Music is a science
It is exact, specific and demands exact acouistic. 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 subdivisions of time into fractions which must be done instantancously, not worked out on paper.
Music is a foreign language
Most of the terms are in Italian, German or French, and natation is certainly not English – but a highly developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantic of music is the most complete and universal language.
Music is history
Music usually reflects the environment and time of its creation, often even the country and/or racial feeling.
Music is physical education
It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lip, cheek and facial muscles in addition to exstraordinary control of the diaphragmatic, back, stomach and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and mind interprets.
Music is all these thing, 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, felling, 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,
not so you can relax,
not so you can have fun
but
so you will be human,
so you will recognize beauty,
so you will be sensitive,
so you will closer to an infinite beyond this word,
so you will have something to cling to,
so you will have more love, more compassion,
more gentleness, more good
– in short, more life.