Is Music Important?

Once upon a time, I was a music teacher although I was never a particularly good musician. My heart was in it at a much higher level than my technique would ever reach. But I could get youngsters off to a nice start and infuse the love and spirit of music up to the point where they’d need to move on to a teacher of masterful technique.

I’d gotten too late a start and had too many distractions to achieve greatness or even goodness. Still, teaching was not a bad calling. After all, every Ph.D. must start in kindergarten, where the love of learning can be either nurtured or ruined for life, depending on the spirit of the teacher.

While earning my degree, we were taught that in public school systems, when budget cuts were to be made, the first two programs to suffer were Art and Music, never PE, as too many pea-brained supervisors consider the arts to be “unnecessary frills.”

Really?

The Internet is peppered with videos of tiny children, age 5 and under, gleefully sitting at a piano performing Rachmaninoff or other complex, dynamic pieces that could take an adult years to perfect, if ever. And I repeat, GLEEFULLY playing that piano or violin or guitar or whatever instrument those tiny fingers can halfway wrap around.

There is not a parent or a teacher in the world who can force a child to perform like that. Those children are BORN with the spirit of music bursting from their souls. They need only parents who can recognize and enable them to let it out.

And Art… what about those elephants who can paint recognizable images? No one TEACHES them that. Someone merely enables them to do it by providing the tools and materials. The talent is innate as is the drive to do it. If true for elephants, how much more for humans?

Would God send souls into this Earth with so happy a compulsion and talent if Music and Art were not absolutely imperative to life? Imperative!

You don’t have to be a prodigy or savant to sing in the shower and color your day for happy successes elsewhere. Music is the voice of the soul and visual art is the bookmark and headliner for each of life’s chapters.

I think that people who call the arts “unnecessary frills” are the same poor fools who think animals lack souls.