Music at North Wales
Dates for the 2023 - 2024 year have been posted on the calendar on our
For a concise list of 2023 - 2024 dates, click here.
I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy but, most important, music, for in the patterns of music, and all the arts are the Keys Of Learning.
-Plato
Why Teach Music???
MUSIC IS SCIENCE
It is exact and specific and it demands exact acoustics. A conductor's full score is a chart, a graph which indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, and 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.
Its architectural form is at once simple
and complex, structurally intricate and detailed.
MUSIC IS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Most of the terms are in Italian, German, or French and the notation is certainly not 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 feelings.
MUSIC IS PHYSICAL EDUCATION
It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lips, and cheek and facial muscles, in addition to extraordinary control of the diaphragm, back, stomach, and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.
Music is all these things, but most of all
MUSIC IS ART
It allows a human being to take all these dry, technically difficult techniques and use them to create emotion, feeling, and humanity.
That is why we teach Music...
Not because we expect students to be music majors
Not because we expect students to sing or play all their lives
Not for relaxation
Not for fun
But for their humanity
So that they will recognize beauty
So that they will learn sensitivity
So that they will be closer to an infinite beyond this world
So that they will have something to cling to
So that they will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good –
in short, more life.
Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless we know how to live?