Why Study Music?

 

Music is a Science

It is exact, specific; and it demands exact acoustics.  A conductor’s score is a chart, a graph that 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 time of its creation.  Often even the country and/or racial feeling of the country chosen by the composer.

 

 

Music is Physical Education

 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 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.

 

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 relax.

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?

 

That is Why You Should Study Music!!