This week I received an email from a prospective father with some questions about the quadrivium and how music is to be studied. I would like to take the question up here, because it requires some explaining and clarification, and I do not think I would do it justice in an email reply. I also think it is a question other parents are quietly asking. Let me give the question first, as it was written, and then take it apart and answer it as clearly and thoroughly as I can.
“Music at first seems like an art that is best taught in the apprenticeship model, and yet we know it is one of the liberal arts for intellectual study. In addition to intellectual study and classical training as a musician, there is also seemingly a third musicianship that pertains merely to what it means to be human — for example, that it is assumed that any man can sing a hymn for liturgy, a nursery rhyme, or a national anthem. Many classical homeschool programs claim to have music courses, but they all seem generally unimpressive, typically reducing to some manner of music appreciation, and in the hands of a busy parent these are often corrupted further into merely listening to a few songs here and there, to be exposed to the variety of musical sounds and the instruments that make them. These seem laughably inadequate to transmit the artistic skill, the science, or the folk tradition. With all that said, what does a classical musical education entail? How broad or narrow is the scholastic study of music?”
That is a thoughtful and thorough question from a father looking around at what is done in the name of music education and saying to himself, “This just cannot be it. This cannot be what music education is supposed to look like.” Anyone who loves music, who loves history, who takes music seriously, will agree that what we see in schools, and in homeschool and classical education circles, cannot possibly be what music education was in the past. So it is a good question, and it is worth our time and attention.
The first thing to see — and the writer wisely acknowledges it — is that we are speaking of several different things under one name. The word music has a number of meanings and a number of applications, and we ought to sort them out before we go any further.
1. Music as one of the seven liberal arts
As Headmaster of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, I will begin by identifying music as one of the seven liberal arts, one of the four mathematical arts. We have arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy: the four classical mathematical arts.
Now, when we look at music in that context, we are not talking about sounds at all. We are not talking about singing. We are not talking about instruments. We are talking about mathematics — about mathematical things, as Aristotle would say.
Let me back up a little. If we look at Aristotle’s Categories, we see that the second category he lists is quantity. Quantity is a subject of philosophical investigation, one of the ten Aristotelian categories. If we take up this category of quantity and study it for its own sake, to learn what quantity is, we find that it divides into two species: multitude, a collection of units; and magnitude, something that varies in size but is one thing.
If we then look at multitude, we find that it also divides into two species: absolute multitude and relative multitude. Absolute multitude is the simple study of number, and we study that in the art of arithmetic. Relative multitude is what we study in the art of music. Music is the study of relative multitude.
Now, this may sound very fancy, but it is really very simple. One thing I have always emphasized in my teaching, as I have tried to explain and promote the classical liberal arts, is that modern academics love to make things appear complicated. It is the emperor’s new clothes. They love to act as though they understand things that other people cannot understand — but when it is time to explain, they act as if it were impossible to communicate with common people. The truth is the opposite. Aristotle explains that we know a man knows something when he is able to teach it. When we find that a man is not able to explain or teach what he claims to know, it is a sign that he does not actually know the subject he is talking about. We have to learn to call men out when they stand up and pretend to know a subject and then, asked to explain it, act as though it were too complicated. They are being exposed as men who do not know the subject they are talking about.
So let us take the imaginary complexity away. This talk of absolute and relative multitude sounds impressive and philosophical, but we use these ideas and speak of them every single day.
An absolute multitude is a multitude — a collection of units, a collection of things — spoken of without reference to anything else. It is absolute. It stands by itself. If I say there are seven coins in my pocket, the number seven is an absolute multitude: a number by itself, seven. Very simple. And, as I said, arithmetic studies absolute multitude, number.
A relative multitude is simply number expressed or understood by comparison, by ratio, by relation to something else. If I say it is twice as hot as it was last August, the quantity twice expresses a number, but a relative number; it assumes that some other quantity, some other multitude, exists. If I say you have half the coins that I have, the quantity is relative: it assumes that some other quantity is known, and it expresses this one in relation to that one. That is all it means to speak of relative multitude. It is not a complicated or mysterious subject. And that is what music is.
