303-279-1111 | 10395 W Colfax Ave Lakewood CO 80215 | info@goldenmusic.co | Open Sat/Sun 10a-5p, Mon-Thur 11a-7p 303-279-1111 | 10395 W Colfax Ave Lakewood CO 80215 | info@goldenmusic.co | Open Sat/Sun 10a-5p, Mon-Thur 11a-7p

Music Music Music

Signs Your Child Is Ready For Lessons

Signs Your Child Is Ready For Lessons

A child often conveys readiness for music lessons with physical expression. This is often starts with banging on pots and pans, tapping on couches, pretending a briefcase is a piano or that a notebook is a keyboard. 

The next sign that your child is ready for lessons is usually through verbal expression. The child may tell you outright that they want to start playing an instrument or taking voice lessons. Once the physical and verbal interest is there, it’s up to you as a parent to get the ball rolling. 

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Music Lessons are Not Really About Music...

Music Lessons are Not Really About Music...

Music lessons provide invaluable skills that can help a student’s personal, social, and academic development. A student of music can foster and develop an appreciation for being creative, confident, and persistent in their efforts to improve upon a new ambition.

Humankind has always been interested in music, even when instruments were rare and rudimentary. Music is an essential part of life that unfailingly brings us joy and elevates our spirit. In a cultural and societal sense, music is ingrained in our everyday lives.

 

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Put A Little Music In Your Heart

Put A Little Music In Your Heart
What is it about music that touches our soul, evokes emotions from happiness to sadness, gets us toe-tapping and exhilarated? These rewards especially come when you play an instrument and create the music yourself.
1. Helps in increasing concentration
2. Generates a sense of achievement
3. Strengthens respiratory system....
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The Importance of Recitals

The Importance of Recitals

Giving an adult or child music student the opportunity to perform on stage every six months is extremely beneficial to the learning process.

These performances can play a big role in their self-confidence later in life when they will need to make presentations in front of a real audience.  It is a chance to take a moment and realize that your student is improving and learning in their lessons.   It can be a fun family event also.  At Golden Music, we take a pause out of our busy lives to enjoy the community and music!

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Scottish Fiddling Comes to Golden Music in Lakewood on Sunday 3/22/15

This Sunday we welcome Although she is the Juice O' the Barley's fiddler extraordinaire, Kelly also performs music in other genres--and quite well. Website SepiaChord.com described her as the "secret weapon" in the band Tarantella. In addition to Irish and Celtic folk music, Kelly is an accomplished performer on the Hardanger Fiddle (Hardingfele). She has also performed and recorded with Portland-based Strangers Die Every Day and Minneapolis-based Painted Saints. During her career in Denver, Kelly has shared the stage with artists such as Thurston Moore, Jello Biafra, Dick Dale, and The Fray.
 
This Sunday, we welcome Scott, a singer/songwriter major from CU Denver and a multi-instrumentalist that plays guitar, mandolin, bodhran, and ukulele.  He has been playing both private and public events for a few years specializing in mostly americana, bluegrass, folk, rock, celtic and my own original music. In that time, he has shared the stage with the likes of Gipsy Moon, Leftover Salmon, Michael Engberg, and The Owen Kortz Trio. 
nd sometimes play mandolin. She plays violin and sings harmony and some lead. 
The band we play with normally is at www.reverbnation.com/juiceothebarley 
or the website www.juiceofthebarley.com 
 
Here is a page of Scott's songs at www.reverbnation.com/cscottsproject 
Here are a couple links for what they sound like on our own live
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Gregory Walker Guest Conductor works with our Chamber Orchestra

Since his 2009 Philadelphia Orchestra debut, praised by the American Record Guide as a performance of “precision and rapturous immediacy,” Gregory Walker has gained international recognition for his "beautifully calibrated phrasing," “ravishingly beautiful” tone, and the “sheer virtuoso force”of his delivery. While developing unique collaborations with the Poland's SinfoniaVarsovia, Filharmonia Sudecka and the Encuentro Musical de los Americas in Havana, Cuba, as well as the Detroit Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Breckenridge Festival Orchestra, the Oberlin Conservatory Orchestra, Ft. Collins Symphony, Yaquina Chamber Orchestra, the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra, and the Bavarian Youth Orchestra in Germany, he has been engaged at Norway's Tromsø Cathedral Series, the Gateways Music Festival in Rochester, New York, the Centro Mexicano para la Musica y las Artes Sonoras, Cork Orchestral Society Concert Series in Ireland, and at the U.S. Library of Congress.


