WELCOME BACK!!!



Welcome back to another great musical year! This is the place to visit if you want to know what's going on in the Music Room this year! I will be posting new information on this main page throughout the year and I have created pages over to the right side of this site that will be updated often. Check out any and all of these posts and pages that interest you and feel free to make comments. I hope that you will come back and visit often as I will be adding new information all the time and throughout the school year. You could also follow this site so that you will receive e-mail notifications of any new additions and not miss out on anything newsworthy.

Music Survey!

Please feel free to take the survey below if you are a current music student of mine from Jefferson, Davis Thayer or Parmenter Elementary School. Your answers will help me to make the music classes even more meaningful for you this year!

(Feel free to complete and submit this form if you're not a student of mine, too!)

Mr. Barrett ;-)

Your name:
Your grade:
Your school:
Your classroom teacher's name:

Do you have a favorite style of music?
Do you have a favorite song or piece?
Do you have a favorite artist or band?

Where do you listen to music most often?
Describe the kind of music you like to listen to.

Do you participate in any musical activities outside of school?
Please tell me more about this.

Do you play a musical instrument outside of school?
What instrument(s) do you play?

Do you take private music lessons?
If so, could you tell me more about them (teacher, location, etc.)?

What do you hope to learn in music class this year?

Thanks for taking the Music Survey!

Why Music?

 

 

This is why I teach music:

Not because I expect you to major in music
Not because I expect you to sing or play 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, compassion, gentleness, good - in short more life.
Of what value will it be to make a prosperous living unless you know how to live?
-Anonymous

I would teach the children music, physics and philosophy, but the most important is music, for in the patterns of the arts are the keys to all learning.
-Plato

During the Gulf War, the few opportunities I had for relaxation I always listened to music, and it brought me great peace of mind. I have shared my love of music with people throughout this world, while listening to the drums and special instruments of the Far East, Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Far North, and all of this started with the music appreciation course that I was taught in a third-grade elementary class in Princeton, New Jersey. What a tragedy it would be if we lived in a world where music was not taught to children.
-General H. Norman Schwarzkopf — United States Army

The things I learned from my experience in music in school are discipline, perseverance, dependability, composure, courage and pride in results. . . Not a bad preparation for the workforce!
-Gregory Anrig – President, Educational Testing Service

Music is an essential part of everything we do. Like puppetry, music has an abstract quality which speaks to a worldwide audience in a wonderful way that nourishes the soul.
-Jim Henson – television producer and puppeteer

Should we not be putting all our emphasis on reading, writing and math? The ‘back-to basics curricula,’ while it has merit, ignores the most urgent void in our present system – absence of self-discipline. The arts, inspiring – indeed requiring – self-discipline, may be more ‘basic’ to our nation survival than traditional credit courses. Presently, we are spending 29 times more on science than on the arts, and the result so far is worldwide intellectual embarrassment.
-Paul Harvey – syndicated radio show host

In every successful business…there is one budget line that never gets cut. It’s called ‘Product Development’ – and it’s the key to any company’s future growth. Music education is critical to the product development of this nation’s most important resource – our children.
-John Sykes — President, VH1

It is our job, as parents, educators, and friends, to see that our young people have the opportunity to attain the thorough education that will prepare them for the future. Much of that education takes place in the classroom. We must encourage our youngsters in such pursuits as music education. In addition to learning the valuable lesson that it takes hard work to achieve success, no matter what the arena, music education can provide students with a strong sense of determination, improved communication skills, and a host of other qualities essential for successful living.
-Edward H. Rensi – President and Chief Operation Officer, U.S.A. McDonald's Corporation

A grounding in the arts will help our children to see; to bring a uniquely human perspective to science and technology. In short, it will help them as they grow smarter to also grow wiser.
-Robert E. Allen – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, AT&T Corporation

Some people think music education is a privilege, but I think it’s essential to being human.
-Jewel – singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist

95% of Americans in a 2003 Gallup Poll believe that music is a key component in a child's well-rounded education; three quarters of those surveyed feel that schools should mandate music education.
-Gallop Poll - "American Attitudes Toward Music" - 2003

Sometimes we choose to serve our country in uniform, in war. Sometimes in elected office. And those are the ways of serving our country that I think we are trained to easily call heroic. It’s also a service to your country, I think, to teach poetry in the prisons, to be an incredibly dedicated student of dance, to fight for funding music and arts education in the schools. A country without an expectation of minimal artistic literacy, without a basic structure by which the artists among us can be awakened and given the choice of following their talents and a way to get to be great at what they do, is a country that is not actually as great as it could be. And a country without the capacity to nurture artistic greatness is not being a great country. It is a service to our country, and sometimes it is heroic service to our country, to fight for the United States of America to have the capacity to nurture artistic greatness. Not just in wartime but especially in wartime, and not just in hard economic times but especially in hard economic times, the arts get dismissed as ‘sissy’. Dance gets dismissed as craft, creativity gets dismissed as inessential, to the detriment of our country. And so when we fight for dance, when we buy art that’s made by living American artists, when we say that even when you cut education to the bone, you do not cut arts and music education, because arts and music education IS bone, it is structural, it is essential; you are preserving the way of life that we are supposedly fighting for and it’s worth being proud of.
-Rachel Maddow - American radio personality, television host, and political commentator

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosphy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.
-Ludwig van Beethoven - music composer

Music can change the world because it can change people.
-Bono (U2)

Music does bring people together. It allows us to experience the same emotions. People everywhere are the same in heart and spirit. No matter what language we speak, what color we are, the form of our politics or the expression of our love and our faith, music proves: We are the same.
-John Denver - singer-songwriter

Do you know that our soul is composed of harmony?
-Leonardo DaVinci - painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer