Mozart Went Down to Georgia

Abstract

Now don't you feel smarter already? --Governor Zell Miller to Georgia legislature after listening to a portion of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony We raise corn, hell, fiddlers, one feisty old-time fiddler told a newspaper reporter in 1920, and we had a pretty good crop this year, all around. Since its inception, we've tried to make Up Beat Down South a place where such infectious enthusiasm for music comes to life, to suggest energy, richness, breadth of Southern music-making. But even if inclusion is dominant theme running through a column still in its brash youth, recent events in two southern states remind us that there are powerful cultural urges that resist placing all musical forms on equal footing. In last two years, legislatures in Georgia Florida have passed laws designed to ensure that all new-born infants gain benefits of what has become known as the Mozart Effect. Based on a smattering of preliminary scientific studies, on general public's seemingly infinite faith in classical music's intellectual moral stature, the Mozart Effect posits that listening to classical music speeds a child's neurological development. As a corollary, public accepts that popular music it listens to daily has little intellectual or artistic value. There is no Hank Williams Effect, for instance, that promises to make babies smarter or better at math. The movement to stoke babies' cerebral development music received its biggest publicity boost in 1998. In his January budget address to joint session of House Senate, Georgia's then-Governor Zell Miller asked approval for $105,000 to provide each of state's estimated 100,000 newborns a tape or CD. Research shows that reading to an infant, talking an infant, especially having that infant listen to soothing music helps those trillions of brain connections to develop, especially ones dealing spatial reasoning, he explained. Better music for all kids would give them a head start in temporal reasoning that underlies math engineering even chess. After all, Miller recalled of his youth in north Georgia mountains, musicians were folks that not only could play a fiddle, but they also were good mechanics. Yet rather than demonstrate music's power by playing Back Step Cindy, Devil in Pea Patch, or any of fiddle tunes that inspired him as a youngster, he played a portion of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Now don't you feel smarter already? he asked. The proposal ignited a firestorm of debate on both sides of issue. Yet controversy centered not so much on Miller's conclusions or on scientific foundations of his assertions, but on cost. Many legislators barked that this was yet another big government spending program. Sony Corporation stepped into scuffle volunteered to underwrite requested $ 105,000, ostensibly because they had a large factory in Georgia, but also because infant brains would absorb brand-name loyalty along Mozart. Sony set to work came up a CD titled Build Your Baby's Brain Through Power of Music. The title is fairly self-explanatory, except part about music. Only classical selections made cut, even those were restricted to milder works of Mozart, Pachelbel, Beethoven, Handel, Schubert, Vivaldi. Of necessity, Sony had to make arbitrary decisions about what should be included excluded. Yet nowhere on CD could infants build their brains to grooves of other masters like Etta James, Elvis Presley, Boozoo Chavis, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, George Jones, Janis Joplin, Santiago Jimenez, Fiddlin' John Carson, Bessie Smith, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Monroe, or Patty Loveless. The CD'S narrow artistic focus reflected a widespread belief that only classical music can make babies smarter. When asked why CD for Georgia babies didn't include any of country bluegrass artists he loved, Zell Miller sheepishly explained that with my likes dislikes I don't want to be one that picks these numbers. …