To take away the false mystery further: if we wish to study this art of music, we simply have to study the book that teaches the art. This is not secret wisdom revealed by the Holy Spirit to certain men. There is no oracle we can visit where some blind old man will tell us the secrets of the mysteries of music. We simply have to study. It is a subject, and it is studied in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. The summary of what is known of the art of music that we study was composed by Boethius, a Christian philosopher who lived in the early sixth century, about halfway through the Christian era. So we have a book on the art of music written by a Christian scholar. There is no mystery about what this liberal art of music is.
Let us get all of that fake, mystical intellectualism out of the way, because that is not what the classical liberal arts are. They are very simple. The reason they are presented with so much confusion by men who talk and talk about them is that those men have never studied them. They make their living talking about a subject that gets people excited, and never actually deliver any instruction in it, because they do not know it. They are con men. I do not mean to be nasty in saying so, but that is what they are. We know that a man knows a subject if he is able to teach it; and when we find men who talk about subjects, pretend to know them, and never teach them, we have con men in education.
So the first sense of the word music is this liberal art, the study of relative multitude — and, as the writer said, that clearly has nothing to do with the study of instruments or learning to sing in a choir. That is right. And that leads us to the second sense.
2. Music as imitation
We also use the word music to refer to the music we actually perform and listen to: the singing of a choir, the playing of instruments, and so on. There is a reason we call this music, too. Deep beneath the performance, beneath the sounds and the harmonies we hear, there is a science, and that science relates back to the classical liberal art of music. So there is an indirect connection between the music we hear or perform and the liberal art itself, because the science stands behind the music.
However, you do not need to be a scientist in music to learn to play the violin or to sing in a choir. You do not need to know the science in order to imitate the art. When we speak of the practical performance of music, what is really being done is that one man is imitating another. It is an art of imitation. It is not a true art; it is not a true science.
Think of the man who plays the piano and says, “I learned to play that song by ear. I listened to it, and then I worked out the melody on the keys by trial and error.” What he means is that he does not know the science, if there is any, behind the composition of that music. He listened to it, and then played around on the keyboard until he could reproduce the melody, or something close enough to it to seem like the melody. Performance music is largely imitation. A violin teacher chooses a piece and then teaches the student how to play that piece. That is imitation. It is the same thing done in modern mathematics classes, where a teacher says, “This is how you do long division. Step one, step two, step three. Now you do it.” You imitate the operation. The same thing is done in music.
So whenever we speak of instrumental music at the school level, we are speaking of children learning by imitation to play instruments or to sing in a choir. When we go to church, we sing by imitation. The choir director or music leader sings, let us say, the antiphon of the psalm, and what do we do? We repeat him. We imitate him. Some of us imitate him well and some of us do not, but that is how imitative music works. Most of the music we engage in is imitation. It is related indirectly to the classical liberal art of music, to music properly so called, but it is something else entirely.
When most people speak of music in education, this is what they mean. They want their child to learn to sing. They want their child to learn to play the violin or the flute. I played the trumpet when I was a boy. They want their children to learn an instrument, or several, simply for the sake of playing instruments. That is imitative music — something altogether different, and not scientific.
3. Music as composition
But there is more, because we can also consider the work of actually composing music, and there we find something different again.
There are different kinds of composition. There is composition that is really nothing more than what we hear in modern popular music, where a performer comes up with a clever riff or a catchy melody and then a song is built around it. There is no real science in it at all; it is composing by ear. The guitarist plays a neat little piece, and the band or the producers say, “People will like that — let’s get it recorded.” The words are almost a secondary concern; the other members of the band fill in around the main riff, and that is how the song is made. That is what much of popular music really is. It is why, when you listen to popular music and wonder what the words even mean, you find that the song was never designed to communicate a message. The song was designed to sell the riff. We might call that a mercenary composition: music produced for the sake of making money.
But there is also a scientific composition, and this is what we find when we look into classical composition, into the polyphony of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, back into Gregorian chant, and further back still into Greek music. There we have composition of music that has a science behind it.
