Music in Words
Friday, September 4th, 2009
“Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us,” says Dr. Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the music division at the Boston Conservatory, in a beautiful speech from 2004 that has now made its way through the internet. And the same could be said—has been said—of good literature. So now imagine the effects of literature and music combined!
To help children begin to explore this powerful pairing, I suggest you take a look (if you haven’t yet done so) at the features currently highlighted on our website. I also recommend reading Paulnack’s speech on the value of music in its entirety. Here’s another excerpt, as way of enticement:
“I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we cannot with our minds.”
