When the rock band Queen performed in Vancouver last week, one of the stars of the show was guitarist Brian May.
There he was: big hair, a true rock god. May is credited with being the author of some of the all time great rock riffs, including We Will Rock You.
It is also worthwhile to point out to kids who are just getting started with a garage band that May also wrote A Survey of Radical Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud.
In fact, Dr. May is regarded as one of Britain’s leading astrophysicists. Yet there he is up on stage rocking away in his spare time.
Your kids might be interested to learn that there is an acknowledged link between music and math, and that the connection is even more pronounced when you consider the number of highly successful pop and rock musicians who hold advanced academic degrees.
Greg Graffin, the lead singer and songwriter for the California punk band Bad Religion, double-majored in anthropology and geology at UCLA and, with a master’s in geology, obtained a PhD in zoology from Cornell.
His is the lead voice on Bad Religion’s Sorrow and Los Angeles Is Burning.
Milo Aukerman is the lead singer for the punk rock band the Descendents. He has a doctorate in biochemistry and alternates between working with the band and academic research.
The message for those kids hammering away in the garage in pursuit of musical success is that hitting the big time musically, getting to the point of doing a few club gigs and hoping to get noticed doesn’t preclude academic excellence.
Before founding the group Boston, Tom Scholz was already an engineer. With a master’s from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was a senior product designer for Polaroid. His love for music and engineering combined when he invented the Rockman amplifier.
One of the vocalists and synthesizer wizards with the highly successful English electronic band Ladytron is Mira Aroyo. She has a PhD from Oxford and was a postgraduate research geneticist there.
Canada has its own highly rated musicians whose diverse talents have not restricted them to “playing for pizza,” as the saying goes among musicians.
Diane Nalini de Kerckhove sings jazz professionally as Diane Nalini. She holds a PhD in materials science from Oxford, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar. She teaches physics at the University of Guelph, and in a recent Maclean’s interview pointed out that “most musicians I know have a strong grasp of mathematics.” She adds that “they have to, keeping the beat, counting out divisions of beats, thinking about harmony — music theory is almost dauntingly mathematical.”
Nalini says: “I write songs in the key of E=MC2.”
That statement alone is something for the kids out in the garage to think about.
It would be too easy to conclude that so many successfully creative musicians have excelled in other academic fields, especially those related to mathematics and the sciences, because of their musical intelligence.
However, the long-term career survivors such as Kenny Chesney and Garth Brooks (both have bachelor’s degrees in advertising), Art Garfunkel (MA in mathematics), Coldplay (bachelor’s degrees in ancient history, anthropology and mathematics), Ludacris (business degree from Georgia State) and Mark Knopfler (BA in English from University of Leeds) have all brought with them the education and smarts to avoid becoming one-hit wonders.
Numerous studies have established that musical education has a beneficial effect on higher cognitive functions.
The findings published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine suggest an association between music education and general cognitive ability, as well as specific language development.
So when kids are telling you about their latest musical find, take a moment to remind them that many of the “biggies” have taken their other pursuits and passions just as seriously as they take music.
And when they want to rehearse with their group out in the garage, remind them that musicians have a saying: “Don’t give up your day job.”
Right now, for most kids, school is the day job that could eventually lead to more than just one career.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
