wisconsin music educators association president
Music Minds, Bigger Minds! Randal Swiggum, WMEA President
It started in July 2014. A TED short, “How playing an instrument benefits your brain,” started making the rounds on YouTube (rack- ing up 14 million views since then). Its creator was a
(then) fairly unknown music teacher in Canberra, Australia, with a recent PhD in the intersection of neuroscience and music education. Her name was Anita Collins.
Later that year, Anita gave a TEDx talk, “What if every child had access to music education from birth?” (300,000 views and counting). In 2018, she founded Bigger Better Brains, a global music education ad- vocacy resource based on the accelerating research on music education and the brain. In 2022, Penguin released her fascinating book, The Music Advantage: How Music Helps Your Child Develop, Learn, and Thrive, endorsed by everyone from Victor Wooten to Tim Lautzenheiser.
And this year? Dr. Collins is coming to Wisconsin! She’ll be in residence in Madi- son for a full week and appearing at our 2026 Wisconsin State Music Conference.
Our Spectacular Conference
I have been attending our state music conference for over 30 years, but this year looks to be a truly over-the-top experience of workshops, sessions, concerts, network- ing and exhibits. Besides presenters from all over the country, we’ll be joined by our NAfME president, Cecil Adderly, as well as “Dr. Tim” Lautzenheizer, a true celebrity in music education and not to be missed.
Even Carnegie Hall has taken notice of Wisconsin’s jewel of a music conference, sending one of their most exciting teams, the New York-based rap duo Soul Sci- ence Lab, whose specialty is hip hop with young kids!
Our conference kicks off on Wednesday, Oct. 28, with TI:ME, our Technology in Music Education pre-conference workshop (included free in your registration!), fol- lowed by our evening Presidents’ Recep- tion and Awards, open to all. Thursday and Friday are jam-packed with sessions for all kinds of music educators, including the WSMA High School State Honors Music Project concerts, this year in the stunning Hamel Music Center, on the UW campus. The grand finale of our conference is the annual trio of WSMA Middle Level State Honors concerts on Saturday afternoon.
“Of all people, music teachers have always known that music is one of the best things a young person can do (and they can do it for the rest of their life).”
Music Minds, Bigger Minds (Really?)
I confess that I was a reluctant convert. The whole neuroscience and music thing was not that interesting to me for a long time, partly because I thought it was sort of gim- micky and grasping, and partly because I didn’t need to be convinced of the value of music education – I had spent a whole ca- reer learning how to persuade parents, kids and decision makers that music mattered.
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But the new research was different. All the new brain technologies, like MRIs and EEGs, were not created by music profes- sionals, and the “fireworks” that happen across all regions of the brain when mak- ing music were discovered more or less accidentally by neuroscientists. We know a lot more now – even more than ten years ago – about the deep evolutionary basis for music and how music (e.g., singing) likely preceded speech.
We also know:
• Preschoolers who have practiced keeping a steady beat will have greater success learning to read, especially when it comes to fluency. (This is not pedagogical – it’s neu- rological.)
September 2026
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