In modern circles we know very little about this, but in the ancient world it was held that there were different modes — different scales, different collections of tones — and that when these different modes were played they had different moral effects upon the listener. The music was designed almost in a rhetorical way, to have a moral influence upon the audience, upon the listeners. We can imagine an army going out to battle and music composed to rouse the soldiers to courage: there would be a mode that promoted that virtue. We can imagine a different mode suited to a funeral, where we are somber and mourning and quiet — a different mode, a different mood, a different moral effect. We can imagine yet another mood for a banquet or a festival, where we are celebrating some joyful event and want music that promotes that spirit of festivity and joy.
Composers who were more philosophical understood the moral philosophy, the rhetoric, behind the sounds, and designed their music according to that ancient art to accomplish their ends. And that philosophy of music, that understanding of the effects of music upon the human soul, continued into the Gregorian chant of the Church. It is what stands behind all our discussions of what music is appropriate or inappropriate — what styles or genres, what instruments, what tunes, what rhythms suit a Mass, a wedding, a funeral, or private and popular religious music. All of it comes into play on the basis of an understanding of the moral effects of sound.
So there is a philosophical investigation of music that leads us into a different view of the subject, and it was on the minds of many composers who had a philosophical end in view for their work. I would propose that this is a third and different meaning of the term music. I think that when many people speak of music in some classical or philosophical sense, this is the idea they are reaching for: the composing of music fitted to serve a certain end or goal.
To give an example I always love to meditate on: in the Old Testament we read of King Saul tormented by an evil spirit, and of David, who would later be king — still a boy at the time — who played the harp. We read that when Saul was tormented by that evil spirit, the music David played calmed his spirit and brought him peace. There, in that biblical example, we see the moral, and even the spiritual, effect of a certain kind of music. David was surely an inspired musician; he was the composer of the psalms. So we see that idea confirmed as real and true in the Scriptures themselves.
Three senses, three different studies
So I would propose these three ideas of music — and there could well be more; these are the three I have in mind. First, the classical liberal art of music, the study of relative multitude. Second, the simpler idea of music as the imitation of sound, whether by voice or by instruments. Third, the philosophical or rhetorical idea of composing music to accomplish some effect upon the soul of the hearer.
Once we see this, the question of music education becomes much simpler, because now we can ask: what are you actually trying to do? Are you interested in having your daughter learn to play the flute? Would you like to learn to sing Gregorian chant? Are you interested in the study of relative multitude as a preparation for philosophical studies? Or are you interested in composing music to accomplish some effect? How you would study for each of those ends is obviously different. Simply understanding that these three senses of the term exist puts you in a very rare group of men in modern society, and it is good for us to see that.
In the Classical Liberal Arts Academy we are obviously concerned with the art of music as one of the seven liberal arts. But that does not mean we have no interest in the other senses. We certainly do, and some of them are simply practical. I would like my children to learn the piano because it is useful. I would like to learn to chant because it is useful in my worship as a Catholic. I would like to learn the drums so that I can understand rhythm, and because it is enjoyable. There are simple, practical motives for imitative music, with no science and no philosophy in them: just lessons and imitation, do this and do that. What is commonly called music theory is really instruction in how to do certain things in music with instruments — how to control the voice physically, how to make sound with an instrument. Those are practical arts, practical studies, not liberal arts and not philosophical studies at all. They are very useful for their own purposes. We are not choosing one or the other.
As for the third sense, composition assumes that you already possess practical skill in music. It would make little sense for a man with no practical skill to be meddling in talk of composition.
The mathematical arts and the contemplative life
Now, as parents looking at our children and thinking about their education, we can see that the second use is the one we are normally concerned with — that imitative study of performed music. Rarely do we get into composition. More rarely still would we have children interested in the classical liberal art of music. You would have to be genuinely ambitious and eager for the study of classical philosophy to undertake and persevere in that study. It is not an easy study, because it is very abstract.
