The Power of Music
and the Importance of Music Education
Russia Suzuki Association, Moscow

Universally throughout the ages, the arts have served as a means for human beings to express externally their internal understanding of order in the world.  Knowledge, beliefs, feelings, revelations are transformed and interpreted through a richness of aesthetic experiences: literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, theater, dance, and music. Through the arts, man attempts to integrate himself with the complex environment of which he is a part—with nature, with others, with his unique life force. Through symbol, metaphor, and ritual he seeks to communicate his perceptions and discoveries to future generations. As the great cellist and humanitarian Pablo Casals so simply, so eloquently stated, “Art and life are intimately interrelated. They cannot be separated.”

Among all living creatures, mankind is unequaled in the caliber and reach of his physical, intellectual, ethical, and creative capacities. In order to explore human potential fully, myriad abilities must be trained. The study and appreciation of the arts prove to be an ideal instrument for developing many of these: cultivating the senses; enhancing corporal, mental, and emotional growth; expanding innovative thinking; providing a means for personal and communal expression; and triggering renewal through challenge and pleasure. Arts education offers a profound exploratory experience that allows us to learn about the world and to achieve self-realization.

Jewel in the Crown
All the arts tend towards the condition of music.
Walter Pater

If the arts are, as many believe, the crown of civilization, music surely is the radiant jewel in that crown. Indeed, music fulfills a special and critical function in all cultures because of its multimodal, multi-sensory nature.

Music, as a medium of organized sound that moves through time, offers order and shape through the auditory perceptions. Springing from man’s imagination and sensibility, its development is one of the most magnificent and revered accomplishments of humankind. Yet music remains the most instinctive and natural of aesthetic experiences. All beings are responsive to melody and rhythm, for music is a form of communication that is at the same time expressive and non-verbal. Though styles and tastes may vary through time and place, there is not a civilization in existence that has not developed a form of music and music education.

It is a biological and psychological fact that the auditory experience has a relation to physical development, behavior, and mental life that is different in certain important ways from the visual or tactile experience. This is so because of the unique interplay between music’s distinctive elements.

‘Why Music Matters’ introduces the many diverse characteristics, each extraordinary in their own right, that are embedded in the sonic experience. Integrating them into a whole makes music a medium beyond compare. Inasmuch as music’s full meaning and form are not immediately revealed and as music has the ability to inspire internal association and external movement before the first living breath to the last, people are drawn to listen to the same works time and time again—a subliminal repetition that makes the influence of music more continuous and, ultimately, more powerful and transformative than all other arts.