Music as a Healing Art Initiative

Music can address an array of physical, emotional, and mental conditions

For example, therapeutic music can help to:

• Stabilize heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration rates.

• Minimize stress and have a calm, stabilizing influence.

• Increase production of endorphins and decrease pain.

• Bolster the immune system.

• Provide comfort at end of life.

Longy's training provides students with the tools they need to create an environment that is conducive to healing. This initiative reshapes students' views on what a performance can be.

Our

Music as a Healing Art Initiative

encompasses:

• Courses that introduce students to the art and science of therapeutic music, focusing on elderly and vulnerable populations.

• Scholarships for students to become Certified Music Practitioners, a growing career field of complementary medicine.

• Research into the clinical effects of therapeutic music.

DeShaun Gordon-King envisioned playing in orchestras or gaining international fame as a flute soloist. After participating in Longy’s Music as a Healing Art Initiative, he realized that using music to make a healing environment perfectly combined his spirituality, his love of storytelling, and his passion for music. The recognition he once sought as a performer seemed to pale in comparison to the difference he could make as a therapeutic music practitioner. “I’m okay with not pursuing these international competitions or these orchestral auditions because, at the end of the day, I know my music will be having a powerful impact on people—and that’s the most important thing for me.”

Preparing Teachers to Make a Difference

Music has the potential to change students’ lives in profound ways. Interactions with passionate and supportive teachers can have a lasting impact on children.

Using Longy’s teaching philosophy, our alumni are working in schools and El Sistema and other community music programs, where their work is guided by:

Culturally responsive engagement

People learn most effectively when education builds on what they already know: their culture, language, beliefs, and life experiences Culturally responsive teaching connects learning to these aspects of a student’s life. In lessons, classes, conversations, and performances, culturally responsive engagement increases understanding, enhances confidence, and raises expectations for the ability to learn.

Resource-based learning

Rather than waiting for the ideal set of resources—the right space, materials, and instruments—Longy musicians are trained to use whatever resources they have at hand to connect with students and audiences.

A growth mindset

Teachers with a growth mindset believe that intelligence and talent can be developed through effort and persistence. Longy musicians learn to support every student as they strive to grow and improve.

Our in-person degree

Immediate experience in underserved communities

Longy’s Master of Music in Music Education is rooted in socially engaged teaching practices. Longy students work toward their Massachusetts teaching license while exploring culturally responsive pedagogy and gaining vital in-person experience at local music programs, El-Sistema inspired sites, and public schools in the greater Boston area.

Our online degree

Making teacher training accessible worldwide

To enable more musicians worldwide to become teachers, Longy has launched an online Master of Music in Music Education program that is available to anyone, anywhere. The program allows musicians to complete their degrees in as little as one year. The online degree is designed to be accessible and affordable through its asynchronous content that allows students to remain employed at their current job.

Ivan Shiu grew up in a musical family in Hong Kong and wanted to become a music teacher. But as an international student and a person of color studying in the U.S., he often felt unseen and misrepresented by his teachers—his perspective and contributions didn’t seem to matter. Determined to become the kind of teacher who could ignite a student’s passion for music rather than dampen it, Ivan enrolled in Longy’s music education program, which emphasizes culturally responsive teaching that values and builds on each student’s life experiences. He now teaches in a public school system committed to engaging its highly diverse student body with this same teaching philosophy. “Longy helped me figure out how to be my authentic self in the classroom, with students who often feel unseen as I once did.”