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Guest Post by Anya Willis, FitKids.info

Self-care plays a vital role in achieving health and wellness as an adult. But many people don’t realize how critical it is for children as well. Kids face a lot of pressures and stressful situations these days, and if they don’t have methods to foster their well-being, it can be difficult to overcome obstacles and lead a healthy life.

The best way to teach your child about self-care is to practice it yourself. But there are other strategies worth trying that can realistically fit into your daily routine. Check out these arts-related self-care ideas from Jessica Lee Studio!

Clean Your House

First, nix the negativity in your home. If your household experiences and participates in excessive arguing, complaining, and criticism, find ways to improve the energy in your living environment.

One practical solution is to declutter and deep clean every room and keep it that way. Also, draw the blinds on sunny days and think about opening the windows to let fresh air flow in. And finding a relaxing activity to do as a family each day can also help to ease tensions and maintain a healthy atmosphere.

Reduce Your Stress

Many parents bring stress home with them from work. And don’t think that kids can’t fill that! If you’re constantly showing your work stress, it will negatively impact your child’s self-care routine and overall life.

Try mixing up your routine at work to make things more interesting and less stressful. Also, make sure you’re taking nutritious snacks to the job, and use productivity tools to help you stay organized and on task. Any steps you can take to reduce job stress will benefit your entire family.

Learn an Instrument

Playing an instrument can do wonders for an individual’s mental health and well-being. And that goes for adults and children alike. If your child shows an inclination to music, explore various instruments with them to determine which they might be interested in learning.

Younger kids can develop many developmental skills through playing an instrument, and older kids can use it as an outlet for their thoughts and emotions. In other words, it can be an excellent self-care activity for kids of all ages. Connect with Jessica Lee Studio to get started on lessons!

Listen to Calming Music

Playing music is not the only way to practice self-care; simply listening to it can also boost a child’s mood and help them maintain a healthy perspective. Encourage your child to sit and listen to soothing music for at least 15 minutes a day.

If you have a younger child, you may need to designate a specific time of day and keep them accountable. For older children and teenagers, simply suggesting classical and other relaxing genres can make a big difference in their personal lives and well-being.

Try Other Art Forms

There are many other art forms worth considering as a self-care practice for your kid. Many children enjoy drawing or painting because it gives them an opportunity to let their imagination run wild and express things they can’t articulate in words.

Take time to scour the web for indoor and outdoor art projects that you could engage in with your kid. You might be surprised how fun it is for you both!

Practice Self-Care as a Parent

Finally, don’t forget to be a role model for your child as they learn the essentials of self-care. Maintain a balanced diet and steady exercise routine. Make sure you get at least seven hours of restful sleep each night and find de-stressing activities that you can incorporate into your routine. Telling your child about self-care is one thing; showing them is quite another!

If your child is not experiencing the stressors of life quite yet, keep in mind that they certainly will at some point. Teaching them about self-care now can help them keep a healthy perspective and maintain their well-being as they deal with tough choices and situations down the road. Consider the tips above and keep finding other ways to guide your child to building healthy routines!

Are you interested in learning voice, piano, viola, or guitar? Visit JessicaLeeStudio.com today!

There’s nothing like a lively rhythm to get toes tapping or a lush melody that evokes memories of a magical summer.

Music has no age restrictions. From the tiniest tot bopping to the beat to an older woman swaying in time, everyone benefits from listening to and creating music. Multiple studies have found that music:

● Provides emotional release
● Relieves boredom
● Increases self-esteem
● Calms the nerves and reduces anxiousness
● Encourages positive, happy thoughts
● Shifts negative thinking
● Motivates movement

Experts at Johns Hopkins agree that music is medicine for the mind, noting, “Music is structural, mathematical, and architectural. It’s based on relationships between one note and the next. You may not be aware of it, but your brain has to do a lot of computing to make sense of it.”

Jessica Lee Studio offers music lessons in Naperville for voice, piano, viola, and guitar that focuses on the individual needs and abilities of each student. To learn more, call 331-330-SING or send a message through this contact form.

