For any questions or more info about music please contact
stephen.goode@dsbn.org
Westlane Music has a long history of providing a fun and engaging music program.
We provide instrumental and vocal music from grade 9 to grade 12. In addition to our classes, the music department offers many exciting, team building opportunities - such as:
Trips to Florida, Cruises, Competitions, Canada's Wonderland, Concert trips, Concert performances, Musicals and many more.The study of music is one of the most valuable and worthwhile activities a person can undertake. No other area of study develops the whole person like music...
Why 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 subdivision 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 reflects the environment and times of its creation, often even the country and/or the racial feeling.
Music is Physical Education.
It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lip, 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 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 gentleness, more good---- in short, MORE LIFE!
Other studies...
Music is academic. A recent study found that music trains the brain for higher forms of thinking. Second graders who were given music lessons scored 27% higher on proportional math and fractions tests than children who received no special instruction. Research indicates that musical training permanently wires a young mind for enhanced performance.
Research made between music and intelligence concluded that music training is far greater than computer instruction in improving children’s abstract reasoning skills.
The University of Montreal researched brain imaging techniques to study brain activity during musical tasks. Researchers concluded that sight-reading musical scores and playing music “activate regions in all four of the cortex’s lobes” and “parts of the cerebellum are also activated during those tasks.”
Researchers in Leipzig discovered through the use of brain scans that musicians had larger planum temporale, the region of the brain associated with reading skills. Also, musicians had a thicker corpus callosum, the nerve fibers that connect the two halves of the brain.