Why We Teach

3248 J Street

Sacramento, CA 95816

916 - 441- 6555

Why We Teach

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 and with the most exact control of time.

Music is Mathematical: It is rhythmically based on the subdivisions of time into fractions that 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 Physical Education: It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lip, cheek and facial muscles for singing and playing; it involves the entire body in movement and dance. In addition, there must be extraordinary control of the diaphragmatic, back, stomach, and chest muscles that respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.

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: the human feeling, or emotion.

That is Why We Teach Music

• Not because we expect all children to major in music.

• Not because we expect them all play or sing all their lives.

• Not so they can relax.

• Not so they can have fun. But…

• So they will be human.

• So they will recognize beauty.

• So they will be sensitive.

• So they will have more love, more compassion, more good, more gentleness – in short, more life. Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless you know how to live?

That is why we teach music!

Our thanks to Mat Marucci for forwarding this to us!