So you've learned to play an instrument. What's next?

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Many people, at some point in their lives, have wanted to learn how to play an instrument. Young people especially want to do it because they want to look cool in front of their peers or they have a musical artist that they look up to.

Those who are able to develop their interest into a discipline soon acquire the competence in the instrument of their choice. This level requires several hours spent on learning the fundamentals and practicing enough to perform more naturally. At this point, however, many people still end up discontinuing their study of the musical instrument. They are usually satisfied with the ability to play a few songs in their leisure time.

Despite the long hours of practice required in learning a musical instrument, competence is just part of the beginning. There are many paths open to aspiring musicians and all of those lead to a deeper enjoyment of playing music.

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Going for mastery of an instrument and making forays into a specific genre are moves beyond mere skill acquisition. Mastery involves knowing the full extent of what one can do with an instrument and allows a musician to collaborate with other top musicians. Going on this path is usually tied to aspirations to become a professional musician.

Another viable path is to learn other instruments. People who’ve been in a band for a few years often develop an appreciation for what their band mates can do. Some turn that appreciation into interest and they start all over again on a journey to learn a new instrument under the tutelage of their peers.

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Find more resources on studying music through the Mark Begelman Facebook page.

Is there an ideal age to begin music lessons?

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Nowadays, parents are bombarded with a plethora of brain-enhancing products for their children like musical apps and online videos. With the promise of making their children grow smarter, parents take advantage of these products. That’s all good and acceptable. Still, nothing beats the benefits of formal music training. The question is: When is the right age to start training?

Several studies done by the University of California suggest that taking music lessons at age three can boost brainpower. However, Baby Center reveals that piano trainers recommend that children’s hands should be big enough to handle the keys and they should be able to sit still for hours of training. And this is usually at age five.

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There is also a growing concern about introducing formal lessons to very young kids. This may be an issue for them, later on in life, if they felt like they were being forced into playing an instrument when they were smaller. They can possibly grow to hate, even develop anger against music. So just when parents think their very young children are ready for formal lessons, music teachers advice parents to give them a year or two before enrolling their kids so that the children can determine for themselves what instrument they want. Although piano is an ideal instrument to start with, parents have to expose their children to several other instruments to know and cultivate their interest.

Brain development is probably the number one reason why parents encourage their young to engage in music. But let it be a reminder to them that the love for music should be as fun as much as it is educational.

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Mark Begelman continues to spread his musical influence on kids of all ages. Visit this website for more music updates.

REPOST: When words fail, grieving children can find an outlet in music

Music is important, especially to children who are in pain and grief because music gives them something to look forward to each day. To know more about the power of music, read this LATimes.com article.

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 To help them cope with loss, therapist Arvis Jones uses music as a way to help children express how they feel.

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How do you help little children, too young to know what death really means, cope with the feelings of grief and pain that the loss of a loved one brings?

If you're music therapist Arvis Jones, you let them bang on a drum, do the hokey-pokey or join a choir and sing.

Jones is part of a growing professional field that taps the restorative power of music to help traumatized children heal.

For 20 years, she's been going to crime scenes, hospitals, funerals and schools, reaching out to grieving families with a bin of unorthodox tools — keyboards, claves, jingle sticks, tambourines, djembe and tubano drums.

Music is a right-brained activity, she said. Listening, playing, dancing and singing all engage the mind's emotional sphere.

But it's not just neurobiology that makes the medium a valuable tool. "With grief, the pain is sometimes so deep it hurts too much for kids to talk about what they feel," Jones said. "Music breaks down their defenses. They think they're having fun."

That helps counselors like Jones create a safe space to address the anger, confusion and fear that loss generates in young lives.

For the children who survived a car accident that killed a sibling and left their mother in a coma, that meant dancing around her hospital room with wooden rainsticks and percussion rings. "They'd been too traumatized to even look at their mother," Jones said. "Getting comfortable helped them reconnect."

For the little boy who hadn't smiled since his father died, that meant singing with Jones' children's choir. "Suddenly you're up there on the stage and everyone's clapping for you," Jones recalled. "He was beaming, bowing to the crowd." He'd realized that his father's death didn't mean the end of joy in his life.

