The below excerpt is from the book Music with the Brain in Mind, by Eric Jensen (also author of Teaching with the Brain in Mind)

THE WALDORF MODEL
Perhaps one of the best long-term models for examining the process and results of integrating music into the curriculum is the Waldorf school. For more than fifty years, learners attending Waldorf education programs have had the opportunity to explore their musical interests through standard curriculum activities. As an independent, arts-centered learning institution, the Waldorf school is one of the fastest-growing education enterprises in the world: Today there are 130 in America and 700 worldwide.
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In Waldorf schools, students often spend a year working on a single project like building a piece of furniture or learning to play a musical instrument. Community service projects, exposure to the arts, and music interactions are considered good use of valuable class time. This kind of seemingly “loosey-goosey” schooling can really test the patience of some anxious parents.

For straight-line, conservative, standards-seeking, bean-counting, highly competitive parents, the Waldorf philosophy may, in fact, seem outrageous. The teachers avoid textbooks, heap on field trips, encourage journal reflections, and downplay tests. A practice called “looping” keeps teachers with their students for years – usually from first through eighth grade – while placing great value on long-term relationships. Waldorf schools never force reading on students; they focus instead on the love and joy languages and literature can provide. Often Waldorf children don’t start to read until they’re seven to nine years old; and understandably, some parents panic and pull their children out.

But something must be working. Prominent educational figures including Howard Gardner and Theodore Sizer express admiration for this method. On SAT exams, Waldorf students outperform national averages. They often pass achievement tests at double or triple the rate for public school students (Oppenheimer 1999). College professors remark about the humility, sense of wonder, concentration, and intellectual resourcefulness of Waldorf graduates. These lean-budgeted, small private schools have produced the likes of Oscar-winning actor Paul Newman, Nobel novelist Saul Bellow, and legendary dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. The Waldorf curriculum, which is heavily grounded in the arts and particularly music, exposes all first graders to their own (likely first) musical instrument – a recorder. Their instrument is stored in a case they build themselves. Beyond this, the school offers jazz, choir, orchestra and more. A day may start with singing and end with a dramatic performance. All this is offered along with the subjects of science, history, literature, and math, but they learn these through the process of the arts.