As I prepare to post our new website features tomorrow (which will be focusing on children’s literature from/about the Philippines), I think back on the music-related features we highlighted these past two months as part of our “music in children’s literature” focus. They brought so many new readers to us, and led us to such a wealth of book discoveries!

Now, before these features give way to new ones (fear not: they will remain in our archives), I would like to leave you all with a lovely quote by Sufi mystic and musician, Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927):

According to the thinkers of the East, there are five different intoxications: of beauty, youth and strength; then the intoxication of wealth; the third is power, command, the power of ruling; and there is the fourth intoxication, which is the intoxication of learning, of knowledge. But all these four intoxications fade away just like stars before the sun in the presence of the intoxication of music. The reason is that music touches that deepest part of a man’s being. Music reaches farther than any other impression from the external world can reach. And the beauty of music is that it is both the source of creation and the means of absorbing it.

Aren’t these words music to one’s ears? The intoxication of learning, of knowledge, of music… May our lives be filled with their dizzying effects!

The Playing For Change Foundation is “dedicated to connecting the world through music by providing resources (including, but not limited to facilities, supplies, and educational programs) to musicians and their communities around the world.”

They have recently opened their first music school, the Ntonga Music School, in Gugulethu, near Cape Town, in South Africa. Watch this inspirational video:

Help Connect the World Through Music from Doug Kenney on Vimeo.

and then take a look at the amazing Playing for Change journey that has been travelling around the world since 2005:

Over the course of this project, we decided it was not enough for our crew just to record and share this music with the world; we wanted to create a way to give back to the musicians and their communities that had shared so much with us…

Now, musicians from all over the world are brought together to perform benefit concerts that build music and art schools in communities that are in need of inspiration and hope. In addition to benefit concerts, the Playing for Change band also performs shows around the world. When audiences see and hear musicians who have traveled thousands of miles from their homes, united in purpose and chorus on one stage, everyone is touched by music’s unifying power.

… and browse through the various episodes featuring musicians from all over the world who have taken part in Playing for Change. I especially like this one.

“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.”