Why Choral Music?
Singing in a choir plays a crucial role the intellectual development of our students. Through music performance, choir members are required to use almost every part of the brain simultaneously in order to produce quality work. The fact that performance lives in time is what separates this type of learning from other core academic subjects; students are required to synthesize an array of skills and concepts in the moment, in order to create the finished product. The choral setting is also a place teeming with emotional and social growth. Singing is a very personal act, and the only way to create choral music is to do this with other people. The social bonds that students form through working together in this setting are among the strongest and most meaningful in their high school careers. This is also due in part to the emotional understanding of the self and others that inevitably comes through the study and expression of a performing art. Aside from the pure enjoyment of making great music with great people, those who choose to study choral music are also choosing to invest deeply in their own personal growth over the course of their entire lives. |
10 Lessons the Arts Teach
1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail. 2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer. 3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world. 4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds. 5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition. 6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties. 7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real. 8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job. 9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling. 10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important. SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. |