Welcome to Maximo Music Department's site page!  Here you'll find details pertaining to our upcoming concerts and performances, as well as information concerning your child's music education here at Maximo Elementary. I hope you will find the pages entertaining, uplifting, and educational. Music education offers so much more for our children than just simple fun.

 

At Maximo, students are taught that music is....

 

Mathematical and logical. Music is rhythmically based on the subdivision of time into fractions. It is highly sequential and organized, and demands great focus and determination to fully understand and appreciate. 

 

Utilizing purposeful language - much of which is foreign! Most musical terms are in Italian, German, or French, and the notation itself is a language as well. Written music involves notes and symbols that are a kind of highly developed shorthand that represent ideas and sound. 

 

Scientific and physical. Thanks to science, we know sounds happens when an object vibrates. You hear the sound when the wave travels through the air to your ear. Different sounds have different wavelengths. The number of high points per second in a wavelength is called the frequency. In music, the pitch of a note (how high or low it sounds) depends on the frequency of the sound waves. 

 

Intensely focused on literacy. Studying music helps us to communicate more eloquently in our own language. We may analyze lyrics and texts, correlate breath pauses, silent rests, and sharp accents with grammar,  and even "decode" information the same way. It is apparent that musical literacy and reading are both perceptual acts. 

 

Cultural and historical. Music is found in every known culture, past and present, varying widely between times and places. Since all people of the world have a form of music, it may be concluded that music is likely to have been present in the farthest ancestral populations prior to the dispersal of humans around the world. 

 

 

In addition to all of this, our children are also instructed in how music can help them become more compassionate, better able to recognize and appreciate beauty, and increasingly grateful for our blessings (however small).

 

Thank you again for visiting! May you always have a song in your heart!

 

 

 

"Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness."  - Maya Angelou