Music’s healing harmony

Many experts also agree that music is an effective medicine, especially for seniors and their caregivers, positively affecting minds, bodies, and overall health. One study concluded that music managed pain and depression in older people diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Another study discovered music therapy’s positive effects on older spinal surgery patients’ anxiety and pain levels.

Music also benefits the verbal working memory and enhances cognitive performance in healthy older adults. This universal language is especially effective for those whose language is snatched away by dementia and Alzheimer’s. Today’s Geriatric Medicine says that music therapy for older individuals has proven quite effective in helping communication for those whose language centers are affected by memory diseases.

The power of music

Harness the power of music and improve your and your loved one’s communication, memory, socialization, and quality of life. Play music daily through a music therapy program specifically designed to help a loved one struggling with dementia or recovering from illness or an operation. You can even create your own playlist.

Select music that’s positive, motivating, enjoyable, and familiar. Spin tunes when you or your loved one is:

● Preparing for the upcoming day
● Exercising
● Cooking a meal or neatening up around the house
● Entertaining friends and family
● Relaxing and unwinding after a long day
● Visiting long-ago memories
● Feeling a little blue and needing a pick-me-up

If your loved one does have memory issues, choose tunes that harken back to their youth or 20s or 30s. Why? Memory and music are intertwined! Music that reminds listeners of a specific time, place, or emotion stimulates the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex (memory center). Even some Alzheimer’s and dementia patients who’ve completely lost the ability to speak will hum along with songs from their youth.

Make your own music. Do you or your loved one play an instrument? Dust off the guitar. Tune the piano, sit down, and tickle the ivories. Gerontologists know that hobbies, like playing music, increase self-esteem and are good therapy for seniors. A bonus is that playing music slows the heart rate and lowers blood pressure, too.

Introduce your loved one to YouTube. The site is a rich archive of music from all eras. It’s easy and fun to travel back in time to watch a live performance of Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller, or Count Basie.

Music throughout the house

Today’s 21st-century sound systems aren’t like the crackly, static-sounding speakers of yesteryear. The variety of speakers on the market appeal to a variety of needs, price points, and preferences. While you can still spend hundreds—even thousands—of dollars on a sound system, choosing a less expensive option doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice sound. Here’s some more advice on which speakers may be right for you:

● If you or your senior are technologically savvy, you can opt for wireless speakers that connect to an Amazon or iTunes account, like Alexa or Google Home.
● If you want music wafting through your entire home rather than having one speaker blasting, you can add speakers to multiple rooms.
● If you’re really handy, you can incorporate a wireless or hybrid speaker system. Read more about how to design and build an easy-to-use music system here.
● If you’re using smart speakers, make sure you and your devices are protected from cyber threats.
Music provides a wealth of psychological, health, memory, and stress-reduction benefits for seniors. As musician Macklemore said, “Music is therapy. Music moves people. It connects people in ways that no other medium can. It pulls heartstrings. It acts as medicine.”

Photo Credit: Sandie Clarke @honeypoppet, Unsplash

Sending you and your family wishes for good health!

In early March, before the stay-at-home order in Illinois went into place, my mom, Dr. Joanne Tobacman, and I recorded a few tracks at Imagineering Studios in Arlington Heights. Here are the results: https://jessicaleestudio.com/#clips. Hope they help to brighten your day!

After taking a break from writing for the Musical Notes blog during August and September to focus on leading High Holiday services at Joliet Jewish Congregation, I’m back in blogging business.

Before Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) took place in September, Alumni Weekend at my alma mater, Brandeis University, occurred from June 8-10 and included a roundtable on, who else? Leonard Bernstein.

It covered one of the musicals he wrote, West Side Story, and opened with a beautiful live performance of the song, “Somewhere,” by Theater Arts colleagues Adjunct Associate Professor Nancy Armstrong on vocals and accompanist Todd Theriault on piano. This was followed by a panel discussion among Neal Hampton, Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Brandeis University Orchestra; Carina Ray, Interim Chair and Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies; Robert Walsh, Associate Professor of Theater Arts; and moderated by Ingrid Schorr, Director of the Office of the Arts at Brandeis University.

