ROCHESTER — “A piano is just a piano,” says James Baldwin’s narrator in his short story “Sonny’s Blues.” Almost in the same breath, the narrator urges the musician “to try and make it do everything.” ...

Six months of piano lessons can heighten kindergartners' brain responses to different pitches, and improve their ability to tell apart two similar-sounding words. Christopher Intagliata reports.

Researchers have debunked the much-publicized idea, known as the Mozart effect, that listening to classical music improves children’s ability to reason about spatial relations and other nonverbal ...