What is Music?

1. Music Is Science:  It is exact and 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 precise control of time.
2. Music Is Mathematical:  It is rhythmically based on the subdivision of time into fractions which must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper, and often in multiple combinations simultaneously.
3. Music Is A Foreign Language: Most of the terms are in Italian, German, or French; and the notation is certainly not in 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. It speaks to the soul.
4. Music Is History: It usually reflects the environment and times of its creation, and often even the country and/or racial feelings. It keeps a peoples’ culture alive. It reflects the styles of each historical period, even as do the visual arts.
5. Music Develops Insight and Demands Research: Patterns are analyzed, similarities and differences identified, and style and period characteristics observed.
6. Music Is Technical:  It moves into new technologies as easily as we move into a new house—adapting to new electronic possibilities.
7. Music Is Physical Education:  It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, feet, 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 ear hears, the symbols the eye sees and the mind interprets.
8. Music Is All of 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, build character, develop concentration, establish self-esteem. These are things science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling, emotion—call it what you will.