Music has often been hailed as the universal language that figures prominently into our daily lives. Besides such obvious sources as the radio and concert venues, music seamlessly drifts into each day, underscoring such mundane activities from shopping at the local retailer or grocer to answering one’s cell phone. In the latter instance, the popular emergence of ring tones demonstrates how music can become an “instrument” for the identity of certain callers based on specific tunes.

With music permeating our daily lives and deeply impacting our present culture, one might mistakenly assume that music education has secured an admirable position alongside language arts, mathematics and the sciences as part of our nationwide academic curriculum. Yet for all its merits, music education programs continue to be eliminated from schools due to numerous budget issues. This deprives students of significant opportunities for the development of artistic abilities and the acquisition of skills for the understanding of creative ambiguity and cultural awareness.

The MGRAY Music Academy, located in the growing NoHo Arts District, seeks to right this breach by providing a consummate contemporary musical learning experience for all individuals through education, instruction and performance. Since its inception in October 2005, the academy’s core vision has been that music education, performance and appreciation become an integral part of everyone’s lives. The realization of this foresight can be duly noted in the current student body who exhibit an irrepressible passion for musical arts, brilliantly marked by their spirit of inventiveness and enthusiasm for artful collaboration.

Several scientific studies have shown a direct correlation between music training and the enhancement of children’s abstract reasoning skills, resulting in music students receiving higher scores in mathematics and science than non-music students. Music appreciation students also perform better on their college entrance exams than students with no arts participation—a fact that reinforces the U.S. Department of Education’s recommendation that college bound youth practice at least one year of visual/performing arts. The MGRAY Music Academy has a multitude of honors students to validate this claim, many of whom are enrolled in Advanced Placement courses and on track to acceptance at some of America’s brightest and prestigious institutions of higher learning.

With its contemporary approach, the MGRAY Music Academy offers an impressive set of courses, ranging from piano and woodwinds to turntables and film scoring. These varied fields of optional study serve to cultivate an independent way of learning and thinking about the diverse forms of performance within the music community. MGRAY seeks to provide training that prepares our students to not only excel musically but to also become confident men and women prepared to make a difference… one note at a time!

Kedric Beasley
Macy Gray Music Academy