Music Articles

In 13 years of playing flute, Gabriella Alvarez never imagined playing with a clear plastic trash bag around her instrument. Kevin Vigil never foresaw his fellow tuba players wrapping pantyhose around their instrument bells.

And neither expected to watch their marching band at New Mexico State University play through cloth face masks, separated by six-foot loops of water pipe, with bags filled with hand sanitizer and disinfectant strapped around their waists.

But this is band practice in a pandemic.

Read the full story on NYTimes.com

If your parents ever submitted you to regular music lessons as a kid, you probably got in a fight with them once or twice about it. Maybe you didn’t want to go; maybe you didn’t like practicing. But we have some bad news: They were right. It turns out that all those endless major scale exercises and repetitions of “Chopsticks” had some incredible effects on our minds.

Read the full article by Tom Barnes on MIC.com.

The NAMM Foundation advances active participation in music making across the lifespan by supporting scientific research, philanthropic giving and public service programs. Read the full article by the NAMM Foundation here.

Making music might help lift more depressed people out of the dumps than common antidepressant medications do, the results of a new study suggest.

That’s not to say the people with depression should toss out their meds and pick up a guitar. The music therapy administered to patients in the new study was in addition to regular therapy, and the patients continued their regular medication routines. But about one out of four depression sufferers is likely to respond to music therapy, Finnish researchers reported in August in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Read the full LiveScience.com article here.