Hampton raved about West Side Story, and provided a detailed description of its music. Walsh commented largely on the choreography in the musical. Ray’s analysis of the musical was a good balance to the positive reaction to West Side Story by the other two panelists, as she commented on interracial relationships in a colonial context, and how the musical included a story of immigration, the unequal relationship between Puerto Rico and the U.S., a turf war, women as property (how Maria “belongs” to Bernardo), and lyricist Stephen Sondheim and Bernstein’s small amount of actual research into Puerto Rican music (besides going to a gym where a social organization was trying to bring two opposing gangs together).

Ray commented that depictions of Puerto Rico and its citizens in West Side Story have been a cultural touchstone for those in the United States, regarding how they have come to think of Puerto Rico and its citizens during the 60 years that the musical has been in existence. Discussing the disastrous Hurricane Maria that hit the island of Puerto Rico in 2017, killing 3,057 people, Ray noted that the minimal reaction to the hurricane by the U.S., the nation it belongs to, can partly be attributed to images of Puerto Rico as “backwards” in works such as West Side Story. “They can ‘literally’ be matters of life and death,” she said. She then quoted Oscar Wilde, who once said, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.”

If you’re interested in viewing the roundtable online, click here.

Music names our deep feelings, even when we can’t find the words to label them, Leonard Bernstein said in his first Young People’s Concert, originally televised by CBS on Jan. 18, 1958, in partnership with the New York Philharmonic. “The meaning of music is in the music, the rhythms, the notes, the way the notes move. You’ll find out the meanings themselves just by listening to it.”

Bernstein’s explanation of the meaning of music to young people implied that, even if a story line was supposed to offer a narrative for a piece, the basic understanding of that piece was in the notes themselves.

“Music is never about anything. It just is. Music is beautiful notes and sounds put together in such a way that we get pleasure out of listening to them,” he said.

The two-year worldwide celebration of Bernstein’s 100th birthday continues until Aug. 25, 2019.

Leonard Bernstein’s book, The Joy of Music, contained not only imaginary conversations, but also television transcripts from the show Omnibus. They covered “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” “The World of Jazz,” “The Art of Conducting,” “American Musical Comedy,” “Introduction to Modern Music,” “The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach,” and “What Makes Opera Grand?”.

One concept Bernstein returned to throughout these shows is the idea of the “inevitability” of the next musical note and phrase. Beethoven wrote and re-wrote the musical themes for his symphonies (89-91); he had to figure out what would arrive next. This makes it seem, ironically, as if what he composed was not inevitable. After all, he had many choices for each note and rhythm. So, what makes the final phrases appear as if they were the only possible musical conclusions?

As Bernstein depicts Beethoven’s drafts in The Joy of Music, he shows us notes with multiple cross-outs and re-writes. We realize that it’s only due to Beethoven’s extensive work composing that the final products seem inevitable. If Beethoven had stopped anywhere along the line, then the end products might not have sounded inevitable to listeners at all.

Bernstein contrasts Beethoven’s work with an image from an Igor Stravinsky score, which the author notes, “looks almost as beautiful as it sounds” (92). “But Beethoven’s manuscript looks like a bloody record of a tremendous inner battle” (93). Bernstein called him “a builder,” someone “always probing and rejecting in his dedication to perfection, to the principle of inevitability” (105).

Bernstein also described this quality as “rightness- that’s the word! When you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that can rightly happen at that instant” (29). So, the idea that Beethoven scribbled, wrote, re-wrote his symphonies until they were “right,” makes much more sense.

Perhaps the path to “rightness” is a different one for different composers, or maybe only certain composers achieve this quality. Bernstein goes so far as to compare Beethoven almost to G-d. Although I wouldn’t go that far, I’d certainly recommend this book as a good read for anyone interested in honoring Bernstein during the current, two-year, worldwide celebration. For more information, check-out the “Leonard Bernstein at 100” web site: https://leonardbernstein.com/at100. The festival commemorates the composer, music educator and humanitarian with more than 2,500 events worldwide. G-d speed, Bernstein.

Tune in here next time for reviews of the cultural icon’s Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic.

