Why Teach Music?

In founding a fine arts institution in the Middle East, the staff of Dar al-Kalima College are making a concrete statement that music and the arts in general have the ability to improve quality of life. Anthony J. Palmer, Professor of Music at Boston University, presents a defense of including music as a part of education. Here is what he has to say:

"To ask why the human species makes music is a fundamental question. If we can discover even partial answers, we might be better able to understand what the music making process is about, what benefits it bestows on makers and recipients, and what potential it might hold for an increase in life's satisfactions and understandings.

"I have argued previously that there is a genetic disposition to make music (Palmer, 1997). That is, there is a psychological imperative to express through an organized sound system - developed by all cultures - their innermost thoughts, desires, longings, joys, and vicissitudes of life's experiences. Music is a human expression that helps to answer the basic questions of life's existence: Why am I? Why am I here? What is this 'here' of which I am aware?

"The arts, and music in particular, helped to ease the reconciliation between opposites like good and evil, the physical and the metaphysical, the explicable and indefinable, and the phenomenal and numinous. Humankind lives a psychic existence and finds that music is a necessary expression that permeates the mental world in which it exists. Music is both expressive of and expressive for the inexplicable and mysterious experience we call life."

Taken from "Cultural Interpretation and Contemporary Music Education" by Anthony J. Palmer.