Philosophy of teaching music

Music Is A Science

It is exact, 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 with the most exact control of time.

Music Is Mathematical

It is rhythmically based on the subdivisions 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, while the notation is in a highly developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complex and universal language.

Music Is History

Music usually reflects the environment and times of its creation, often even the country or racial feeling.

Music is Physical Education

It requires fantastic coordination 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 ears hear and the mind interprets.

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, 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 sing or play all your life
But – so you will be human
so you will recognize beauty
so you will be sensitive
so you will be closer to an infinite beyond this world
so you will have something to cling to
so you will have more compassion, gentleness, good…in short – more life.