Why Westside Music School’s Music Teachers Teach Music…
At Westside Music School our music teachers share a common set of beliefs about the impact that music lessons – whether piano instruction, a keyboard lesson or music lessons – have on the development of each student, regardless of age.
Music is a science
It is exact, specific, and must be 100% correct – 99% is not good.
It is unalterable. It demands exact acoustics.
Music is mathematical
It is rhythmically based on the subdivision of time in space into fractions which must be done instantaneously and not worked out on paper.
Music is a foreign language
Most of the terms are in Italian, German, or French, and the notation of notes certainly is not English, but a highly developed kind of shorthand.
Music is history
Since music has always reflected the environment and times of its creation – often even the country 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 must respond instantly to the sounds 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 of these skills and techniques and use them to create emotion! That is the one thing that science cannot duplicate.
That is why we teach music…
Not because we expect you to major in music; not because we expect you to play music all your life; not so you can become technically competent; not so you can read a sheet of musical notes…
We are music teachers because we believe that music…
Makes you more human; empowers you to recognize beauty; enables you to be sensitive; allows you to be closer to an infinite beyond our world; provides you with something to cling to; fills your life with more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good and makes your life a richer one to live!