But that is the whole nature and purpose of the mathematical studies in the classical liberal arts. They are the means by which the soul, or the mind, ascends from material things to eternal things. Music is like an elevator that carries us up from the material things where we begin to things immaterial, unchanging and eternal — the kinds of things Nicomachus speaks of in the opening chapter of the Arithmetic. That ascent of the soul into the contemplative life was the true purpose of the study of the classical liberal art of music. Plato makes that very clear in the Republic, and Aristotle understood it and explains it throughout his teaching.
So it is for the contemplative soul. If you are interested in promoting the contemplative life among children, music was understood in the ancient world as the natural means of doing it: by introducing them to mathematical ideas, and those ideas cause them to think about the world differently.
Let me give a simple example of how mathematics does this. In geometry, the very first definition we learn in Euclid’s Elements is that a point has no length or breadth. If I were to say to you, “Step up to the chalkboard and draw a geometrical point,” ninety-nine out of a hundred students would take the chalk and draw a little solid dot on the board — which would show that they had not listened to the definition. What they have put on the board is not a geometrical point at all. It is a small solid circle. It has length and breadth; that is why we can see it. So the question is: what exactly is a point, if it has no length and no breadth? When we reflect on it, we can see that a point as Euclid defines it would be invisible. Then we move on to the line, and we read that a line is length without breadth. Well, what would that be? Could you draw one? The answer is no — because if you draw it, you make a figure that has a certain breadth. So the line, too, is invisible.
And now we are challenged to think of things that clearly exist and yet are not perceptible. That is the beginning of learning to be contemplative: to think beyond the reach and the limits of the senses. And it begins in something as simple as the first two definitions of Euclid’s Elements. That is how the mathematical arts were understood to lead men to the contemplative life — and the contemplative life was not invented by Christians. It existed in the world before Christianity ever spread among the pagan nations.
The first sense: study the book
There is no mystery about the first idea of music. We study it, as I said, by studying Boethius’ art of music in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. It is a published book. You have to study it. There is no magic way around it. You can go to all the homeschool conferences and educational conferences you like; you can gather together and talk about it; but you have to study the book. The book contains the art, and it must be studied and mastered. There is nothing to discuss. If you want your children to learn the classical liberal art of music, they must study Boethius’ art of music. That is simple.
If you want your children to learn practical music, then do that honestly. You can pretend that you want something more theoretical, but you are not really choosing something theoretical. You are choosing practical music instruction with a bit more explanation attached: the names of the notes, the staff, reading music, chords, and so on. It is still imitative music. It is still low-level, practical, hands-on imitation. How you go about it depends on your goal.
Immersion, and what Gregorian chant actually requires
But there is something important I want to say about imitative music.
In the Catholic life we are supposed to be immersed in music — and in a certain kind of music. The Church has taught repeatedly throughout her history that the official and ideal form of music for the worship of God is Gregorian chant. And that takes us right back to ancient Greek music theory: there is a certain context, a certain end, a certain intended effect upon the soul. You can see how all of this leads us to the philosophical or rhetorical idea of music.
We are supposed to be immersed in music in the Catholic life. Most of us are not. This is part of the problem. I would say the fundamental problem with music in modern culture is that we are not immersed in the music we are supposed to be immersed in. That is one of the reasons I started the classical Catholic radio station: to give Catholic families the opportunity to immerse themselves in the kind of music they ought to be immersed in — what should be normal, and is in fact completely foreign to most modern Catholics. There are several kinds of music on the station: Anglican chant, Renaissance polyphony, classical music such as Mozart’s adagios, a little medieval lute and guitar music. But there is a great deal of Gregorian chant, and it is my desire that Catholics be able to immerse themselves in the sound of chant and to learn by imitation to take part in it.
Now, you can study a little of the theory of Gregorian chant, but here is something interesting. There is a passage — I believe it is quoted in the introduction to Dom Suñol’s textbook on Gregorian chant — from Dom Mocquereau, who says that in order to understand Gregorian chant, what you actually need to know is classical prosody. To understand and perform Gregorian chant, what you need is classical prosody — and prosody is the fourth part of the art of classical grammar. He is saying that if you would study classical grammar, you would have the knowledge needed to take part in Gregorian chant.
