WHY LEARN MUSIC?
Music is mathematical
It is rhythmically based on the subdivision of time into fraction. These fractions must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper.
Music is a foreign language
Musical notation on the staff is a highly developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. Music is its own complete and universal language.
Music is history
Music reflects the environment and times of its creation.
Music is physical education
Our bodies respond instinctively to the sound of music. The hear hears a sound, the mind interprets and the body moves. It requires fantastic coordination of the body to feel and keep the beat for an entire song.
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 all these things, but most of all, MUSIC IS ART
It allows us to take seemingly dry, technically difficult skills and use them to create emotion. Music expresses human feelings.
Pretty good list, huh? The only thing I'd add is that while music training (piano and voice) has been documented to develop, in particular, spatial and logical/mathematical intelligences, that sort of utilitarian, even pragmatic analysis ought be deemphasized, because music is fun. The fun of music ought be the primary guide through one's discovery of music. It is fun to vibrate together. It is fun to co-experience the tonal mystery-in-time that is good music. It is fun to discover new expression. It is fun to improvise. It is fun to perform a composition knowing people are listening with their inhibitions lowered. It is fun to be off-key with another and then find a consonance, even a unison. And it is fun to know that music is there for you whenever you need it, want it, or imagine it. All other effects are important but secondary. Its fun is its own primary reward. (VIA)Mathew Dallman
