There’s a scene in the 20-year-old baseball movie “Major League” when a ragtag group of baseball players, thought to be by far the worst team in the league, start to put together a winning streak. The improved play leads the manager of that fictitious Cleveland Indians team to believe his squad is a contender for a playoff spot, but needs “something to bring it all together.”
 The same could be said for the Recreational Music Making (RMM) movement. The RMM team has some potential Hall of Famers in the work of Karl Bruhn, Dr. Barry Bittman, Remo Belli, and more. But the team of superstars perhaps needs something to make it all come together. That was perhaps one of the reasons why it was so important for NAMM’s Morgan Ringwald to gather a group of experts and the press to meet on Jan. 19 for the inaugural meeting of the National Coaltion of Recreational Music Making.
That something that could bring it all together might be a major PR/marketing campaign to make sure the public understands the benefits of RMM.
That was at least the feeling of Bruhn and Dr. Bittman, who has conducted studies on the benefits of playing music for several years. To sum up Dr. Bittman’s research on Recreational Music Making, RMM, which is playing music noncompetitively, reduces stress, which could therefore lead a person to a longer and healthier life. And who knows, if Dr. Bittman can back up a hypothesis that stress reduction can reduce the likelihood of heart disease, RMM could become even bigger. Can we someday say that playing music can reduce the number of heart disease diagnoses?
But even without the possible heart disease link, Dr. Bittman’s controlled studies already revealed playing music noncompetitively will reduce stress. This research has made Bruhn believe RMM can be as big a movement as aerobics was more than 30 years ago. And he added only 7.6 percent of the adult U.S. population play musical instruments. If 25 percent played instruments, that would equal 41.3 million people and a lot more people at your store. “Aerobics has been around for over 30 years and millions of people know what it is,” said Bruhn. “I ask the question, ‘Is it possible that some day, millions and millions of people will be involved with recreational music making and understand it?’ What would the industry be like if we can accomplish that? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have an industry supported by the scientific and medical communities? Like aerobics, they would say recreational music making is good for you and fun. It helps you lead a better life. We need a global PR campaign in the news media. It’s like a savings account. It takes a long time to get to where you want to go.”
“In order to look into the future, you have to look at the past,” said Dr. Bittman. “In doing so, I think we’ve come to some extraordinary conclusions. I became part of the movement 10 years ago. The question I asked is: ‘Is playing music part of a positive lifestyle strategy?’ At that point, there were very few studies that stood the test of peer review… Frankly, what we tried in the beginning did not work. We failed on four different occasions because of ‘performance anxiety.’ We were having a ball, and the facilitator (teacher) was having a great time, but we were actually inducing stress. So we did everything we could to take out that performance anxiety and level the playing field to ensure people would not feel stupid and silly when they played. When we did that in 2000, we were able to show for the first time that playing a musical instrument produced positive biological outcomes. We proceeded to do some large controlled studies. In 2003, we were able to show in a publication that playing a musical instrument reduced burnout and improved mood states. In addition to that study that was performed on 111 people in very stressed industries, we were also able to look at an economic impact analysis for the first time. We brought economic experts who projected for every 100 beds in a long-term care facility, we could save nine turnover positions (turnover positions refers to employees leaving their job whose goal it is to service those 100 beds). Each position could save about $9,000.”
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