WPS Music Department Closes "Music in Our Schools" Month with Celebration Concert
Two-Hour Event Showcased Talents of Students & UNK Show Choir "Nebraskats"
On March 30, Wahoo High school celebrated music in a big way!
The two-hour concert featured performances by the elementary choir “Dolce Voce,” the middle school and high school choirs and show choirs, the middle school and high school band and jazz band, the recorder classes, and two huge numbers by the combined bands and combined choirs.
Please click HERE to view the concert program, created by Tyler Graphics in Wahoo.
The concert also included some improvisational performances by staff members and students as well.
Ending the concert was a grand performance by the University of Nebraska-Kearney show choir “The Nebraskats.”
It was a musical day to remember, and one that every Wahoo music student should be proud of. The performance was also a testimony to the power of music and how much talent we have among our student body.
There is no denying that music is alive and well at Wahoo Public Schools!
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Why teach music?
Music is a science
It is exact, specific; and it demands exact acoustics. A conductor’s full score is a chart, a graph which indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, melody and harmony all at once and with the most exact control of time.
Music is mathematical
It is rhythmically based on the subdivisions of time into fractions which must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper.
Music is a foreign language
Most of the terms are in Italian, German, or French; and the notation is certainly not English—but a highly developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complete and universal language.
Music is history
Music usually reflects the environments and times of its creation, often even the country and/or racial feeling.
Music is a physical education
It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lips, cheek, and facial muscles, in addition to extraordinary control of the diaphragmatic, back, stomach and chest muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.
Music is all these things, but most of all music is art
It allows a human being to take all these dry technically boring (but difficult) techniques and use them to create emotion. That is one thing that science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling, emotion . . . call it what you will.
That is WHY WE TEACH MUSIC!
• Not because we expect you to major in music
• Not because we expect you to play or sing all your life
• Not so you can relax
• Not so you can have fun
• BUT—so you will be human
• So you will recognize beauty
• So you will be sensitive
• So you will be closer to an infinite beyond this world
• So you will have something to cling to
• So you will have more love, more compassion, more good—in short, more life.
Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless we know how to live?
That is Why We Teach Music!