Importance of Music Appreciation Class

In the fast-paced sprint to impart student's subjects relating to math and English on a partial budget schools habitually cut out other classes and mostly at the expense art subjects. In all places, painting programs and music programs are being moderated in place of subjects that require unvarying tests (Colwell & Peter 15). This is a nerve-racking drift; noting that studying the arts has been established to have instructive benefits while continuous standardized assessments have established to have very slight long-term ability to retain information.

Music has developed diverse forms that people know in the present day, and this development can be traced throughout time. Homburg (117) asserts that there has been a development from the Gregorian hymn to the 20th century Jazz beginning in the middle ages. The present events being politics, religion, technology as well as composers can shape musical eras during time. At this juncture, the concentration will be on middle ages period. Hopefully, a better understanding can be reached and the ins and outs for musical advancement.

Commencing with the fall of Rome in the 476 A.D; denoted as "dark ages" being the first half of this era; the society command flowed from the sovereign with the authorization of the Roman Catholic Church and senior members of the Christian clergy. This was known as the Church and state. The "dark ages" of the Middle Ages by history gave numerous early developments in western music. Polyphony, which pools two or more concurrent melodic lines, is a flawless case of this. Since polyphony did require to be written in order to indicate precise rhythm and pitch, a different notational system was developed. In the middle Ages, the style of living centered mostly on the Church and all levels of the society choose the religious life. This was laborious for patrons, some orders required people to take part in the vows of poverty. Self-restraint was apparent among the Church members. A usual day began at 3:00 a.m. with the festivity of everyday services, reading of lessons, and the singing of psalms.

Colwell & Peter (75) states that perhaps one of the most remarkable themes of the middle ages was sanctified music, molded in part by Greek, Hebrew, and Syrian inspirations. Sacred pieces known as a Gregorian chant were quite prevalent. These consisted of a single-line tune and monophonic texture which lacked harmony and counterpoint (Silverman 3). The prehistoric society used music for much more than entertainment purposes; they used it in their daily lives. They would shout and scream during the period of battle, and as warning they would blow a horn, have ceremonies in the honor of the deceased or bring the rain, as a danger indicator, to show someone important in society, besides being used as a curative power.

The five main properties of musical sounds being pitch, dynamics, tone color, texture and duration do help us to distinguish music from other sounds (Homburg 17). Pitch can be well-defined as the relative highness or lowness of a sound determined by the frequency of its vibrations and hence, the higher the speed of the vibrations the higher the pitch; the lower the speed of the vibrations the lower the pitch. Dynamics is the grade of loudness or softness in music and a steady escalation in loudness is known as a crescendo and normally generates pleasure in the listener mainly if the pitch intensifies too. Diminuendo on the other part is the steady decline in loudness and often is used to express a sense of tranquil. According to Wei (84), the sound of a flute differs from that of a trumpet even when each of them is played the same melody at the same dynamic level. This quality of sound is termed as color or timbre. Music composers use tone colors in order to create variability and contrast. The interlacing of dissimilar timbres is termed as texture while the duration is the span of time a melodic sound carries on.

A musician makes a wide range of choices in the event about what to listen for and what to concentrate on. When listening for something definite (for example, picking out the cellos in the orchestra), the responsiveness is not quite altered from envisioning the ceiling to be the floor. The listener should be inside the music and at the same time participate in it by merging fragments of an existing piece of music with different sounds to suit their requirements. All aural information is still existent, but the perception has totally changed (Wei 34). The better listeners get at doing this, the more the part they are keen about pops out - an aural impression. These are the two skills involved in listening similar to a musician: Firstly, being capable of shifting amongst the different musical components, and the second skill is recognizing and comprehending the music language in order to acquire all information required from it.

Music is just as vital as all the classes every student is required to take, and it is critical that music appreciation classes remain in every school. Not only does music yield a place for scholars to belong, but also it has something that will help their minds to nurture and progress like no other class (Silverman 5). Music does play a major role in people's lives, and if we take it away and ignore the music appreciation classes, who knows what the world would be like.