For the 8-year-old who'd been fighting his classmates since he found his brother's body after a suicide, that meant pounding a giant drum. He might not have been able to describe his rage, but he could hit Jones' drum as hard as he wanted.

And he could hug it to his chest and cry when Jones asked if he loved and missed his brother.

I'd always considered it airy-fairy; the notion that music can heal something as profound as grief.

Jones said that's not an uncommon view. "A lot of agencies don't want to be bothered with music therapy. They consider it frivolous — until they see it," she said.

She said it's becoming more widely used to help children deal with not just their own grief, but with the trauma of public tragedies. Jones was asked after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School to share music therapy techniques that might help families recover.

"Death is not something we can hide from," she said. "But we have a hard time helping children talk about it."

Without encouragement, children tend to stay silent; some act out their pain in destructive ways.

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She remembers a visit to a South Los Angeles middle school to talk with classmates of a boy whose sister had been stabbed to death. "I talked to the kids about what to expect … and asked if anyone had a similar experience," she said.

Hands all across the classroom went up. One boy said his mother had been beaten to death the year before. "The teachers didn't know. They don't ask," she said. "No one knows what to say in a situation like that. Then you wonder why the kid causes trouble in class."

On Thursday, at a conference on children's grief, I watched Jones share her music therapy techniques with teachers, social workers and counselors.

She had volunteers from the audience role-play children, displaying the routes that music can take:

A tough teenager can use rap lyrics to reveal emotions that are hard to claim. A silent preschooler can signal distress with the vigorous shake of a tambourine. A withdrawn child can learn to trust by becoming part of a handbell troupe. A hurting child can learn to self-soothe by humming Grandma's favorite tune.

Music isn't magic, Jones made clear. "Recovery is a process, not an event.... But music is a way for us to begin to listen to what children feel.

Jones is the assistant director of the Center for Grief and Loss for Children at the mental health agency Hathaway-Sycamores, which began hosting the grief conference 10 years ago.

Joan Cochran, the center's executive director, financed the first conference with her credit card. "They said no one would come," she recalled. Twenty people showed up. That was enough to keep her going. She had worked with hospice patients, and seen children overlooked in the mourning process.

This year, more than 500 people attended the Pasadena conference, where workshop topics ran the gamut from bereavement rituals to therapist burnout.

"People are desperate for answers," said Deanne Tilton Durfee, director of the county's Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, which helped organize the conference. "They want to know how to do the right thing for children. And they want to know how to manage that without damaging their own lives."

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Jones offered an answer in her workshop. "You have to feel the joy inside yourself to be able to reach kids," she told the crowd, waving her arms as music filled the conference room.

By the end of the session they were on their feet, gyrating to a James Brown tune.

 Mark Begelman is a  co-founder of Markee Music, which provides a world class facility where children can enhance their talents. Follow this Twitter page to know more about its services.

For the love of music: Careers in the music business

Music has continuously evolved through the years. It has become a huge part of the entertainment industry, employing various types of performers, technicians, and staff.

For those many people, having a career in the music business can be rewarding both professionally and personally as it offers a great avenue to practice one’s passion and love for music.

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As a guide, here are some of the most popular careers in the music business today:


Musician and singer -- Often performing in places like concert halls and clubs, singers and musicians play instruments or sing for live audiences and in recording studios. With a median pay of $23.50 per hour, potential employmentin this field is relatively harder to find compared with other occupations. If successful though in gaining employment, singers and musicians could earn thousands or millions of dollars depending on their projects, shows, and sales records. In 2013, singers Lady Gaga and Madonna earned over $80 million and $125 million, respectively, out their various records and projects. 

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Music producer -- Having an in-depth knowledge of the music industry, music producers are in charge of the entire music recording process, including the recording, mixing, editing, and mastering an album. They also help mentor artists for tours, songs, style, and musical direction. Music producers earn an average salary of $86,000 to over $100,000, depending on one’s expertise and market demand.

Manager -- Responsible for the direction of an artist’s career, personal managers book their “talents” for gigs and projects, and are involved in the artist’s overall creative decision-making process. They earn by getting a percentage of the performer’s pay.