In Leonard Bernstein’s The Joy of Music, the author’s wide-ranging roles, including those of composer, inform his opinions. One of the topics he writes about is George Gershwin, even having one of his characters, the Professional Manager (P.M.) ask lightly, “What other George is there?” (55). Bernstein and the P.M. compare and contrast Bernstein’s and Gershwin’s works. “After all, George was just like you,” the P.M. says, “highbrow, one foot in Carnegie Hall and the other in Tin Pan Alley. He wrote concert music, too, and was all wound up in fancy harmony and counterpoint and orchestration” (56). Bernstein replied that Gershwin’s progression as a composer was a more natural progression than his own, “starting with small forms and blossoming out from there. My way is more confused: I wrote a symphony before I ever wrote a popular song” (57). The comparison between the two men continues, with Bernstein largely lauding Gershwin, calling him a “great, great theater composer,” even to Gershwin’s detriment: “Perhaps that’s what was wrong with his concert music: it was really theater music thrust into a concert hall” (62).

Bernstein wrote that he thought that each of Gershwin’s works was better than the previous one. Although Bernstein greatly admired the melodies of Rhapsody in Blue (1924), which United Airlines has determinedly made famous through their advertising, he wrote that the later musical An American in Paris (1951) is also a study in tunes, but an improvement upon Gershwin’s earlier works. “[Gershwin] had by that time discovered certain tricks of composition, ways of linking themes up, of combining and developing motives, of making an orchestral fabric” (59). However, it’s the opera Porgy and Bess (1935), famous for melodies including  “Summertime,” that has caused Bernstein to ask, “Doesn’t it point the way to a kind of Gershwin music that would have reached its own perfection eventually?” (61). This huge compliment leads to Bernstein lamenting Gershwin’s death. “What he would have done in the theater in another ten or twenty years!” (62) “Will America ever realize what a loss it was?”

The imaginary conversation comes back to Bernstein’s own composing. Despite knowing the general formula for a hit musical, the Professional Manager wraps up with one of his original thoughts about one of Bernstein’s shows: “Very strange. It’s a big success, the public enjoys it, it’s been running for five months, and there’s not a hit in it. How do you explain it?” he asks (53, 62).

Why is a piece of music successful? Although there may be a formula for much of it, we may never fully know.

Tune in next time for a further exploration of Bernstein’s The Joy of Music.

“Leonard Bernstein at 100” is a two-year worldwide celebration of the life and career of the composer, with more than 2,500 events on six continents. There are many possible descriptors for Bernstein, including musician, educator, author, cultural ambassador, conductor and humanitarian. In Bernstein’s wide-ranging career, he found time not only to educate the public through television broadcasts of the programs “Omnibus” and the “Young People’s Concerts,” but also through books, such as The Joy of Music, Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, Findings and The Unanswered Question.

As part of this major celebration, it seems pertinent to revisit some of Bernstein’s works, beginning with The Joy of Music (Amadeus Press, 2004). The first half of the book includes a series of imaginary conversations among characters including Younger Brother, Lyric Poet, Bernstein himself, Broadway Producer and Professional Manager, addressing topics of “Why Beethoven?”, “What Do You Mean, Meaning?”, “Whatever Happened to that Great American Symphony?”, and “Why don’t You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?”.

Bernstein’s many different roles in life led him to come to a wide variety of revelations about music. His background as a music educator informed his thoughts about music history. These include the ideas that, “All music must begin in the theater, historically speaking. … Music first arises attached to words and ideas. There is no folk music, to my knowledge, that is abstract. It is music for working to, or for dancing to, or for singing words to. It is always about something” (44). Music originated as folk music for various functions in people’s lives, including praying, life cycle events including weddings, other celebratory events, for healing, and for working.

The development of music included operas growing from small to large, and church motets becoming cantatas and large requiems. “Now musical idioms have become familiar; and the procedures of Western music are enough alike so that the music can be separated from the words or the ideas or the concepts – that is, from the theater- and can exist for the audience in its own right” (45). Now, we have different forms of music: not only operas by Mozart, but also symphonies, and not only Passions by Bach, but also his preludes and fugues. Certain types of music developed into others. Bernstein called the church, “the greatest theater of them all” (44), concluding that, “in short, the audience had grown up with the music in the theater, and had reached the point where they could relate to the music without the theater” (45). In other words, the churchgoing audience itself developed from a group that expected music to include lyrics, to one that also became interested in and receptive to instrumental music outside of houses of worship.

