Learning Music After Age 50

Roy Ernst remembers the first few times he conducted an orchestra full of novice adult musicians.

“When we played a piece that was recognizable, people were like, ‘Oh, my goodness, they are really good,’ ” says Ernst, a professor emeritus of music education at the University of Rochester in New York. “One advantage we had,” he joked, “was that expectations were so low.”

It’s not just audience members who are skeptical when adult beginners take the stage. Would-be singers and musicians often face their own doubts.

“We often think about people participating in music only if they’ve done it earlier in life,” says Julene Johnson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Institute for Health & Aging at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s a little bit of myth that people later in life can’t do it.”

Not only can we do it, we probably should do it: Making music is a good brain-stimulating activity at any age, according to a 2020 report on music and the brain from AARP’s Global Council on Brain Health (GCBH).

“We now have a number of studies suggesting that engaging in music late in life is not only good for your brain but good for your social and emotional well-being,” says Johnson, who was among the experts who wrote the report.

In a study led by Johnson, older adults — many with no musical experience — joined choirs at senior centers. After six months, the singers felt less lonely and more engaged in life, according to results published in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B in 2018. Another study, published by Johnson and colleagues in PLOS One in 2021, found choir singers age 60 and older showed more verbal flexibility than their non-singing peers.

Older adults who learn to play the piano or other instruments also seem to get brain benefits. In a study of 30 people who learned to play a handheld keyboard called a melodica and 30 who did not, those who played improved their verbal memories in just 10 weeks. That study was published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience in 2023. 

Similarly, among 155 adults ages 60 to 80, those who did 16 weeks of piano lessons showed improvements in working memory, processing speed and verbal fluency over those who didn’t take lessons, according to another study published in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B in 2022.

Music lessons belong on the long list of learning experiences likely to bolster brain health, says neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin, another contributor to the GCBH report.

Your willingness to try new things and be open to new experiences, whether it’s making music, taking language lessons or tackling new puzzles and books, is a key to healthy aging, says Levitin, professor emeritus at McGill University, dean emeritus at Minerva University and visiting professor at UCLA. Such experiences matter because our brains make new connections throughout life, he says. 

Levitin’s own grandmother learned to play an electronic keyboard at age 80 and played every day until she was 96. “She didn’t become a concert pianist, but that doesn’t matter,” he says.

Solo lessons and practice are beneficial, but playing or singing in time with a group is an especially rich experience, says Ernst, the conductor who works with novice older musicians. Ernst is the founder of New Horizons, an organization of community bands and orchestras that teach members of any age to play. The New Horizons website lists groups in nearly 200 communities in the United States, Canada and elsewhere.

Community choirs also are widespread and especially accessible since you don’t need to rent or buy an instrument. Yet the biggest obstacle for many adult learners is not the cost of a guitar, but overcoming the idea that they’ll never be good enough. Ernst hears the same childhood stories again and again: “My father said I had no talent … my music teacher told me to move my lips but not to sing.” Those lingering insecurities are irrelevant, he says. “I can tell you that the success rate is pretty close to 100 percent,” Ernst says. “By success, I mean being able to play at a level that brings a lot of satisfaction.”