Recording engineer -- They are heavily involved in the music recording process, including facilitating and working on the sound inside the studio.

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An accomplished musician, Mark Begelman is the co-founder of Markee Music, a world-class facility for musicians and bands that need a place to play, rehearse, and record music. Visit this website to learn more of the company.

REPOST: Music Goes Solo

How does music transformed our culture completely? Read this Forbes.com article.

The culture in which we live today is so vastly different from anything known to our ancestors that it is hard to single out any factor as the critical one. The speed of communication, the rapid advance from one distraction to the next, the packaging of everything into digital format, and the instant projection of our entertainments into cyberspace, to be downloaded in an igloo on the ice-caps or a grass hut in Zululand: all these things have changed things utterly. It is all but impossible for us to look on art, music, literature, theatre and the rest as they were viewed in the past, when they were special events that required an effort of participation and sometimes were anticipated for weeks on end.

Still, at the risk of being unduly selective, I am inclined to the view that it is the change in our ways of enjoying music that has transformed our culture most completely. Music has always had a complex application to human life. You sing it, play it and dance to it. You make music together, sing in choirs, use music to praise God and to serenade your loved one. Music is an accompaniment to marching, fighting and working, and some of the most affecting music we know arose from slavery, as the Negroes on the plantations burst into spontaneous harmony of a kind that was eventually to change the world.

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Still, in all those uses, music was something that people came together to perform, and came together to appreciate. It was a social event, uniting those present through their own body rhythms and their own sense of moving together in another space – the space created by melody and harmony. Playing and listening were the two experiences on which the whole enterprise depended, and in both of those experiences you were transported, out of this world of resistant obstacles, into a place of freedom.

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Of course there were different tastes in music, and people often fought over them. The rise of jazz out of the Negro spirituals and the dance-hall music of the late 19th century changed the nature of popular music in a far-reaching and quite extraordinary way, introducing new scales, new harmonies and new ways of linking things together. A lot of serious critics were quite snobbish about it, and the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, escaping from Nazi Germany to exile in Hollywood, could not contain his wrath. Adorno told his readers that this new music signified the end of the old musical culture. No longer would music be listened to, as an expression of the highest values and the freedom of the human spirit. Instead it would be reduced to a ‘fetish’, something without life of its own, used to plug the hole made by leisure in the life of the working class. Jazz was part of the new ‘mass culture’ manufactured by Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and its purpose was to subdue the masses, and induce in them the illusion that they were enjoying things, when in fact – in fact what? Adorno never went so far as to say that they weren’t enjoying things. But he did rather imply that their enjoyments were of a lower order than his, and therefore not worth having.

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That was tough stuff, but with a remarkable survival value. Despite pouring scorn on America and all its works, Adorno is more widely read in American music departments than any other writer on the philosophy of music. Part of the explanation for this is that Adorno was a Marxist, who saw musical education as part of the worldwide struggle against the capitalist machine. American universities also tend to think of themselves as part of the worldwide struggle against the capitalist machine, and like Adorno, they tend to put out of mind the fact that they depend on that machine for their funding.

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Still, it was not Jazz that brought about the real changes. Many classical composers recognized that the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic devices of Jazz could be incorporated into the concert-hall repertoire, with stunning effects, as in Ravel’s Piano Concerto or the immortal Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin. And jazz was nothing if not an idiom for playing and listening to. Jazz concerts, big bands, jazz clubs and spontaneous gigs in private houses – all these were extensions of the old musical culture. True they gave a large space to improvisation and the huge, meditative and contrapuntal structures of the classical tradition found no real equivalent in this more light-hearted world. But so what? It was the world in which people now were living, and they had found the idiom with which to celebrate it, and to express its heartaches as well as its joys.

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The big change, it seems to me, came when music began to be packaged for home consumption – home consumption, without home production. The gramophone and the radio did some of this work. But it was completed by the iPod, and the habit, which children now acquire from the earliest age, of walking around with their music in their ears, regardless of what else they are doing. Music is no long something you stop to listen to, so as to pass, with whatever degree of wonder, from the world of ordinary causality into this sphere of freedom. Still less is it something that you take time off to play, or to make with your friends. It has been brought down to earth, so as to flow around everyday things, like rainwater on the pavement, demanding no effort either to make it or to hear it, as much a part of the background as the weather or the sound of traffic.