Profiled in the internationally-distributed 2012 Chuck Fryberger documentary, Song of the Untouchable, Walker's discography includes critically-acclaimed releases from the Newport Classic, CRI, Orion, Centaur, and Leonarda record labels. He has performed with pop star Lyle Lovett and, as past concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra, appeared with Mstislav Rostropovich and Itzhak Perlman, as well as Doc Severinsen and the Marcus Roberts Trio. Walker has been featured on National Public Radio, in Strings magazine, and on the cover of the April 2007 International Musician. He can be heard on Albany Records' 2014 recording of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer George Walker’s Violin Sonata No. 2.

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A Musical Fix for American Schools

Research shows that music training boosts IQ, focus and persistence
Instruction in music literally expanded students’ brains. ENLARGE
Instruction in music literally expanded students’ brains. DENVER POST/GETTY IMAGES
By JOANNE LIPMAN
Oct. 10, 2014 11:24 a.m. ET
75 COMMENTS
American education is in perpetual crisis. Our students are falling ever farther behind their peers in the rest of the world. Learning disabilities have reached epidemic proportions, affecting as many as one in five of our children. Illiteracy costs American businesses $80 billion a year.

Many solutions have been tried, but few have succeeded. So I propose a different approach: music training. A growing body of evidence suggests that music could trump many of the much more expensive “fixes” that we have thrown at the education system.

Plenty of outstanding achievers have attributed at least some of their success to music study. Stanford University’s Thomas Sudhof, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine last year, gave credit to his bassoon teacher. Albert Einstein, who began playing the violin at age 6, said his discovery of the theory of relativity was “the result of musical perception.”

Until recently, though, it has been a chicken-and-egg question: Are smart, ambitious people naturally attracted to music? Or does music make them smart and ambitious? And do musically trained students fare better academically because they tend to come from more affluent, better educated families?

New research provides some intriguing answers. Music is no cure-all, nor is it likely to turn your child into a Nobel Prize winner. But there is compelling evidence that it can boost children’s academic performance and help fix some of our schools’ most intractable problems.

Grammy Award-winning composer and violinist Mark O'Connor discusses the importance of teaching classical music to children on Lunch Break with Tanya Rivero. Photo: YouTube/Mark O'Connor
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Music raises your IQ.

E. Glenn Schellenberg, a University of Toronto psychology professor, was skeptical about claims that music makes you smarter when he devised a 2004 study to assess its impact on IQ scores. He randomly assigned 132 first-graders to keyboard, singing or drama lessons, or no lessons at all. He figured that at the end of the school year, both music and drama students would show bumps in IQ scores, just because of “that experience of getting them out of the house.” But something unexpected happened. The IQ scores of the music students increased more than those of the other groups.

Another Canadian study, this one of 48 preschoolers and published in 2011, found that verbal IQ increased after only 20 days of music training. In fact, the increase was five times that of a control group of preschoolers, who were given visual art lessons, says lead researcher Sylvain Moreno, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He found that music training enhanced the children’s “executive function”—that is, their brains’ ability to plan, organize, strategize and solve problems. And he found the effect in 90% of the children, an unusually high rate.

Music training can reduce the academic gap between rich and poor districts.

The Harmony Project in Los Angeles gives free instrument lessons to children in impoverished neighborhoods. Margaret Martin, who founded the program in 2001, noticed that the program’s students not only did better in school but also were more likely to graduate and to attend college.

To understand why, Northwestern University neurobiologist Nina Kraus spent two years tracking 44 6-to-9-year-olds in the program and then measured their brain activity. She found a significant increase in the music students’ ability to process sounds, which is key to language, reading and focus in the classroom. Academic results bore that out: While the music students’ reading scores held steady, scores for a control group that didn’t receive lessons declined.

