So Why Music?
Music is a Science.
It is precise, 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 which must be performed instantaneously, not worked out on paper.
Music is a Foreign Language.
Most of the terms are in Italian, German, or French. The notation is certainly not English – it is 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 feelings of a country and/or race.
Music is Physical Education.
It requires fantastic coordination of many separate muscles which must respond instantly and simultaneously to the sounds the ear hears and the mind interprets.
Music Develops Insight and Demands Research.
Music is all these things, but most of all Music is Art.
It allows a human to take all these dry, technically boring (but difficult) techniques and use them to create emotion (humanism, feeling). That is one thing science cannot duplicate.
That is why we teach Music.
Not because we expect students to become professional musicians, but so they will…

• Understand and appreciate so many things: hard work, commitment, teamwork, cultural diversity, friendship.
• Recognize beauty.
• Develop connections between other academic disciplines.
• Have something to cling to.
• Have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good – in short, more life.