Mesa Public Schools Music Education
| Music Education Department Music Education - Mission
Statement - Goals - Star
Spangled Banner Project - MPS Music Education Department Special Performances
MPS Music Education Coordinator, Ruth Argabright Contact Ruth MPS Band Specialist, Janel Huyett Contact Janel MPS Orchestra Specialist, Richard Chelpka Contact Richard MPS Harp Specialist, Karen Miller Contact Karen MPS Chorus Specialist, Jeff Harris Contact Jeff Music in Our Schools Month Mission Statement Our mission is to provide opportunities for all students to develop their potential for musical understanding and expression through exploration, experimentation, exposure and enrichment. Statement of Philosophy Music as an art must be viewed within the context of all of the arts; and all of the arts must be viewed within the context of the actualization of potential. With this in mind the central role of the arts is creativity--the ability to explore possibilities and arrive at a different combination to produce something new. The arts provide the most natural means by which children can explore a rich variety of possibilities and develop their capacity for creativity and inventiveness. In addition, music, dance, theatre arts, poetry and the visual and plastic arts are the greatest resources for developing learning competence in children. The arts are also important, and perhaps, even indispensable, in helping the child to understand order and the nature of beauty. Without a sense of beauty, a child is deprived of a dimension of meaning in his/her life necessary to the full development of his potentialities. As Alfred North Whitehead has stated: "You cannot, without loss, ignore in the life of the spirit so great a factor as art. Our aesthetic emotions provide us with vivid apprehensions of value. If you maim these, you weaken the force of the whole system of spiritual apprehensions. The claim for freedom in education carries with it the corollary that the development of the whole personality must be attended to." Therefore, Mesa Schools should view music as one of the most potent dimensions of the arts. Music and children are natural companions. The essential gift of music, the sensing of an expressive form which addresses the human condition in unique and irreplaceable ways, should be available to every child, according to his or her abilities and interests. When children are given the opportunity to explore and grow with music, in both formal and informal instructional settings, they are provided the means for discovering lasting and important human qualities in themselves and in the social environment they encounter in the school. The cultivation and valuing of the expressive forms found in music are educational priorities because they are vital to children during their school years as well as valuable in their adult lives. Accordingly, music, as a basic component of the school curriculum, is to be approached in a fashion which permits the children to experience and discover for themselves the meanings and values embodied in the study of music. Major Goals To provide every child with the essential ingredients of the musical experience in an environment which consistently promotes growth in, valuing of, and identification with music as a meaningful part of the child's education. To provide basic and regular learning experiences with music from which each child can pursue his or her interests and talents as appropriate. To provide a rich and varied set of musical experiences which represent the cultures of the world. To enable every child to discover the relationship of music to the other arts and disciplines. To provide useful, valid and meaningful links between music and life. Student Goals The music program of the Mesa Schools should produce musically literate individuals who:
Join us along with the rest of America in song! The National Anthem Project spotlights how important music education is and how it effects our "patriotic voice." Star
Spangled Banner
--Francis Scott Key, 1814 O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light, On the shore dimly seen thro' the mists of the deep, And where is that band who so vauntingly swore O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand "On Sept. 13, 1814, Francis
Scott Key visited the British fleet in Chesapeake Bay to secure the
release of Dr. William Beanes, who had been captured after the burning
of Washington, DC. The release was secured, but Key was detained on
ship overnight during the shelling of Fort McHenry, one of the forts
defending Baltimore. In the morning, he was so delighted to see the
American flag still flying over the fort that he began a poem to commemorate
the occasion. First published under the title "Defense of Fort M'Henry,"
the poem soon attained wide popularity as sung to the tune "To Anacreon
in Heaven." The origin of this tune is obscure, but it may have been
written by John Stafford Smith, a British composer born in 1750. "The
Star-Spangled Banner" was officially made the national anthem by Congress
in 1931, although it already had been adopted as such by the army
and the navy." |
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