Why do we teach music?
(From the back of a school music program, contributed by Dale Syverson, musical director, Richtones Chorus)
Music is a SCIENCE
It is exact, specific, and it demands exact acoustics.
A conductor's full score is a chart, a graph that indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, melody, and harmony all at once 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 instantane-ously, not worked out on paper.
Music is a FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Most of the terms are 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 a HISTORY
Music usually reflects the environment and the times of its creation often even the country and/or racial feeling.
Music is a PHYSICAL EDUCATION
It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lips, cheek, and facial muscles in addition to extraordinary control of the diaphragmatic, back, stomach, and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.
Music is all of these things,
but most of all Music is ART
It allows a human being to take all of these dry, technically boring, but difficult techniques and use them to create emotion. That is the one thing science can not duplicate; human feelings, emotion, call it what you will.
That is why we teach music!
Not because we expect you to major in music...
Not because we expect you to play or sing all your life...
But, so you will be human -
So you will recognize beauty -
So you will be sensitive -
So you will have something to cling to -
So you will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good -
In short, more life!
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