Music Programs
Welcome to the Music Program
The Redlands Unified School District proudly supports music education in our schools at all levels. 4th and 5th-grade students have the opportunity to participate in group instrument lessons as well as band and orchestra ensembles. At the middle and high school levels, our award-winning music programs provide opportunities in band, orchestra, choir, piano, guitar, and music theory. Music provides students an outlet for creative expression, fosters cooperation, collaboration, and music provides students an outlet for creative expression, fosters cooperation, collaboration, and connections between students, and develops skills necessary for success in the 21st century. All of our performing ensembles take pride in representing the RUSD through performances in our local community and beyond.
Why Learn 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 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 environment and times of its creation, often reflecting events for the country and/or racial feeling.
Music is 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 science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling, emotion, call it what you will.
That is why we teach/learn music!
Not because we expect our students to major in music
Not because we expect them to play or sing all their life
Not so they can relax
Not so they can have fun
BUT
So they will be human
So they will recognize beauty
So they will be sensitive
So they will be closer to an infinite beyond this world
So they will have something to cling to
So they will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good
In Short, More Life
Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless you know how to live?This is why we Learn and Teach Music!