So it is not a music class that is needed or missing. It is classical grammar. And because we do not study grammar in modern Catholic schools, we are not able to take part intelligently in Gregorian chant. In the Classical Liberal Arts Academy we study Latin prosody in Latin Grammar III, so you would have to make your way through to Latin Grammar III. Very few students ever get through Latin Grammar I, so we are simply not there yet academically. We are not reaching the place where we begin to dig into these subjects and put them to use. The rubber is not meeting the road. I always say it is as though we were driving with the transmission in neutral: the motor is running, there is all kinds of noise, but the engine is not engaged and we are not moving forward. That will never change until we commit to the complete and devoted study of the classical liberal arts.
So it is important to see that grammar is the prerequisite for Gregorian chant, not some kind of Gregorian chant music class. That is not what is needed. The reason I am able to take part in Gregorian chant is that I am a classicist who has studied Latin prosody. I understand accent; I understand quantity in Latin pronunciation. So I can see and understand easily what is going on in the chant. I have no musical education in the sense most people would look for, but because I know Latin prosody, I have what is needed to understand and make use of Gregorian chant.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, immersed from the age of five
Let us go back into history. I always point to the great model, the patron saint of Catholic education, Saint Thomas Aquinas. He was obviously an amazing philosopher and theologian, and obviously a master of the classical liberal arts. As you read the Summa or his commentaries, you see that he knows them all and refers to them constantly. He was taught by Saint Albert the Great, who did the same — and I think Saint Albert is more amazing still. And remember that Saint Thomas also composed liturgical pieces, prayers and hymns. He had a mastery of music in more than one sense.
But if we go back and look at his life, we learn that the Catholic world simply functioned differently than it does now — and I do not think that difference is necessary. I think we choose to make it different. Saint Thomas Aquinas was sent to live in a Benedictine monastery when he was five years old. For all our talk of his philosophy and theology and languages, Saint Thomas Aquinas was immersed in the sound of the music that Catholics ought to be immersed in. He was immersed in Gregorian chant, in the sung liturgies, in the sung Divine Office, from the age of five. So we should not be surprised to find him deeply skilled in music later in life without reading of any formal music study in his education or career. He was immersed in true music from the beginning.
That is different from the experience of most modern Catholics — but it does not need to be. Some will object that we cannot send our children to a monastery as they did in the old days, and that is true. But we also have resources they did not have. They could not sit at home and listen to Gregorian chant whenever they liked.
Let me share one while I have it in mind. The Abbey of Le Barroux in France — B-A-R-R-O-U-X — a Benedictine abbey, broadcasts the daily recitation of the Divine Office in Latin, in full Gregorian chant, every day. I do not think they post Matins, but they certainly post the principal hours of Lauds and Vespers, and some of the little hours as well. If you have an old traditional breviary, you can even learn to chant along with the Benedictine monks, who are the real masters of Gregorian chant in the Church.
So we have opportunities to immerse ourselves in Gregorian chant. Even if we cannot live in a monastery, we can visit one. If you are in the United States, you can visit Clear Creek Abbey. You can make use of these resources and deliberately immerse yourself in the sound of chant, and I recommend that you do. I recommend that you learn to chant along, to sing along. There are also good channels online where the music and the words scroll across the screen as they are chanted, so that you can follow along and learn to read and imitate the chant.
We do not have all the privileges Catholics of the past enjoyed, but we have advantages they did not have. We have these resources available to us in our own homes.
I can say that this is where my own interest and love of music developed. In college I spent my spare time learning and singing Christian hymns. I was not a Catholic then, so it was mostly Anglican hymnody. There was a website, the Cyber Hymnal, and on a Sunday afternoon or in the evening, if I had some spare time, I would learn a new tune and a new hymn. After a little while you have the words by heart, and you can walk around singing beautiful Christian hymns rather than carrying all kinds of junk in your head. So there is a commitment we have to make to have that kind of culture, and to share it with others. It is not so much formal music education as a certain immersion in a quality of music — and that is really an issue of culture, not of formal education.
