to this point. But this book is an attempt to say music is essential. It is core to who we are as people, and let us intentionally use it to connect better in our world.
SLS: Absolutely. And to go off of that a little bit. Across the country, there are gaps in what is out there to experience live performances, really, for all ages, and to make music accessible to all communities and to all ages, I’ll focus on classical music for a moment, since that is my background. But Mozart for Munchkins, as you mentioned earlier, is an interactive concert series based in New York City, and it started because I was still performing when my daughter was four months old, and I was playing a concerto with orchestra, and she was there, but no other babies were there. And looking across New York City in particular, where I’m based, there was nothing else out there where I could potentially take my daughter to a concert, and she could be a four month old. And Mozart for Munchkins was born on this idea that music is for everybody, and I think oftentimes we’re stuck on the benefits of music as a performance and as a learned practice. And what Mozart from Munchkins does, and what we try to do in the book, and that really over the last nine years, now that Mozart from Munchkins has been around, we try to make sure that the benefits of music are visible and palpable through experience and interactive performances. The benefits from letting kids be kids, or even have adults understand what they’re listening to instead of just passively having it on in the background is huge. Their benefits are countless, and I think so often when we talk about music education, we forget about the importance of just becoming active listeners, and so the book is really trying to highlight how we can bring music into our everyday life to gain these benefits without necessarily learning how to play a piano, how to play the drums or the flute or become the next opera singer. Because those opportunities are not accessible to everybody for whatever reason, whether it’s financial reasons, whether it’s neurodivergent reasons. And so music is for everybody, and we really hope that this book highlights that.
AH: Definitely. That’s what came across to me, the inclusivity of this book. And I think in the introduction, you talk about start from where people are, respect with non-judgment for ourselves and others. And I think that’s core to a lot of music educators’ practice nowadays. Fascinating. Could you briefly run us through what people will learn about in the book? There’s so much in there. I know that’s going to be a difficult job, but what would be of particular interest to people working in the fields of music for education, wellbeing and social justice, for example?
SLS: Yes. So two branches there, and I’ll try to answer both of them. So I like to think of the benefits in four different categories: focus, emotional awareness, executive functions and community building. And when we look at the neuroscience behind focus, we know certain types of music lower our cortisol levels, reduce our blood pressure, help us focus when we learn how to do that. We know listening to music collectively can have our brainwaves actually synchronise, and it builds this beautiful sense of community. Maybe when we listen to music collectively, it releases oxytocin, which creates these social bonds. There’s ways in which we can use music and dopamine attachments for our executive functions to help get through our everyday lives and create positive habits. There’s also ways in which we can become more in tune with our emotions. When we listen to music and it lights up our amygdala, our emotional awareness region, that we can use music as that universal language, either to take us where we are and select a song to move us where we want to be, or to use it to communicate to somebody else. If you don’t have the vocabulary accessible to play a song and say, ‘Hey, this is how I’m feeling today’. And so in the book, we have actionable strategies within those four categories, whether it’s breathing with a piece of music, whether it’s selecting a song with a certain amount of beats per minute to create that community, and there are playlists as well that are just a starting point. We recognise that our musical choices are not everyone’s musical choices, but they’re a place to begin if you don’t know where to start, and then to go from there. And those actionable strategies can be used for your own music selections. In terms of accessibility, there is a chapter in the book on transforming boundaries, and there’s two ways in which we talk about that. One is with all communities for people that might not have the means to go to concerts, and so how music can be this connector in New York City. We’ve performed concerts for migrant families and families in shelters, people that we don’t know, but we’ve had bilingual programmes. We’ve had programmes in English, but this music is this universal language that connects people in really hard times. The other part of that is neurodivergent communities, that music can be a way of giving agency for students or for adults, whether it’s for habits, for routine, but everybody can speak music and feel music with our neurons firing 100 to 300 milliseconds after we’re exposed to a piece of music. It’s a way in which our body reacts without us really knowing, right? So before we can use the words for it, our body is responding to a piece of music.
