Music Advocacy
The DuPage Symphony Embraces Music Education
The DSO believes that the Arts should be considered an essential part of every child’s comprehensive K-12 education. Scientific research has shown that, in addition to providing social and mental health benefits, music education enhances cognitive development and helps students build a competitive advantage for success in school, work, and life. The DSO strongly believes in the benefits of a music education and advocates for high quality music programs through its partnerships with area schools and local music stores, as well as through its involvement in a wide variety of community events.
With our youth educational and community engagement programs, the DSO strives to enrich our community and bring the real-life experience of symphonic music to new audiences. You can learn more about our youth resources here.
Click on the buttons below to access music advocacy resources.
Learn about what other music organizations are doing for music advocacy and how to get involved at the below links.
Dr. Charles “Chip” Staley, Honorary Doctorate of Music, presented on music advocacy in the video to the right. Watch the video to learn more.
Why Study Music?
- The ability to assimilate disparate pieces of information in the process of creating new ideas, interpretations, products, & solutions to problems.
- The capacity to synthesize rather than analyze.
- The imaginative skill to see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields, to detect broad patterns rather than specific answers, to create something by combining elements nobody else thought to combine; to be a boundary crosser.
- The ability to see (hear) the big picture.
- The ability to place facts, or in the case of musicians sounds, in a creatively memorable context & deliver them with emotional impact.
- The capacity of sharpening understanding of one thing by expressing it in the context of something else.
- A pathway to understanding that does not run through the left side of the brain.
- The capacity to recognize & appreciate the combination of function & beauty.
- The ability to think and create “artistically.”
- Aesthetics matter. Attractive things work better. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, & beauty to produce something that the world did not know was missing.
