Music at Northern
The music program at Northern offers many avenues for students. Its aim is to provide students with an opportunity to explore and create music, either upon an instrument or with the voice. Students develop and study musical techniques with a view to performance of both an individual and group nature. Through performance they will experience a sense of achievement, fulfillment and communication. In the process students will enlarge their musical sphere in the areas of literature, musical knowledge, performance and enhance their creativity and listening skills.
Northern offers courses in Band, Strings, Guitar and Vocal. Students have the opportunity to specialize in any of these 4 areas. As well, in the senior years courses on music, computing and creating may be available.
Why take Music?
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.
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; 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.
Music is history
Music usually reflects the environment and times 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 extraordinary control of the diaphragmatic, back, stomach and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.
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. This is one thing that science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling, emotion, call it what you will.
Why Teach Music?
Not because we expect you to major in music
Not because we expect you to play or sing all your life
BUT
- to be human
- to recognize beauty
- to be sensitive.
Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless you know how to live? |
