Mighty Mustang Marching Band

"Practicing a Musical Instrument in Childhood Enhances Verbal Ability and Nonverbal Reasoning"

A Harvard-based study has found that children who study a musical instrument for at least three years outperform children with no instrumental training - not only in tests of auditory discrimination and finger dexterity (skills honed by the study of a musical instrument), but also on tests measuring verbal ability and visual pattern completion (skills not normally associated with music).

The study, published October 29, 2008 in the online, open-access journal "PLoS ONE," was led by Drs. Gottfried Schlaug and Ellen Winne. A total of 41 eight- to eleven-year-olds who had studied either piano or a string instrument for a minimum of three years were compared to 18 children who had no instrumental training.

Children in both groups spent 30-40 minutes per week in general music classes at school, but those in the instrumental group also received private lessons learning an instrument (averaging 45 minutes per week) and spent additional time practicing at home.

While it is no surprise that the young musicians scored significantly higher than those in the control group on two skills closely related to their music training (auditory discrimination and finger dexterity), the more surprising result was that they also scored higher in two skills that appear unrelated to music - verbal ability (as measured by a vocabulary IQ test) and visual pattern completion (as measured by the Raven's Progressive Matrices).

Furthermore, the longer and more intensely the child had studied his or her instrument, the better he or she scored on these tests. Consequently, studying an instrument seems to bring benefits in areas beyond those that are specifically targeted by music instruction.

The research study may be accessed at Click Here

Answers Definition

Marching Bands, using mostly percussion and wind instruments, originally served the military by providing communication and music in the field as troops marched from one locale to another. Broader instrumentation was eventually added for parades, ceremonies, and review, especially after brass instrument valves were patented in 1818, which allowed a bigger "outdoor" sound to be projected before crowds.

The brass band first became important in America during the Civil War. Union Army Bandmaster Patrick S. Gilmore's band instrumentation is still the model for the concert band. It was John Philip Sousa (1854–1932), however, who took this music to its zenith. After twelve years as the leader of the U.S. Marine Band, he formed his own "Sousa's Band" in 1892 and began touring the United States and Europe. His marches are considered a distinctively American music, and his "Stars and Stripes Forever," written in 1896, is his most popular piece. As professional touring bands began to disappear in the early twentieth century, American schools filled the void. Beginning with the bandmaster A. A. Harding at the University of Illinois, school bands across the country conducted by both former professional band directors and academically trained teachers participated in nationwide playing and marching contests. Municipal and military bands continued, but colleges and universities clearly had gained the spotlight. In the mid-twentieth century, band music finally received the attention of world class European and American composers such as Robert Russell Bennett, Morton Gould, Vincent Persichetti, and William Schuman.

Wikipedia Definition

A marching band is, in the broadest terms, a group of performers that consist of instrumental musicians and sometimes exotic dance teams / color guard who generally perform outdoors and incorporate some type of marching (and possibly other movements) with their musical performance. Instrumentation typically includes brass, woodwinds, and percussion instruments. Most marching bands use some kind of uniform (often of a military style) that include the school or organization's name or symbol, shakos pith helmets, feather plumes, gloves, and sometimes gauntlets, sashes, and/or capes

Marching bands are generally categorized by function, size and by the style of show they perform. In addition to traditional parade performances, many marching bands also perform field shows at special events (such as football games) or at competitions. Increasingly, marching bands are performing indoor concerts (in addition to any "pep band" duties) that implement many of the songs, traditions, and flair from outside performances.