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All
About Music
or
Why
Music?
1.
Music
a a Science. It is
exact, specific, and it demands exact acoustics. A band director'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.
2. Music
is Mathematical. It is
rhythmically based on the subdivisions of time into fractions which
must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper.
3. 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
used symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the
most complete and universal language.
4.
Music
is History. Music
usually reflects the environment and time of its creation, often
even the country and or racial feeling.
5. Music
is Physical Education. It
requires fantastic co-ordination of fingers, hands, arms, lips,
cheeks, 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.
6. Music
develops Insight and Demands Research.
7.
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 emotions. That is
one thing science cannot duplicate; humanism, feeling, emotion, call
it what you will.
That
is why I teach music; not because I expect you to major in
music. Not because I expect you to play all your life.
But
so you
will be human. So you will recognize beauty. So you will
have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good - in
short, more life. |
