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NAME:
Ms. Barnhart
SCHOOL:
Cedar Ridge Middle School
CLASS:
Chorus
Ms. Barnhart has a love of singing that has only grown since childhood.
Deeply involved in chorus classes throughout school, she continued her
studies into college where she studied Classical Voice and Music Education
at The Universtiy of Alabama and Auburn University.
WHY MUSIC?
I. 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.
II. Music is Mathematical. It is rhythmically based on the subdivisions of
time into fractions which must be done instantaneously, not worked out on
paper.
III. 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.
IV. Music is History. Music usually reflects the environment and times of its
creation, often even the country and/or racial feeling.
V. Music is Physical Education. It 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.
VI. Music Develops Insight and Demands Research.
VII. 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
science cannot duplicate; humanism, feeling, emotion, call it what you will.
That is why we teach music:
Not because we expect you to major in music
Not because we expect you to play or sing all your life...
But so you will be human
So you will recognize beauty
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.
Excerpts from "The Value of Music"
by Tim Lautzenheiser
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