evidence shows studying music improves academic performance

“Often, resources for music education—including the hiring of trained, specialized music educators, and band and stringed instruments—are cut or not available in elementary and secondary schools so that they could focus on math, science and English,” said Gouzouasis. “The irony is that music education—multiple years of high-quality instrumental learning and playing in a band or orchestra or singing in a choir at an advanced level—can be the very thing that improves all-around academic achievement and an ideal way to have students learn more holistically in schools.”

read the article from the University of British Columbia

and read the study here

interview with Jay Sweet

“The spirit of servitude that [Pete] Seeger brought to the world didn’t die when he passed away in 2014, and that fact is perhaps most evident at Newport Folk Festival, the now-iconic event that Seeger helped George Wein get off the ground in 1959. “The spirit of Pete, and of Pete’s egalitarian nature, is in every ounce of this festival’s DNA,” says Jay Sweet, executive producer of Newport Festivals.” Dacey Orr Sivewright in The Bluegrass Situation, 5/22/2019

click here to read part one of the interview

and here for part two

quote from David Bowie

“I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go. I realised from the beginning that you could actually affect the way people saw things in quite a major way.”David Bowie, 2002

read the entire interview in GQ magazine