Why Teach Music?

Found a nice piece of inspiration today. Thought I’d give it some limelight.

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 com- plete and universal language.

Music is history
Music usually reflects the environments and 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 extraor- dinary 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 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 that science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling, emotion, call it what you will.

That is Why We Teach Music!

Source: http://www.pmea.net/whyteach.pdf

Dedicated to all the music teachers, formal or informal, professional or simply your loved ones.

Mmm… I miss teaching.