Wooster Music Club learns how music affects the brain

The Wooster Music Club met in Wesley Hall at the Wooster United Methodist Church for its program meeting on Oct. 3.

Pianist and scholarship recipient Hannah Lamp performed two pieces on piano to begin the evening’s program. Lamp is 15 years old and has been studying piano over the past two years under the instruction of Stephanie Musselman. Lamp performed “Fur Elise,” originally composed by Beethoven and arranged for piano by Allan Small. Her second piece was “Hava Nagila,” an Israeli folk dance.

Following this, pianist Mary-Marie Deauclaire and cellist Jack Pomfret, a senior at Wooster High School, performed. The duo has been playing together at various occasions around Wooster for the past year. The first piece was “Vocalise” Opus 34, No. 14 by Sergei Rachmaninoff. “Variations on Holy Manna” followed this, a hymn tune from the 1820s and arranged by Deauclaire.

Dr. Dennis Helmuth gave a slide presentation titled Your Brain on Music. Helmuth is interested in what performing and listening to music does to one’s brain and recently attended a conference in Boston on the subject. This lecture focused on various regions of the brain and how the brain processes music.

Humans have the most advanced sense of rhythm of all species. The temporal lobe is the region of the brain where sound and music are first processed. Among other regions within the temporal lobe, music and sound are hard wired to the motor spread or motor cortex that controls arm and leg movements. This hard-wired connection is what makes humans want to dance when they hear particularly rhythmic music or familiar tunes.

Music produces two chemicals in the brain. One is oxytocin, known as the love chemical, and the other is dopamine, known as the reward chemical. Music enhances socialization, group cohesion, physical movement, and abstract reactions such as emotions like joy and tears. Music therapists use music as a way of helping rehabilitate neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, autism, stroke victims and people who suffer from PTSD, to name a few. Music can improve mood and motivate people to get moving and be productive.

The evening program continued with Louie Miller reciting three poems. The first two poems recited were “The Morning I Watched the Deer” and “Invitation,” written by Mary Oliver, a National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize recipient for poetry. Dressed in costume, Miller then recited Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from “Through the Looking Glass.”

The program ended with refreshments and sharing memories of the Wooster Music Club, formerly MacDowell Club, in celebration of 103 years of continuous membership.

The Wooster Music Club meets the first Tuesday of the month at 6:30 p.m. from September through May, except for January and February, in Wesley Hall at the Wooster United Methodist Church. Guests are welcome.