A Little Mail

When I was home for Heritage Days I was receiving many checks in the mail for t-shirts and raffle tickets, which was a fabulous thing, but it was one letter that stood out to me that I thought was worthy of sharing with you.  It was a letter from someone who knows how important music is to me and it included this small article.

Why Teach Music?

Music is Scienceà

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 with the most exact control of time.  

Music is Mathematicalà

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 Languageà

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 Historyà

Music usually reflects the environment and times of its creations, often even the country and/or racial feeling.

Music is Physical Educationà

 It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lip, 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 these things, but mostly music is Artà

 It allows a human being to take all these dry, technically boring (but different) techniques and use them to create emotion.  That is one thing science cannot duplicate; humanism, feeling, 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.  Not so you can have fun.

But- So you will be human.  So you will recognize beauty.  So you will be sensitive.  So you will be closer to an infinite beyond this world.  So you will have something to cling to.  So you will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good, -in short, more life.

Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless you know how to live.

THIS IS WHY WE TEACH MUSIC.

Kayla 

Miss Nebraska 2011