A Well-Tempered Mind: Using Music to Help Children Listen and Learn

Peter Perret, conductor of the Winston-Salem Symphony, chronicles in A Well-Tempered Mind how a brief NPR feature about music and the brain inspired him to create an innovative music education program for first- through third-graders at two elementary schools in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The musicians from his woodwind quintet taught the children to listen to music, detect the roles of the instruments, discern how music is constructed, and even compose their own music.

The effects of the quintets intervention reached beyond the music classes and carried into other academic subjects as well, resulting in a significant improvement in the childrens scores on annual state tests. A Well-Tempered Mind describes how the children and musicians worked together, and explores the brain research that seeks to understand how music engages the brains cognitive capabilities ranging from memory and language and emotional processing.

Perrets Bolton project inspires a host of tantalizing questions such as: Does music physically change the brain? Can music help kids with short attention spans, dyslexia, and other learning difficulties? Does music influence the cognitive abilities needed for reading and math? Perrets engaging and candid narrative, previously featured in Symphony Magazine, tells of a fascinating journey of discovery into the complexities and intricate workings of the human brain. Further, it opens the door to new and exciting opportunities for education, in its demonstration of how music can be a universal language that expands young minds in unforeseen ways.

A Well-Tempered Mind demonstrates that by working together, we can make a difference in our children's lives and replace cultural bankruptcy with a full pocket of good music.  Lord knows we need it."—Wynton Marsalis, Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center

This book should persuade parents and administrators to give education in music its deserved high priority in the schools under their care.—Walter J. Freeman, M.D., professor in the Graduate School Division of Neuroscience, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California at Berkeley

A chance event in 1992 prompted an unusual experiment. Perret, music director of the Winston-Salem Symphony in North Carolina, happened to hear a National Public Radio report about neuroscientists who were investigating the influence of music on learning. Young children who learned to play keyboards scored higher than their peers on tests of spatial-temporal reasoning, which is related to abstract and mathematical thinking. Perret, who had a lifelong interest in neuroscience, was so intrigued that he decided to apply the core principles to education. The result was the Bolton project, initiated in 1994 at the Bolton Elementary School in Winston-Salem to integrate live orchestral music into the curricula of "at risk" children, aiming to improve their academic performance. Many students represented challenging demographics: poverty, minority status, language barriers, learning disabilities and below-average IQs. Nevertheless, as little as 30 minutes of group music instruction three times a week made a difference. "Measured by the standard state prescribed tests of reading, writing and mathematical achievement, the children we worked with did better than expected and better than children who hadn’t had their instruction blended with music," Perret and his collaborator Fox report. That was the case for the first pupils the duo worked with, later classes, and schools elsewhere that have used the now expanded program (some are described briefly in the book). The authors say that the Bolton project "succeeded beyond our wildest expectations." At the program’s outset, fewer than 40 percent of Bolton’s third graders scored at or above grade level in reading and math. Subsequently, of third graders who had studied music since the first grade, 85 percent scored at or above grade level in reading and 89 percent did so in math. After several years with a music curriculum, Bolton was reclassified from an "at risk" to an "exemplary" school. Needless to say, these results do not constitute a scientific study. Nor do Perret and Fox claim to know how or why these effects occurred, acknowledging that many factors came into play, including social, psychological, motivational and possibly neurological ones. Indeed, they spend most of the book describing the Bolton program and teaching process, and only support their descriptions with high-level summaries of scientific research that backs up the educational theory. The studies do highlight a positive relation between music and learning. And they posit neural mechanisms to explain the effects, including sensory integration and enrichment of the corpus callosum, which connects the brain’s two hemispheres. "This book does not have formulas for creating young geniuses; nor is it a book of science," Perret and Fox explain. "Rather, it tells a story, describes an educational process, and attempts to share some insights into the world of cognitive neuroscience." In this context, they amply succeed.

Richard Lipkin