This brief overview of folk and church music is only a taste of the topics Bernstein included in The Joy of Music, some of which are discussed here. 

Tune in next time for a comparison of the music of George Gershwin and Bernstein.

Violinist for the L.A. Philharmonic, Vijay Gupta, spoke about “The Power of Music to Heal” at Wentz Concert Hall in Naperville, Ill., on Feb. 27. The free, sold-out talk was sponsored by ARTSpeaks, a grassroots group focused on arts advocacy in Naperville. It began with Bach solo music, unaccompanied, and Gupta joked with the audience that, that was what they had signed up for.

Gupta made his debut with the Israel Philharmonic as a child, appeared on Oprah’s talk show when he was 8 years old, and toured as a soloist internationally, including in Israel and Germany.

He took the SATs when he was 12, and began college when he was only 13 years old. He graduated from Marist College, “fell in love with cell biology,” and working in a lab at Harvard, studying Alzheimer’s, discovered his fellow researchers “were bigger music nuts than I was.”

However much science appealed to him on a certain level, and how little he wanted to disappoint his family members, Gupta heeded the advice from a colleague that, “You need to do what makes you leap out of bed in the morning.”

He earned a violin performance Master’s degree from Yale, and in 2007 at 19 years old, auditioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The conductor at the time, Esa-Pekka Salonen, awarded Gupta a position with the internationally-renowned orchestra. Gupta’s father moved to L.A. with him, as the condition upon which the gifted musician could accept his job offer.

Gupta eventually became the violin teacher of Nathaniel Ayers, a former Juilliard student with a severe mental illness who ended up homeless in Los Angeles. Gupta visited Skid Row, an area of downtown Los Angeles with one of the largest stable populations of homeless people in the United States, of between 5,000 and 8,000 individuals. This visit led him to wonder, “How many more Nathaniels were out there? It was in meeting Nathaniel that I began to understand that it was about more than playing live music for audiences in a concert hall.”

Gupta started the program, “Street Symphony,” as a 2011 TED Senior Fellow. Street Symphony is a non-profit group that “places social justice at the heart of music-making. Our community creates opportunities for musical engagement and dialogue between world-class musicians and people disenfranchised by homelessness, incarceration, and poverty in Los Angeles County,” states the Street Symphony web site, http://streetsymphony.org/.

Next during his talk in Naperville, Gupta played a video about the orchestra. The video included an interview with Reena Esmail, a composer-in-residence with the Street Symphony, who said, “Music isn’t just a form of entertainment, it’s a lifeline.”

Gupta then played a violin version live of the piece that Esmail composed for Street Symphony, “Take What You Need,” which was originally written for choir and audience in a call-and-response format. “We need to embrace art as a public health tool now,” Gupta said. “In a world where we are human doings, not human beings, the arts give us a place to be.”

The organization has played more than 350 concerts for the Skid Row community, with an average of 125 attendees each.

“How do we show up for this community without our instruments? That’s the challenge,” Gupta said.

In one study, “Music training alters the course of adolescent auditory development,” Northwestern University researchers studied the affects of in-school music training on adolescents, discovering that it improves sound processing and language skills.

Specifically, compared to those who don’t study music, musicians tend to show enhanced:
1. ability to perceive speech in noise,
2. verbal memory,
3. language skills, and
4. reading abilities.

Musicians tend to:
5. respond to sound faster and
6. differentiate speech sounds to a greater extent.

According to the study, adolescents who study music in school
7. maintained higher neural consistency throughout high school and
8. showed the cortical responses of an adult earlier, suggesting that in-school music accelerates neurodevelopment.

9. These changes seem to benefit literacy skills. Although the two groups of high school students in the study both improved in language awareness relative to the general population, the music training group improved more.

Click here for a link to the full study write-up: http://www.brainvolts.northwestern.edu/projects/music/index.php