Making Music and a New Life

This chapter reviews Esther Lederberg’s life in music. Researchers who study multiple intelligences have observed an overlap between musical and linguistic intelligence. Esther Lederberg’s mastery of foreign languages would have given her confidence to independently master the recorder. Her enthusiasm for music resonated with her French colleagues, Jacob and Monod, at the Institut Pasteur. Probably the most famous musician/scientist of the twentieth century was Albert Einstein, who admitted that if he hadn’t become a physicist, he would have become a musician. In the 1960s, Early Music—of the Renaissance and Baroque eras—enjoyed an international revival. In 1962, Esther Lederberg and some like-minded amateur musicians founded the Mid-Peninsula Recorder Orchestra (MPRO). She performed with the MPRO for over forty years. This shift in her social circle marked a new phase of personal growth toward music and the arts. Drawn together by a shared passion for music, Matthew Simon and Esther Lederberg married in 1993.

Epilogue

The epilogue addresses the observations of the editors and authors of this volume regarding their observations of the pedagogical shifts needed to address music teaching and learning during a global pandemic such as the one unleashed by Covid-19. When a great deal of musicking, teaching, and learning needed to happen remotely, having access to technology and understanding how to employ it for supporting creative and collaborative music making and remote instruction was of paramount importance for many music teachers and musicians. Yet for too many students and school districts around the globe, the digital divide heightened the lack of educational equity in countless communities. While many districts merely focused on content delivery though whatever digital or non-digital means were available, the authors noted the crucial role that a focus on social-emotional learning plays in the lives of our students, with a particular emphasis on how music and the arts can support our emotional health and sense of connection.

Neuroqueer(ing) Noise: Beyond ‘Mere Inclusion’ in a Neurodiverse Early Childhood Classroom

Inclusion, as it is understood in a British education context, usually refers to the integration of children with dis/abilities into a mainstream school. However, rather than transform the school, inclusion often seeks to rehabilitate—to tune-up—the ‘divergent’ child’s noisy tendencies, making them more easily included. Music and the arts more broadly have long been instrumentalized as one way of achieving this transformation, relying on the assumption that there is something already inherently opposed to music—out-of-tune, or noisy—about that child. In this article, I think and compose with Neuroqueer(ing) Noise, a music research-creation project conducted in an early childhood classroom. I draw from affect and neuroqueer theories to consider how the instrumentalization of music as a way to include autistic children relies on the assumption that ‘they’ are already inherently unmusical. I consider how a deliberate attention to noise might help in unsettling ‘mere inclusion’: in effect, changing the mode we think-with in education, and opening us—researchers and educators—to momentarily say “No!” to ‘mere inclusion’. This article is of relevance to teachers working in early childhood classrooms, as well as to educational researchers interested in affect theories, crip-queer and neuroqueer theories, and neurodiversity, as well as sound- or arts-based research methods.

Towards a Greater Contextualization of Music and the Arts in Aging and Cognitive Disorders

There is an increasing prominence of arts and cultural interventions related to aging and cognitive disorders in the scholarly literature and at gerontological conferences. However, the mechanisms of the salience and relevance of aesthetics, culture and leisure in the lives of older people remains unclear. One aspect which has emerged is that of aesthetic deprivation and its consequences for well-being. This symposium aims to provide perspectives from a range of researchers involved in programs of research and implementation to try to contextualize and better understand the perspectives of older people, arts practitioners and therapists the place and context of arts, culture and leisure in optimal aging.

“Life Is So Good”: Centenarians’ Autobiographies Between the Promise of Immortality and the Specter of Death

When we are trying to come to terms with death and dying, or the loss of a loved one, cultural practices can fulfill important functions. Literature, music, and the arts can help us cope with loss by expressing our emotions in a way which seems to be universal. This paper investigates the role of co-written centenarians’ autobiographies in this context. It focuses specifically on autobiographies by African American centenarians and white co-authors. The article investigates the dialogue between the centenarian and the co-author as a ritual for coming to terms with the co-author’s fear of mortality. It argues that for a white readership that defines itself as secular, the black centenarian – deeply religious himself – can serve as a surrogate and a role model. Just as he assures his middle-aged, white co-author that death is not to be feared, his autobiography may offer a secular readership a model for dying.

The social patterning of sport: Regular sports participation and stratification in Canada

The participation in different forms of leisure has often been ascribed the power to reflect and reproduce social inequalities. While some came before, this intellectual endeavor increased substantially with the seminal work of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction. While Bourdieu’s writings on culture did not neglect sports, sport is often neglected in subsequent studies of culture. Most of the subsequent theoretical and empirical work on culture has focused upon music and the arts, many also arguing that Bourdieu’s work is now dated. This paper seeks to provide an updated and comprehensive re-examining of sports participation. For these investigations, I use large-scale survey data and various statistical methods to test the relevance of the Pierre Bourdieu’s foundational theories and explain these patterns. The findings show direct sports participation relying primarily on dispositions towards the body which are stratified by education and income, especially for the most elite sports. These results therefore highlight the contemporary relevance of Bourdieu’s theories of the relationship between sports, social class, and the stratification thereof.