Music or Not?

Many things cross our minds each day. Seemingly they are not connected; but I think they are! Truly they are.

I have interest in many topics as you know. No doubt there are people who think this odd. But I believe that most topics are bound together in some secret chemistry or other. Take art. The entire subject is fraught with complexities. Where do you start in discussing it? Which genre is up for scrutiny? Why this one and not another? From what perspective is the critique originating, and to what end?

I will get to art specifically, but first, let me say how surprised I am to find a well thought out expression of this discussion’s elements on the Internet.  And fully without anyone taking credit for it! Astounding I think!  Here’s what I’m referring to:

Why teach music?

• Music is a science

It is exact, specific; 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 mathematical

It is rhythmically based on the subdivision of time into fractions which must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper.

• 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 uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complete and universal language. Also, many songs we study are from other cultures.

• 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.

• 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.

So many things to marvel at! Perhaps the most artful itself ~ the intellectuality that expresses all of this. Whoever wrote the quoted material is brilliant, don’t you think? Covered not just music, but art in general, and what it all produces as benefit: humanism, feeling, emotion. I would add thought. Each of the elements covered in the piece provides food for thought and growth. The how music is produced. The why. The fact that it is, and spontaneously so.

The building blocks of a human being’s life are complex. We nurture those blocks into reality with our kids from birth. We teach them melody, lyrics, rhythm. We hum lullabies to calm them to sleep. We mature the musical forms and messages as their brains grow and comprehend more and more material. We do this, don’t we? Intentionally and yet without willful plan: thought out and specific?

And of course we surround our babes with color, and texture. And design. Some whimsical, some geometric, some functional. Some two dimensional while others are three dimensional. All art forms. Right?

Why do you think that is? How intentional is this behavior on our parental or adult part? Is it intuitive? I suspect that is the case, but don’t really know.  All I know is that these art forms are communications. They inform the brain – from ours to the baby’s. Information shared between two minds. Synapses firing away in full force.

If we were plopped down in a strange tribal land and met with the natives, what would we do first? Smile? Shake hands? Cower in fear or extend a symbol of friendship? What exactly would we do?

One thing that paragraph suggests, however, is we would attempt to communicate with the strangers in some way. Communicate. Connect in some knowing way our two different beings.

That process is at its base, intellectual. And the synapses of the brain are the physical attributes that will allow that process to happen at all.

The same is true in developing the brain of a young child. Art is a language that helps us  do that. A very important point to think about.

I think that if we eliminate art education from our schools, we do so at our own peril.

July 24, 2012