Participating in a creative act

To play the trumpet is to participate in a creative act, since without the performer music would have no life. To be aware that one is participating in such an act, however small the role may seem, is to recognize the responsibility each person has to produce his particular contribution at the highest possible level.

Keith Johnson, The Art of Trumpet Playing (Ames, Iowa: The Iowa State University Press, 1981), pp. 50-51

Persevering with the trumpet (or perhaps other hard tasks)

In order to sustain the desire to persevere, first the student must believe that making good music is important, that it makes the world a better place. This notion may seem unrealistic, but all people need to feel that their work makes a difference, that if they were not here some component, however small, would be missing and, more important, would be missed.

Keith Johnson, The Art of Trumpet Playing (Ames, Iowa: The Iowa State University Press, 1981), p. 11

No evidence (yet) that music education helps academic achievement

When schools began cutting even these bands and sing-along music classes, an army of researchers, performers, teachers, and administrators hustled to justify their existence. They rationalized arts education as a magic pill for achieving academic success, rather than teaching the arts solely for their intrinsic value.

In 2001, Harvard researchers would challenge this assertion, combing 188 studies published between 1950 and 1999 to evaluate the effect of arts education on general learning. Their results were shocking: No reliable causal relationship was found between music education and academic performance (except for spatial reasoning). Creative thinking, verbal scores, and math grades were all unaffected by studying music.

Blair Tindall, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music (New York: Grove Press, 2005), p. 258 (citing Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland, The Arts and Academic Achievement: What the Evidence Shows (Los Angeles: The Getty Center, 2001). I haven't found that, but there's an executive summary available here. See Ellen Winner & Lois Hetland eds., Beyond the Soundbite: Arts Education and Academic Outcomes (conference proceedings, 2000).)

Herbert Clarke's practice regimen (in case you're looking for a crazy hard New Year's resolution)

[A]t my father's suggestion I took up the study of the viola. He said that if I could learn to play it well enough we would form a family string quartet . . . .

I immediately planned out a schedule for myself to play four full hours on the cornet each forenoon, with four on the viola every afternoon. . . .

One never-to-be-forgotten Sunday afternoon, about a month from the time when the project originally was started, we made our first full try-out on one of Mozart's beautiful string-quartet compositions. Everybody became so deeply absorbed, and the time passed so pleasantly, that nobody gave any thought about supper, although we were called several times. Father suddenly remembering that he was supposed to play the organ at evening church service, finally jumped up and left precipitately without stopping to eat. The rest of us then came down to earth long enough to eat.

This experience, new to me, was so fascinating and so increased my love for good music that I became more determined to follow out my previously planned schedule for routine work and study in a systematic manner. In detail my schedule was as follows: The cornet in the forenoon, with one hour on scales, one hour on slurring, one hour on tonguing and one hour on miscellaneous work: i.e., a little of each of the preceding combined with playing songs and easy solos. I kept this up all that winter, getting up early and working from eight in the morning to twelve noon. The afternoon was devoted to the viola, carrying out the same general system in scale playing, finger exercises, bowing, and playing parting from the different string quartets. My improvement on both instruments astonished even myself.

Herbert L. Clarke, How I Became a Cornetist: The Autobiography of a Cornet-Playing Pilgrim's Progress (1934), ch. 12. (He was 17.)

What happened to classical music in everyday life?

The role of classical music in American society has changed since 1960. In the thirties, forties, and fifties, music had been a part of everyday life for Americans, many of whom played instruments or sang together as amateurs. Today, classical music has become peripheral and irrelevant to mainstream life. It is regarded as an incomprehensible art that must be performed perfectly or not at all. Even in recent years, the number of American instrumentalists has dropped markedly. In 1992, some 7.8 million Americans played instruments, but that number shrank to 3.7 million—less than half—by 2002, according to the National Endowment for the Arts.

Blair Tindall, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music (New York: Grove Press, 2005) p. 306.

I tried digging up those NEA numbers and found:

• In a 2012 NEA survey, 12.1% of American adults played a musical instrument, alone or with others. National Endowment for the Arts, How a Nation Engages with Art: Highlights from the 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (2013).
• A few years before, the NEA reported 12.7% of adults—28.4 million—played an instrument. National Endowment for the Arts, 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (2009), p. 44. 

So where did Tindall get the numbers showing such a sharp decline? Could her figures relate only to playing classical music, counting oboe in a wind quintet but not mandolin in a bluegrass band?

One other source:

In 2010, 18,078,000 American adults (7.9%) played an instrument in the last year.

2 or more times a week: 7,435,000 (3.3%)
once a week: 2,095,000 (.9%)
2 or 3 times a month: 1,959,000 (.9%)
once a month: 1,211,000 (.5%)

Statistical Abstract of the United States 2011, Table 1240, Adult Participation in Selected Leisure Activities, By Frequency: 2010 (citing GfK Mediamark Research & Intelligence, LLC, New York, NY, Top-line Reports (copyright)).

While I'm not sure about the numbers, I do find Tindall's overall point quite plausible. The piano in the parlor is not the staple it once was, and we don't find bands and choirs in every town, union, and fraternal organization. On the other hand, if I ask the people in my band, there's music going on all over: some of them are in two or three groups, or more.

Interesting, but who wants to be in group 3? Yay science.

Just by using this orbital position sonic algorithm, a simple ambient music piece began to do something weird: control how people thought they were moving in space. So we decided to ramp up the evil meter to 11 by slowly changing the modulation rate for different frequency bands. We thought a piece that used this algorithm would make people feel like they were moving but confuse them when some of the sound elements seemed to move one way and some the other. We lovingly titled this "The Vertigo Tour" and unleashed it as a track on our CD.

Despite the fact that I knew I was torturing my listeners, I begged and pleaded for feedback from anyone who got a copy. It broke down in an interesting fashion. After a few minutes of listening, about one-third of the listeners felt like they were moving when the amplitude and phase were synchronized, another third thought the music was moving through the sound field, and the final third got violently ill. Yay science. We had figured out how to induce auditory motion sickness.

Unfortunately, the chair of my department at the time, a dedicated audiophile whose sound system was worth more than my salary, fell into the third category.

Seth S. Horowitz, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), ch. 8

What jingles do

[A] jingle is not just a way to sell you a thing—it's about linking an object with an emotion and transferring it to your long-term memory without requiring you to pay attention to it.

Seth S. Horowitz, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012)