Several articles published recently about music and wellness encourage us to keep playing and creating music. The first three were each reported from their original sources on the "Health Windows" web site, from which I receive e-mail briefs sent to members of MENC: The National Association for Music Education. A study at the University of Iowa revealed that older adults participating in a volunteer wind band gained much more from that activity than the satisfaction of making music. They also reaped mental and physical health benefits: 79% reported better emotional well-being and a sense of accomplishment, sharpened cognitive skills, better time structuring, and improved relationships from socializing with other people of similar interests; 15% also noted better physical health. The conclusion of the study's authors, Don D. Coffman and Mary S. Adamek, both University of Iowa faculty members, was that making music creates opportunities for intellectual stimulation, learning and reinforcement of skills, creative expression and social interactions--not just for older people, but for people of all ages. Across the globe, a completely different type of study in Sweden found similar benefits from music to health and longevity. Dr. Lars Olov Bygren and Department of Social Medicine co-workers at the University of Umea studied 12,675 people ages 16-74 years. The study participants, chosen as a random sample of the Swedish population, were interviewed first in 1982-83 and then again in 1992. After applying controls for variables contributing to death, such as long-term disease, smoking and lack of exercise, the conclusion was that involvement in cultural events, reading and music related positively to longevity. And, believe it or not, an opera was composed by a group of adults over age 75 living in a personal care facility near Atlanta (GA). In a study focused on creative abilities among older Americans, these seniors started by participating in singing, movement, and some pitch and rhythm reading exercises. Skepticism met the announcement, by Fred Moss of the Special Populations Section of DeKalb County Parks and Recreation, that the group would compose an opera. Nevertheless, the group began discussing the elements needed to write the opera (story, music and characters, and later costumes, scenery and staging), and began producing two acts per class session. Because the libretto chosen was a children's book written by a retired teacher in the group, the opera was written to be performed by children. A private Atlanta elementary school for children with disabilities mounted the production, which was a huge success: the composers were ecstatic and astonished at the performers' abilities, and the performers were much more self-confident as a result of the performance. Coming back to the study's intent to research creativity in older adults, it demonstrated that they can learn and retain complex information about music. It also was a shining example of the joys associated with discovering one's own musical creativity at any age. An article by Gene Cohen,"Creativity and Aging," published last fall in the *Grantmakers in the Arts READER*, also focused on the creative productivity in later life. This article codifies four stages of human potential in the second half of life: the Reevaluation Phase, in one's 40s-50s, when Alex Haley began his 12-year quest through Africa culminating in his book "Roots;" the Liberation Phase in the 60s, when many people know who they are and feel freer to do things they have not tried; the Summing-Up Phase in the 70s, sometimes a period of increased storytelling and autobiography, as well as increased volunteerism and philanthropy; and the Encore phase in the years beyond that. Exemplifying the last phase was the playwright George Abbott, about whom Cohen said, "It was remarkable enough that he wrote *Damn Yankees* when he was 68. But as an encore, he revised it when he was 107." Historically speaking, the idea of senior citizens being old age pensioners who needed "looking after" was a fairly recent attitude. Happily, we seem to be returning to a philosophy of advancing years akin to that in Rome, described by Pliny the Younger as a time to be spent "honorably, cheerfully and actively." The gradual shift from the idea of old age as a positive time of life to the late-19th-century attitude, describing old age as a person's declining years, was traced by assembled historians, sociologists and others invited to consider the "Social History of Aging" at the Stuttgart Institute for the History of Medicine. One tract, an essay of 1594 by Andre du Laurens, painted a picture of growing old as "positively blissful." Timo-Pekka Joutsivuo, a Helsinki participant at the Stuttgart Institute, explained that du Laurens held that old people suffered from an imbalance of bodily fluids (derived from the medical dogma developed by Greek doctors Hippocrates and Galenus of "humours," the four principal liquids of the body), and that they were "cold and dry inside." Consequently, du Laurens prescribed a permanently heated room in which the old people should "listen to music, eat spicy food, and be surrounded by colors in order to stimulate their senses." If that's the price we pay for not dying young, it sounds like a bargain. --Gail Nickless The Mission of the American Recorder Society is to promote the recorder and its music by:
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