Prof. Kraus found similar results in a 2013 study published in Frontiers in Educational Psychology of 43 high-school students from impoverished neighborhoods in Chicago. Students randomly assigned to band or choir lessons showed significant increases in their ability to process sounds, while those in a control group, who were enrolled in a junior ROTC program, didn’t. “A musician has to make sense of a complicated soundscape,” Prof. Kraus says, which translates into an ability to understand language and to focus, for example, on what a teacher is saying in a noisy classroom.

Music training does more than sports, theater or dance to improve key academic skills.

Last year, the German Institute for Economic Research compared music training with sports, theater and dance in a study of 17-year-olds. The research, based on a survey of more than 3,000 teens, found that those who had taken music lessons outside school scored significantly higher in terms of cognitive skills, had better grades and were more conscientious and ambitious than their peers. The impact of music was more than twice that of the other activities—and held true regardless of the students’ socioeconomic background.

To be sure, the other activities also had benefits. Kids in sports also showed increased ambition, while those in theater and dance expressed more optimism. But when it came to core academic skills, the study’s authors found, the impact of music training was much stronger.

Music can be an inexpensive early screening tool for reading disabilities.

Brazilian music teacher Paulo Estevao Andrade noticed that his second-grade students who struggled with rhythm and pitch often went on to have reading problems. So he invented a “game” in which he played a series of chords on a guitar and asked his students to write symbols representing high and low notes. Those who performed poorly on the exercise, he found, typically developed severe reading problems down the line.

Intrigued, he joined with Nadine Gaab, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, to follow 43 students over three years, and they found that the test predicted general learning disabilities as well. Why? Mr. Andrade notes that the brain processes used in the music test—such as auditory sequencing abilities, necessary to hear syllables, words and sentences in order—are the same as those needed to learn to read. Prof. Gaab says the test, which is simple and inexpensive to administer, has great potential as a tool for early intervention.

Music literally expands your brain.

In a 2009 study in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers used an MRI to study the brains of 31 6-year-old children, before and after they took lessons on musical instrument for 15 months. They found that the music students’ brains grew larger in the areas that control fine motor skills and hearing—and that students’ abilities in both those areas also improved. The corpus callosum, which connects the left and right sides of the brain, grew as well.

Ellen Winner, a Boston College psychology professor and co-author of the study, notes that the study doesn’t show a rise in cognitive abilities. But she argues that music shouldn’t have to justify itself as an academic booster. “If we are going to look for effects outside of music, I would look at things like persistence and discipline, because this is what’s required to play an instrument,” she says.

Yet music programs continue to be viewed as expendable. A 2011 analysis in the Journal of Economic Finance calculated that a K-12 school music program in a large suburban district cost $187 per student a year, or just 1.6% of the total education budget. That seems a reasonable price to pay for fixing some of the thorniest and most expensive problems facing American education. Music programs shouldn’t have to sing for their supper.

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7 Year Old Sanford Girls Plays Violin to Stop Violence

SANFORD, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35 ORLANDO) - At the young age of 7 years old, Leah Flynn is a disciplined violinist.

"I like practice because it makes me get better and better and better each day," said Flynn.

 

The Sanford 2nd grader has performed as a soloist at numerous concerts and venues. She started playing at just 5 years old, and ever since she's been taking lessons and practicing daily with her father.

 

"I'm extremely proud and I tell her it's a God given talent that God gave her and she should use her talent wisely," said Paula Flynn, Leah's mother

 

And that exactly what Leah wants to do, her mom says when she saw the unrest and rioting in Ferguson, MO in the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting, she wanted to do something.

 

"She said to me 'mom what's going on?' and I explained to her because I have to, I told her what's going on and she said 'but it's not right these people look so sad maybe I could do something for them,'" Flynn said.

 

So, her father taught her the song "Let there be peace."

 

"There's a lot of scariness there and violence and fighting so I really just want them to have peaceful and happiness," said Leah.

 

Now Leah hopes to be able to travel to Ferguson to play her song of peace to the community.

 

"In her eyes she believes that she can create some sort of change in the atmosphere down there," Flynn said.

 

 

You can view some of Leah Flynn's videos on her YouTube channel

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