Arts Education

Music

The Nature of the Music Discipline

Music enriches a vibrant culture and is integral to human life. It has the power to illuminate, deepen, broaden, and enhance human experience. Music and musicians have an impact on daily experience, help define and express individual and collective identities, and shape, reflect, and comment upon societal and cultural values.

Music is a multimodal, cross-cultural literacy and expressive art form. The ways of knowing through music include cognitive, physical, affective, intuitive, and spiritual modes. Music embodies and expresses ideas, feelings, and meaning. It communicates within and across cultural, societal, historical, and even pre-historical contexts.

Throughout history, music has played a significant role in human life, cultivating and passing on culture, recording civilization, and affecting and influencing society. Music is vital to human life; no culture in the world exists without music. Music contributes to personal, social, economic, cultural, and civic aspects of people's lives. in cultures around the world, life's most important events—weddings, funerals, birthdays, graduations, religious holidays, and community occasions—are observed and celebrated through music.