There is a great variety of music lessons and they're available for almost every instrument, especially here at Cy-Fair Music and Arts in Houston, TX. Here you can take Music Lessons online or in-person, in private lesson format (one-on-one) or in small groups. And we teach all the most popular instruments including piano, drums, guitar, voice, violin, viola, and cello. Students come to
us with or without prior musical training. Many are complete beginners, some have a few years of solid musical progress under their belt, and some are advanced players. They range in age from 4 years on up and come from all backgrounds and walks of life.
We’re proud of our diversity!
Our students share more similarities than differences, however, which is why CFMA has a great community feel. Our camaraderie is also due to two of the greatest benefits of music lessons – fun and happiness.
It’s true. As our students often tell us, learning to play an instrument is not only fun, it also makes them happy.
Music Lessons = Happiness?
That’s a bold statement! But people who are creatively learning music say their involvement helps them navigate the challenges that life throws their way.
The choice of instrument seems to make no difference, whether it’s piano, guitar, violin, singing, drums or cello. Students learn creatively, and that creates happiness!
We have decades of experience watching our students grow in terms of their skill, confidence, flexibility, and resilience. And don’t those qualities make for a happier person?
And there’s more. A musical involvement can also broaden cultural awareness, improve academic performance, and – are you ready? – open the door to higher levels of intelligence.
Music Lessons = Genius?
That music lessons can lead to becoming a genius seems like a stretch, doesn’t it? But bear with me and consider this. Albert Einstein said, unequivocally, that he was an average student before he began learning music.
We’ll pause here for just a sec to let that sink in.
Albert Einstein, average? And Einstein attributed his genius – at least in part – to learning and playing music? There’s something important going on here, something worth considering.
Einstein’s son Hans said that the violin was an important part of his father’s work, adding that whenever his father couldn’t solve a problem, he would go to his music room and play his violin.
And here’s the capper. Einstein attributed his famous discovery (E = mc2) to his involvement with music.
“It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.”
This tells us that music has significant benefits that many don’t fully understand. And what about “musical perception”? What did Einstein mean with that? One can only speculate that he was referring to higher-level abilities and understanding that come because of musical involvement.
At the very least, the term “musical perception” offers some new ways of thinking about learning.
A Little Historical Background (it’s not a sidetrack, I promise)
American education has a long history of teaching by rote and requiring conformity. That’s because America’s industrial revolution needed workers who could learn specific processes and follow directions.
Since students’ knowledge was fairly easy to evaluate through standardized testing, the U.S. government increasingly required schools to test. In time, high-stakes testing became the norm for schools to receive Federal funding.
As a result, music and arts programs were generally the first to be cut in schools when funding was scarce, because they were seen as more of an add-on, not as important elements in education.
Has standardized teaching, testing, and learning worked? Well, that depends on whom you talk to. Some say yes, but those who believe education should holistically address human development adamantly disagree. We’re pretty confident that Einstein would be among that latter group.
Enter the Technological Revolution
However, times are changing – fast. As the technological revolution picks up steam, it’s requiring different skills and abilities of workers. It requires skills that used to be dismissed as “soft skills”-- skills like the ability to think critically and creatively. Rote teaching and learning doesn’t work for these skills, no matter whom you ask.
So, America is now hustling to keep up globally as companies look for a different kind of worker. They are no longer keen to hire workers who are good at memorizing information and following orders – they’re looking for all the skills that come with creativity:
"We don’t care about how well you memorize … are you creative? Flexible? Able to think critically? If you are, then we want you!"
Soft Skills for the Future
According to the Future of Jobs 2020 report, soft skills are increasingly important skills that global employers see as rising in prominence in the run up to 2025. These include:
- creativity
- critical thinking
- complex problem-solving
- resilience
- flexibility
- originality
- initiative and
- emotional intelligence.
Research shows that a person with these skills is also more likely to work well on a team.
Soft Skills for Success
Through the ages, people have mused about the constancy of change, but we’ve never seen anything like this. We’re living in an era of rapid-fire, unrelenting change which means we’d better learn to be adaptive.
Frankiewicz and Chamorro-Premuzic wrote in the Harvard Business Review that talent, not technology skills, are increasingly becoming the top prize:
“In our view, [companies should] invest in those who are most adaptable, curious, and flexible in the first place. Since nobody knows what the key future hard skills will be, the best action is to bet on the people who are most likely to develop them.”
These abilities are acquired quite naturally through creative learning and involvement, which brings us back to … music lessons!
Soft Skills and Studying Music
Studies abound about the “soft skill” benefits of learning music, and we think this statistic from the National Center for Education Statistics sums it nicely:
Children who study a musical instrument are more likely to excel in all of their studies, work better in teams, have enhanced critical thinking skills, stay in school, and pursue further education.
National Center for Education Statistics. "Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools, 1999-2000 and 2009-2010." National Center for Education Statistics. Accessed February 24, 2015.
So, those of us in the business of teaching music are very optimistic that the benefits of learning music will become increasingly understood … the time just needed to be right.
Soft Skills and Multiple Intelligences at Cy-Fair Music and Arts
Teachers at Cy-Fair Music and Arts use a unique teaching approach. It’s especially effective because it utilizes the Theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI). MI is progressive educational thinking that, developed by Harvard professor Howard Gardner, broke new ground in 1983 and continues to find its way into great education.
Rather than teaching all students as if they’re the same, our teachers use the MI approach to find each student’s unique strengths and abilities. They then work with students to develop those. The results are quite impressive, because as a student’s strengths are developed, her “weaknesses” or “limitations” also improve.
So, back to learning music and soft skills, the skills needed for the future. When students have developed their strengths through creatively learning music, they feel more confident and unafraid of learning new things.
Would you like to develop your own (or you Child’s) creativity? Join Cy-Fair Music and ArtsToday! Music Lessons are available Online (via Zoom) and In-Person at our Houston Campus!