Rec Sports
Why We Need Classical Music
Violinist Joshua Bell gave a delightful TED talk in the spring – “300 Years of Classical Music in 18 Minutes” – and now everyone can watch it, please enjoy:
My favorite part of it is his plea for music education: that every town and city should have as many youth orchestras as they have youth sports leagues. Why? Because “in an orchestra a child learns about beauty, and they learn how to listen to each other and to be part of something bigger than themselves,” Bell said. “They learn discipline as well, but it’s fun. It’s a blast! I wish every town had a youth orchestra, or multiple youth orchestras – as many youth orchestras as we have Little League baseball teams. And hey, I love baseball!”
He made it look like a blast – playing on his 1713 “Huberman” Stradvari violin and also leading a new ensemble that he just founded called Chamber Orchestra of America, based in New York. (Look carefully and you’ll see violinist Nick Kendall of Time for Three and ECCO, as well as our own Caeli Smith, who has been blogging on Violinist.com since she was in high school!)
Standing together and reading from iPads (and a few of them simply playing by memory, I suspect), they start with an excerpt from Vivaldi’s “Summer” and travel musically through time, playing excerpts from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Mozart’s Symphony 25 (written when the composer was 17), Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and Kevin Puts’ “Earth.” For the final excerpt, from Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings,” they are joined by members of the Vancouver Youth Symphony Orchestra.
“The beauty of classical music is that the more times you hear these pieces, the better they get – they take on deeper and deeper meanings for the listener, and for the players,” Bell said. “There’s not a greater gift that you can give to a child than the gift of music, and I wish every child had the opportunity to play in an orchestra.”
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