Keeping the Beat: Healthy Aging Through Amateur Chamber Music Playing - Hardcover

Ada P. Kahn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0930121023 ISBN 13: 9780930121020

Publisher: Wordscope Associates, 1999

Synopsis

Book by Ada P. Kahn

About this title

From the Publisher

The Foreword was written by Don Campbell, musician and author of The Mozart EffectR. Campbell is the world's foremost educator on the connection between music and healing.

Here's what Don Campbell says in the Foreword to Keeping The Beat: Music is much more than what meets our ears. Its power is strong enough to quickly modify the way the mind thinks, the body moves, and the heart beats.

Keeping The Beat is about the joys of tuning up mature minds and bodies through participation in music making. Music lifts their spirits and relives an accumulation of life's stresses. Older musicians experience the effects of music from the inside out.

Before you move into the text, I want to mention a few more of the many beneficial effects of playing chamber music that are not directly described by these players. There is a release of endorphins, the brain's own "opiates" that can induce a "natural high." Players can boost their immune function, because the profound emotional feelings the experience can trigger release of hormones that can help reduce factors that allow the disease process to take hold. And players improve their physical endurance because playing to a strong beat increases strength, especially when combined with physical exercise, such as bowing a violin, cello, or viola, or blowing a flute, clarinet, trumpet, cornet, or French horn.

The players you will read about in Keeping The Beat have indeed experienced The Mozart Effect R. All music participation affects their moods. It makes them feel happy, inspired, excited, empowered, comforted, or heroic. Read and enjoy their stories. They will be inspirational not only to musicians but also to all who want to know more about one avenue toward healthy aging.

From the Author

Keeping The Beat is about the joys of participating in amateur chamber music. It's also about healthy aging. What is the connection between the two? How do the two fit together? To find out, I interviewed many older amateur players and professional musicians who teach or coach older amateurs. This book is a compilation of the stories of people in their late sixties, seventies and eighties and the important role music plays in their lives.

These seniors are not without aches and pains. Many have vision and hearing impairments. Some have had heart repair, cancer, and other debilitating diseases, Others care for ailing spouses. All of them - amateurs and professional musicians - share one things in common, a passionate interest in making music. They also believe that music brings a high degree of well-being into their lives.

For these people, playing amateur chamber music is more than just a hobby; it is the focus of their lives. It may be a continuation of lessons started in childhood or an avocation they put aside because of career or family commitments or a challenge to learn an instrument they undertook at an older age. One thing for certain is that as senior adults they now have plenty of time to practice and play with others - and they do.

If you want to know how some individuals keep their vitality into older age, you will find this book inspiring and informative. And of course, if you are involved in amateur chamber music playing, you may relate to the examples of older adults who are "keeping the beat " and perceiving themselves as enjoying a high degree of well-being.

Keeping The Beat is my attempt to identify some common elements that lead to healthy aging and the joys and satisfactions of playing chamber music.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wordscope Associates
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0930121023
• ISBN 13: 9780930121020
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 257