“As a musician myself, I never did believe in the whole ‘Mozart effect’ as espoused by Don Campbell, Baby Einstein and their ilk,” writes Timothy Mangan in Thursday’s (7/10) Orange County Register (California). “The Mozart effect phenomenon was an overreaching reading of the results of a legitimate experiment in which subjects were played a bit of Mozart before taking a spatial reasoning test. Those who heard Mozart did better on the test than those who hadn’t. The ‘effect’ was apparently temporary, but never mind. Eventually, parents were playing Mozart for their tots in an effort to turn them into geniuses. I didn’t think that Mozart would make my child smarter. But I did want to expose him to classical music–because it’s good.… It offers something different than many other kinds of music–a certain subtlety, a different way of dividing time, a sense of space and texture, a sophisticated harmonic scheme and form, a place in (sometimes distant) history–that makes it a valuable addition to any child’s development. … classical music, you see, is its own reward.…You don’t have to end up in music for it to have been worth your efforts. After all, Thomas Jefferson and Jack Benny were violinists. So was Einstein.”
Posted July 14, 2014
