Why Study Music?

That may seem like a rhetorical question, especially for someone who is looking at a web site for a music school. But, we think it’s worth the time to explore some answers. Here are some observations we have made over the years:

Music is a science.

It is exact, specific; and it demands exact acoustics. A conductor’s musical score is a chart, a graph that indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, melody and harmonies 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 another 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 its culture.

Music is physical education.

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

Music is taught:

  • Not because you are expected to major in music
  • Not because you are expected to play or sing all of 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, compassion, most 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 music is taught.