MS: There’s a thread of the book that says, ‘Hey, let us think differently about our work. Let us look differently about our curriculum music education, about music itself, not being just passive in the background, but intentionally, deliberately looking at music as a way of connecting, of networking, of thinking deeply and getting all of those advantages that we might have’. And there’s another piece to our lives. I can’t imagine growing up in Sara’s household, what a fortunate person she was, not just because of her wonderful parents and her sisters, but because of the difference in her life compared to how I grew up, and this book is written for both. And so how I grew up was with a father who did not graduate high school, who is a tough guy marine out of the 30s and 40s in the Depression era, and he still listened to music, and he was profoundly hard of hearing. And my mother was a nurse in the naval, Brooklyn Naval Yard during the war, dealing with all the women there who were taking care of building these ships. And so my experience is so different than Sara’s, and I think it’s the combination of the two that we would like to have as a takeaway. Music is for everybody. It is ubiquitous. It exists everywhere. We have to think differently about it. Sara taught me something during the writing of this book I didn’t realise, and it’s now become part of my discussion always. It’s the fourth wall, the breaking down of the proscenium. So Mozart, and we talk about this in our book, loved the audience reaction. He didn’t say, you know, and Sara wrote in the book, ‘You know that crinkling of the paper, you know you get these nasty looks from others or don’t applaud during the separation the quiet between the movements’. Well, it is that quiet between the notes, the quiet between the sound breaking down the fourth wall, that is particularly appealing to me. And I hope that people take away from this book the idea that we could look at music as who we are, as humans, and look at it differently than a way we were raised or taught. And so much of the way we were raised or taught is narrow, is provincial, and in some ways a counter intuitive to the wonderful potential of music in our lives.
AH: Oh, those are such good points, and something that I think listeners will really resonate with.
MS: And we love that they’ll resonate with it.
AH: There is a kind of separation of music since however many hundreds, 1000s of years ago, when we began making music as humans, and it was a central part of our lives, wasn’t it? And there’s some kind of disconnect that’s happened gradually and gradually and particularly in the education system. And I was really interested to read early on in the book that you were quite frustrated by these narrow perspectives presented to young people as this is what music learning is, and this is what music learning isn’t. Because I know, you know, we’re aware in the UK that there are loads of young people who are making music at home or experiencing music in a range of ways, but that’s not recognised in their school, and they’re not seen as musical. Things are changing, but they’re changing quite slowly, I guess, for a lot of us who want to make sure that we capture that passion and that that gets brought into school. So can you tell me a little bit more about that, about your experience? Obviously, being brought up in the States, it may be very different there.
MS: I don’t think it’s changing. I’m going to speak as a teacher, as a principal and as a superintendent of schools in the United States, and one who always brought music to my experiences. And I don’t think it’s changing, because it’s I don’t know that we’ve asked the right question, even when I was looking at Ed Sheeran’s Foundation, who just has to be commended for the remarkable work he’s doing. I would love to talk with him about adding to his notes, not just creating music educators or creating musicians, but creating a love of music for all and creating a broad base of music for all. For example, I was an English teacher, and I would, I wish I could replay those years and bring music more into the classroom. Not once, as an English major in college, did I ever hear the music of Shakespeare, and how could that be? Or Ed Sheeran’s beautiful music about the castle on the hill, and which is distinct for the UK, not the United States. You don’t bump into too many castles here. But how many examples are there in science about acoustics and waves and learning about music, which could be core to the science curriculum, or the history of the UK or the United States? There’s so many examples. So the question that’s existing here and in the UK is about funding, and the arts funding are being cut. And I would hope we add to that question, how do we integrate as an essential music into all the curriculum, if it’s such an integral part of our lives? Rather than seeing us going off to an English class or to a music class, it should be part of the curriculum as natural as breathing, because that’s what music is. In fact, Sara has done some research where music preceded language.
