Why Orchestra?
Why should and do we have orchestra (or anything for that matter?) in schools?
We’ve all heard and given many reasons – to have a musical experience, to cultivate the arts, to allow to kids to ‘express’ themselves (yeah, right), because it’s good for them (it is, but WHY?), etc… But these are all superficial reasons that only mask much deeper reasons and laws of nature and human nature. Some say it’s because it fosters self-discipline and habits & ethics of work. That’s not bad. Perhaps it goes even deeper – down to self-sufficiency and trust. Learning an instrument is a true and tactile demonstration of natural law – you can’t run before you can walk and you can’t play the concerto without even learning how to open the case as a child. There is order and sequence. It is about learning about these natural sequences that are immutable and universal.
How about trust? What aspect of trust? The only way to gain trust is to be trustworthy and the only way to be trustworthy is to practice being trustworthy – first to yourself, then to others. How to you learn to be trustworthy to yourself; internally? By making by first making small commitments and keeping them – like saying your going to practice and doing it. Orchestra (and all music, and most other activities) is a means to practice the muscle of trustworthiness. It is about keeping promises to yourself. You can’t keep promises to others if you can’t first keep them with yourself – YOUR self.
Orchestra is about mental fitness.It trains, hones, and sharpens our mental blade and faculties. It can give a student’s life meaning – Logos as Viktor Frankl put it.
Orchestral music speaks to our humanity. Why should anyone be deprived of that?
To educate the whole human being, that’s why. Look at Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences. Not everybody has an equal aptitude in each intelligence but everybody has each intelligence to some degree. They are linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. If music programs don’t exist in schools then schools simply aren’t doing their job of educating the whole child. I’d feel the same way if there were no mathematics or language classes. Each should be equally represented.
You are both absolutely right and I agree with you. I also wanted to get even deeper in the human emotional experience and spent quite some time thinking about the ‘why’. As it turns out there is not a ‘reason’ but collection of reason that are intertwined and layered in a mutli-dimensional arrangement. They all compliment each other and give the entire experience support, meaning, and intrinsic worth.