Dear band and orchestra students and parents,
Music is a special gift.
It touches something inside all of us, even if we don’t consider ourselves “musical.” At Holland Christian Schools, we believe the reason for that connection is the image or picture of God that we bear as people. His characteristics and qualities are woven into the fabric of what it means for us to be human, and just as God is the Creator, we too are creators—of poetry, art, architecture, dance, and music. Therefore, when you see the joy on the faces of performers or you feel that depth of meaning stirring in your soul, it’s because in those very moments, we are living out exactly who we were made to be.
And that’s glorious.
This reasoning is why, as a Christian school, music is such an important part of what we offer in our education. Sure, we’re teaching about half notes and eighth notes, about treble clefs and bass clefs, about musical dynamics and proper breathing techniques—but from an even larger perspective, we’re teaching students what it means to be fully human. In his 2008 address to freshmen parents at the Boston Conservatory of Music, Karl Paulnack said, “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 can’t with our minds.”
That’s a lot of importance for a subject to carry. And through that lens, it’s easy to see why we want to teach, play, and enjoy music with excellence. Later in that same speech in Boston, Paulnack said, “If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at 2 AM, someone is going to waltz into your emergency room, and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM, someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.”
So, with the same vigor we apply to any pursuit worth doing, we pursue music—that God-glorifying, humanity-revealing, life-saving artform that we’re sharing with you today. I pray that all of you are blessed by it and take this special gift with you and out into the world when you leave this place.
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