SLS: And before I even get to that, just this idea of interdisciplinary curriculum, I think, is fascinating. We already know that teachers, at least in the States, are oftentimes just trying to make sure their students are engaged. They’re not letting anyone fall through the cracks, and they’re overwhelmed and they have so much to do. So adding on to their curriculum is not something that we think is necessary, but it’s a way in which to use music to simplify. Maybe it’s putting Debussy on and letting them draw and learn about Monet at the same time in art class, maybe it’s learning something in math and playing Mozart and talking about the beats per measure and how that’s all intertwined, that there are ways to simplify all of this, instead of, as my dad was just saying, Have a music class here, a literature class here, in an art class. And so I think there are ways to support teachers, to help them bring music into the classroom. There’s an interview with a New York City teacher in the book who teaches first grade. She’s taught K[indergarten] through five and that she doesn’t even know where to begin with music, but she does use music in the classroom as a place to focus, as a point for movement breaks, and I think having teachers even start there to use music throughout the day maybe it’s a transition. Hey, when we play this song, it’s time to go out the door and it’s time for lunch, that music can be used as a tool and not as something that is extra. Before I even get back to the language, I also think, although this might be an unpopular opinion, some of the problem lies with this conservatory mentality. And I feel like I can say that because I’ve gone to conservatories my whole entire life. There is a siloed ideology of here’s classical music, here’s jazz music, here’s our music theory and here’s our music humanities. Even in conservatories, it’s taught so separate those courses. So I think starting from the top down, at some point that conservatories and higher education also has to recognise that the people that they are making the best they can possibly be at their instruments in their fields, also needs to learn to speak language outside of that conservatory world, to connect, to create leaders, to build communities, because that’s the only way that all these genres of music are going to continue to thrive, not just exist.
AH: So are the conservatoires still like that in the States, or are they changing? In the UK we are seeing changes. We are seeing strands to conservatoire teaching that is about community and that is about taking a wider perspective. Not in every place, but you can see that that is changing as we move through the generations, really, the generations of music educators. Do you think that’s changing the States as well?
SLS: Maybe a little slower than a snail’s pace? It’s yes in the way in which I think some schools are addressing, let’s say performance objectives. Right at the end of if you’re a performance major, you have to play something from the Baroque, Classical, romantic, 20th century, and now maybe they’re filling in, and you have to do a minority composer or something, somebody that was composed a piece in the last 20 years. And I think in a lot of ways, that is how conservatories, at least in the States, are thinking, we’re opening up our horizons. There are some wonderful pedagogy teachers that I’ve encountered across time as well. But I still think it’s this very narrow ideology we make you the best you can possibly be. Good luck. Go out into the world and let us know what happened. It’s not setting up musicians to thrive afterwards. I talked to so many graduate students that, okay, now what do I do? What am I supposed to do with my life now that I’m excellent at this, where do I go?
AH: Absolutely, yeah. And I think it’s about maybe lack of critical thinking about the purpose of music, the purposes of musics. There’s a university in the UK with a degree course, and I won’t remember what the degree course is, but it’s called SOAS, and it’s the School of Oriental and African Studies, but they have a music course which is very broad-minded, and it is producing people who think critically about music and learn a wide range of skills that they can apply in many different settings. Yeah, so there’s some sort of interesting work going on over here. So it sounds like it’s the same in the UK, that young people’s access to music education and that music education that might inspire them is patchy. And over here, it’s actually, it’s been getting worse. There are obviously financial pressures, which I’m sure you have there. Here, there’s pressure from the particular school performance measures that don’t now include music and the arts. So there’s no real incentive for schools to do music and the arts. Music is statutory up to the age of 14, but many schools have started reducing their music curriculum, often putting it on a kind of carousel with other art subjects, so that kids might kids up to the age of 14 might get music every four weeks and one hour lesson. You know, that’s how bad it’s gotten. I think in some schools they cut it out altogether. It’s given very little attention in the education of general school teachers for ages five to 11. I think people get an hour, if that, when they’re training to be a teacher. There’s a lack of specialist music teachers generally in the UK, and not surprisingly, we’re seeing a decline in young people choosing music when they get to choose their exam subjects at age 14. So I’m really curious to know, what is the situation like in the States? Is it similar?
