A Look at the Reasons for Teaching Music

Why Teach Music?

Music is a SCIENCE - It is exact, specific, and it demands exact acoustics. A conductor's full score is a chart, a graph which indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, melody, and harmony all at once and with the most exact control of time.

Music is MATHEMATICAL - It is rhythmically based on the subdivisions of time into fractions which must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper.

Music is a FOREIGN LANGUAGE - Most of the terms are in Italian, German, or French; and the notation is certainly not English - but a highly developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complete and universal language.

Music is HISTORY - Music usually reflects the environment and times of its creation, often even the country and/or racial feeling.

Music is a PHYSICAL EDUCATION - Music requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lips, cheeks, and facial muscles, in addition to extraordinary control of the diaphragm, back, stomach, and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.

Music is all these things, but most of all music is ART - It allows a human being to take all these dry, technically boring (but difficult) techniques and use them to create emotion. That is one thing science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling, emotion call it what you will . . .

For all of these reasons and countless more, we are Teachers and Supporters of Music. We believe music enables our children to be human, to recognize beauty, embrace sensitivity, grow closer to an in finite beyond this world, so they will have something to cling to and experience more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good - in short, more life.

Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless we know how to live?

That is why we teach music!