Why I Teach Music

Today I want to share with you something that was given to me some time ago that I found the other day while organizing my things. I'm not sure who gave it to me, most likely my Uncle Andy. If anyone knows where this might have originally been posted, let me know!


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 ouit 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 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 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 that science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling, emotion, call it what you will.

That is Why I 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 relax
Not so you can have fun
Not so you can trot around the football field in uniform

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 we know how to live?

That is Why I Teach Music!