MS: It is similar, and it’s not that students are choosing music less. We know from the research that we’ve done, I think the figure is about 70% of people across the world listen to music three to four hours a day. So it’s so fascinating this morning, when Sara was out doing her morning run, we were talking with her kids, and they said, ‘Well, listen, let’s listen to K-pop’. And my wife and I don’t listen to K-pop, but the children of this conservatory trained mother listen to K-pop, and they can discern what’s good and bad and tell us at six and eight years old what they like about it or they don’t like about it, and switch. So I think Anita, the question has to be broadened. It’s just not those courses that exist or the cycle every four weeks, but it’s about how we ask the question, about including music in all that we do. Kids are listening to music. In fact, Anita, you just have to do a quick search and ask AI for a couple of tunes, and it’ll give them to you. Or now, emerging very quickly through AI is the ability to create music on your own. Go ahead and talk to some teenagers, they’re doing that. Music is part, it’s essential, it is part of their lives, and they’re no longer dependent on school, which breaks my heart in a way, because it’s a missed opportunity for educators and for parents. And then I could speak as a grandparent, what a wonderful opportunity to ask your grandchildren, your children, about what they’re listening to, and out of respect, listen to it. How about teachers in school? Do they ask the kids what they’re listening to? It’s not that curriculum is being changed, and as Sara’s point before about, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s so much to do’. It’s that we’ve never said music is part of culture, part of history, part of science, part of social studies, part of everything we do. And it’s not an add on, but it has to be looked at differently. So when you have that cycle, your phrase was so powerful. When you have that cycle every four weeks, you might have something in music, and during the other time, music should be everything that goes on in the classroom. It’s a way of introducing themes and emotions and regulation and focus. It’s a way of understanding who we are as a people. That would be success, not just more music teachers and music classes.
SLS: If I can follow up on that, I think part of that is to answer your question, funding, as we all know in the States right now, is also hard on the arts. I have many colleagues that lost grants this past year from the National Endowment of the Arts, or even from the NIH that were doing research on neuroscience and the benefits of music, and they’re now stuck without their funding to continue their projects. Some musicians that I knew were putting on concerts for children in Boston, and they lost their funding to finish their programmes. Besides that, part of what we see in the States is that public schools in particular are funded from taxes, right? And so many affluent communities still have the ability, if the to keep music programmes, and a lot of those are still very robust, but that’s not universal in the States, and I think that’s one of the first things that is cut when facing financial troubles, because music is seen as enrichment and not essential, like what my father was saying. And I think that’s the key that hopefully will start to change over the next few years, especially as more of this research in the States. We have a movement called Neuro Arts, and I’m curious if you’ll have something similar out there. It’s coming out of Johns Hopkins, a movement by Susan Maximum. She wrote a wonderful book called ‘Your Brain on Art’ with Ivy Ross. This movement is putting that neuroscience behind it, the neuroscientists with the artist practitioners to show that this is not enrichment. We know this works. It’s essential for our executive functions, for our focus, for our communities. And I think that really has to be the foundation to make big change, that it’s not this thing that feels good and sounds nice.
MS: Let me, uh, quote one of my favorite philosophers, Pogo, a great cartoon character, I’m not sure it’s been covered in the UK. And Pogo, years ago, and it has not just been Pogo, but wrote ‘We have met the enemy and he is us’. So if I’m a good anthropologist and look at this funding crisis, or look at the curriculum crisis, or look at music education crisis, [and ask] Why did we get here? What have we learned? If we continue to say, give me more let’s have more music education classes. We’re not going to change. We’re not going to make it, we’re not going to get more funding. So let us ask what we have learned. You know, it’s like when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in the 1960s, and Ted Kennedy paraphrased a wonderful quote, which is, ‘Some people see things as they are, and ask, why? And others dream things that never were, and ask, why not?’. I think Sara and I are in that category. And say, what can we do? Why not? Let’s dream things that never were.
AH: Oh, I love that. Can you just tell me what that quote was again? Is it ‘We met the enemy, it may be us’?
MS: Yes. Well, something contributed to Pogo but, but it may be. And you know, there’s part of what Sara and I struggled with in the book, is how direct and candid and how many people do we upset by saying the things we are?
AH: Well, I’ve been talking and thinking a lot about the way we reframe our advocacy messages for music and the arts. And, you know, it’s a really interesting topic of conversation, because I think we’re coming to a point where we realise that we do need to talk differently about music as a social good, about music as as healthcare. Music as a central, essential part of being human. But we, we often in the arts and in music, we’re a bit too fluffy about it, aren’t we, and I think sometimes people have heard those same messages over and over and over again, and they kind of switch off to it. So that brings me on to the question of, when you’ve already touched on this, what do we do to change this, this situation where we’re feeling that a lot of young people are missing out on pursuing music in whatever way they want to, and being supported in music in the way they could in schools or out of schools. So you’ve both had careers that have involved making the case for music’s impact. What have you learned about advocating for music to be taken seriously as a tool for education, wellbeing, social justice, both in policy making and funding and the systems, all the systems that surround them?
