Author: Carol Reynolds

We all do it, don’t we? We carefully defend the bold choice we’ve made to educate our children seriously and rigorously. Friends or relatives may assert that we are choosing outdated traditions, irrelevant in our techno-saturated world. Latin in elementary school? Whatever for? The Great Books? Aren’t they terribly boring? Handwriting and memory work? We …

We live in an era highly focused on the visual. Our lives are shaped by digital images blasted from cell phones, tablets, and massive billboards that obliterate the night sky with their intense light. Yet, despite this visual stimulus, we travel farther each day from meaningful encounters with the important human expression called “art.” What …

At church they don’t bother to pick up a hymnbook. They don’t even mumble or pretend to sing. Of the people who come to my booth at conferences to talk about music, many claim they can’t sing. Nonsense. I’m giving it a name: cantiphobia. And I’m here to cure it. The ability to sing is …

Seemingly simple, the question of what makes a song good is actually a complicated one. What does the word “song” actually mean? One reliable definition would be “a composition of relatively short duration characterized by a melody, to which words are placed.” But people use “song” to refer to all sorts of music, including purely …

  Classical educators know that the quadrivium includes music as one of four core subjects along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. This list can strike our modern minds as puzzling. If we are to approach music as a classical subject, we need to rethink our terminology and what it really means to study music. Today, …