Some of the consequences of this are often remarked on: the fact that children are no longer motivated to learn musical instruments or to sing, whether alone or in choirs; the fact the musical tastes remain static, insulated from judgment, since the iPod only presents you with the things that you like; the fact that children only half attend to the things they are doing, just as they only half attend to the things that are sounding in their ear. But that last point is perhaps the most important. Thanks to the packaging of music we are entering a new world of half attention, a world where everything is done, read, understood, engaged with by half, the other half being the musical tapestry on which the thing of the moment is pinned.

Should we worry about this? And if so, is there anything we can do about it? One major difficulty in confronting the phenomenon is that – precisely because people are plugged into their music from morn to night – it is no longer possible to separate people from their music. We cannot invite them to stand back from their music in a posture of critical judgment. It has become absurd, even offensive, to judge the stuff that people listen to, and as a result, even in departments of academic musicology, the rule is to leave well alone. Let them get on with it. We each sink into the bed of our own chosen music, and this art which was once the highest point of human sharing is no longer shared.

Mark Begelman is the owner of Markee, a fully equipped musical facility in Florida. Subscribe to this Facebook page to know more about him.

Nurturing young talent

It is often a great thing to meet other people who share the same interests. Being among the likeminded gives the feeling of belonging to something greater than oneself – a sense of community or familiarity that produces empathy and the drive to give other people better experiences in life. This is perhaps the motivation of artists who have developed mastery to nurture those who just started their own journey in their craft.

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However, talented individuals who know their craft wholly don’t always find it easy to teach others. It takes some time before teachers see improvements among their students’ skills. Those who are grappling with instruction may find these few reminders useful in nurturing young talents:

First, one must remember what one went through before being exceptional at their chosen craft. It takes a lot of practice to master the basics of any art. Finding out how one can motivate students to take on the drills without fail is the first step to getting them to improve.

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Second, making lessons doable yet challenging is vital to learning. Students do well from being challenged and from being given the opportunity to make mistakes. The right balance is important in keeping them interested and focused on their goal.

Third, taking note of the student’s emotional state also influences the learning pace. The teacher must remain encouraging at all times yet firm in correcting any mistakes. It is also important to send a message that frustration is a normal part of the process. The teacher’s duty is to keep reminding students that their hard work will soon pay off if they stick to what they need to do.

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Finally, making every lesson enjoyable lightens the rough patches in the learning process. It is hard to stick to dull yet important routines, but an experienced teacher should be inventive enough to key in novelties during repetitive practice.

Mark Begelman seeks to nurture young musical talents by providing them with a great facility where they could practice and play. For more information on Markee’s Florida music facility, visit this Facebook page.

Songwriting essentials: Putting the groove on your music

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Professional musician songwriters have different ideas on how to write creative music for existing lyrics or the other way around. Some composers write the lyrics first and then compose the music after. Others find it easier to scribble the lyrics only when the notes have been ironed out. No matter how they do it, for experienced composers, creating music is relatively easy.

However, if you are a budding songwriter, writing words for the music or fitting music to those words can be a challenging take … at first. You may have to painstakingly extract those creative juices to make music that will sell, sooner or later. So as a rookie composer, do what many professionals do nowadays: look for inspiration from a variety of sources. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the form of a horrendous experience, a personal nightmare, a happy memory, a website, another song, or a dead dog.

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Steve Hillier, of Dubstar, has written numerous songwriting guides. You will find more helpful ideas from him in this BBC article.

There is no exact formula for a guaranteed hit song, but one thing’s certain—every song has its own life and origin to tell. Each arose from a unique process from scratch. As how the singer-songwriter, film score composer, and record producer Mark Knopfler puts it:

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“Each song has its own secret that's different from another song, and each has its own life. Sometimes it has to be teased out, whereas other times it might come fast. There are no laws about songwriting or producing. It depends on what you're doing, not just who you're doing.”


Mark Begelman is co-founder of Markee Music, which offers facilities and services for your songwriting needs. For more advice about songwriting and making music, visit this website.