SLS: Yeah, I’ll go some specific examples. We have a non-profit arm called the Little Mozart Foundation, which brings free or highly subsidised programmes to underserved communities in New York City. It’s hard to get funding, as I’m sure you can imagine, but we’ve had the fortune of getting some city-wide grants, you know, some independent private donations as well. But the communities that we’ve worked with are so hungry for connection, and for community and connection through music, and we have worked like I mentioned earlier, migrant families, which is a really tough community right now, especially, well across the country, but in New York City, we’ve done programmes for women and children in domestic shelters. We’ve put on free Juneteenth celebrations, where we closed down the street of the West Village in Manhattan and had a wonderful multi-generational celebration. And so I think getting these programmes to happen isn’t just luck, but it’s been really focusing on the neuroscience benefits behind it. We’ve done some professional development days multilingual on how some of these leaders in these communities can use music for these students that have been through trauma. And I think that’s really interesting, when we’re talking about these brain benefits, that they’re coming to us and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve seen you do this work, and we want to reach our children in a different way. How can we do that with music?’. And we’ve been able to create workshops with them, whether it’s through playlists, whether it’s understanding if they select certain songs, like I mentioned earlier with a certain amount of beats per minute, maybe it’s clapping around and learning simple rhythms, all of these ways in which, when rhythm helps with logic, it helps with problem solving. So it’s always being science forward and not just on, ‘Hey, let’s put on this great performance of this great thing’. Why? It’s always going to, why are we doing this? And I think that goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You know, we messed everything up, or we’re the enemy, and it’s us. Now, what do we do about it? We need to understand why we’re doing what we’re doing and not just putting it out in the world.
MS: People create music in any number of ways, and that’s part of what Sara, I think, wrote beautifully in the book, is this question of, well, how do you talk with your children at home? How do you make it a family conversation? How do you make it banging around the table or dancing around the kitchen table, singing into wooden spoons. All that, and then the side of that that you’re getting to is like, how do you formally move it ahead? How do you assure that it’s a part of the curriculum and the culture? I really deeply believe that I’m an eternal optimist. Otherwise I wouldn’t be an educator. I think the pendulum will swing, and what we have to do is help that pendulum swing towards the arts in an intentional, deliberate way, and not swing back. But Sara just used the phrase ‘forward with the science’. I think that there are so many opportunities for voices to be raised, to structure the next generation of arts and in particular, music in schools and at home.
AH: Interesting. The word that keeps on coming up, in addition to resonant, is intentional, the intentional use of music, the intentional use of music at home, and evidencing to policymakers and funders that music can be intentional and it can help their intentions, I guess. Really interesting. We’re coming to the end of the podcast, so I wanted to invite you to share either three practical pieces of advice or three calls to action for others working in this area, things you’d like to see happen in the next few years.
SLS: Going back to the three to four hours of music that adults are already listening to every day, it’s higher for our children, it is eight to nine hours. And much of that is not intentional. It’s while they’re scrolling, it’s in the grocery store line, it’s well, it’s on in the background, and they’re talking to friends. And so I would ask educators, parents, ourselves, to think about how we’re utilising music and put that attention intention behind it. Whether I want to be more focused, or I’m feeling really sad, what song can I use to motivate myself? And so to find a moment throughout the day where you want to shift where you are and help select a song to be where you want to be. And you can also help your students, your children, even your co-workers, use music in that way. And so we can change our physiological being in that moment, just from a song.
MS: Yeah, and mine is three things: ask, listen, respect. And whether it’s in a conversation such as this, we’re having with you, with one another, with our kids, with our grandparents or friends, I think in those three simple words, it’s a capturing that would serve us well as humans in being better towards one another.
AH: That’s lovely, beautiful words to end on. Thank you so much, Mort. And just before we go, where can people find out more about this fantastic book?
SLS: We have a website, resonantminds.com, there are playlists on resonant minds. There’s also mozartformunchkins.com, there’s also a Mozart for Munchkins Instagram, which shows this work in action if people want to see little videos of it. Mozart for Munchkins also has a Spotify that has playlists on there for focus, for community building, for a lot of those topics that we talked about today, and the book itself is available on almost every major retailer out there.
AH: Fantastic. Thank you both for making the time. It’s been a really fascinating conversation.
MS: Anita, I want to thank you. Your questions were terrific and gave us opportunity to think more deeply about our work. So thank you.
AH: Oh, thank you both so much.
SLS: Thank you, Anita.