What I would tell parents
When parents with young children ask me what they should do to give their children a great classical education — and the man who wrote is a father of several young children — my first answer, which I spoke about in a recent talk, is that you have to establish stability in your family life. You cannot be living a crazy life. You must have stability: financial stability, social stability, marital stability. That is the first thing.
The second is that you must create an environment conducive to this kind of learning — an environment conducive to a contemplative Catholic life. We can do that. We have the advantage of resources in the twenty-first century. We can create a culture. But if you have the television on in the middle of the house, blasting all kinds of worldly nonsense, you can just forget it. You have to create an environment conducive to learning.
There is so much to learn, so much to study, and, as I said before, a great deal of work has to be done to make significant, meaningful progress. The only way it can be done is little by little, step by step, multiplied by thousands and thousands of days of stable, consistent, undistracted years of classical Catholic study.
So that is what I would like to leave you with. As Saint Thomas Aquinas was placed in a monastery and immersed in the music of the Church, we have to do likewise. We cannot do it in the same way, but we have means and resources he did not have, and we have to learn to use them.
We can study the classical liberal art of music, the study of relative multitude, as one of the seven liberal arts. That is done in a course in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy; there is nothing else to discuss. We can give our children practical music instruction by having a skilled teacher teach them the piano or any other instrument. We can have them join a choir and learn to perform choral music, largely by imitation. And if they love music, and wish to study it further and to compose, that education in composition will have something to do with music theory, to be sure, but much more to do with the study of rhetoric and moral philosophy — because what is really being pursued is a rhetorical art, in which music is used as a means of persuasion, of enchantment, of influence. Think of the three persuasive appeals: there is logos, the reasoning in the words; there is ethos, in the character of the music and of the performance itself; and there is pathos, the emotional effect of the music. You can see that it really is a rhetorical study.
And that brings us back again to the seven liberal arts. Gregorian chant, we saw, relates to Latin prosody and grammar. Musical composition relates to rhetoric and moral philosophy. If we would learn to trust the seven liberal arts, and pursue them, and study them thoroughly, we would find that the solutions to most of these problems are already present in them. That is why the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and so many of history’s wisest men, did not talk about all these things: they simply studied the seven liberal arts. They knew the answers were there.
But in a culture where no one studies them, we imagine that the answers must be somewhere else, and so we look to all these cheesy, false classical education programs, all these cheesy music theory programs, all these cheesy practical music courses, and we call them classical — and it is all a bunch of baloney. We have to study the seven liberal arts if we are going to have a classical education. And if we do, we will find the culture we long for. We have a longing, a vague longing we cannot articulate. There is something we want, but because we do not have the education we ought to have, we do not really know what it is or where to find it. What I am telling you is that it is in the seven liberal arts. The culture that has been lost came from the mastery of the seven liberal arts, and it will come from them again.
The mission of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy is to research, restore, publish and teach the classical liberal arts. I have thought at times of expanding that to say “and the culture that proceeded from them,” though I have not done it. But that really is the answer.
A word on the price
So it is a good question, and it is good to see that there are these different senses of the word music — different divisions, different applications, which happen to share one name, and that is what causes the confusion. Aristotle explains this in the classical liberal art of logic. It is good to understand what music is in its most proper sense: the second art of the quadrivium, the study of relative multitude. It is still good to study practical, imitative music, for the sake of performance and for the enjoyment of singing and playing. And it is good to understand that if there is a desire to compose, that study is accessible as well through the same liberal arts, with attention to rhetoric and moral philosophy.
I do not think we need new courses and new programs and all this shallow conference talk, all this marketing of new products. We do not need modern music teachers pretending to be classical educators because they have decided to imitate Gregorian chant. That is not classical music. We have to understand the different kinds of music, their proper functions, and how each is pursued — and then understand that everything needed for them is already available to us. There is no mystery. But there is a great deal of work to be done, and the only way we will do it is by learning to live with singleness of mind. We have to learn to say no to things. We have to learn not to be good at insignificant things. We have to learn to devote ourselves, and our time, and to study until it hurts.
I talk to my wife about this, because she worries that I may wear myself down with study. And I say: when I played sports, no one criticized me for twisting an ankle, or busting my head open, or breaking my arm trying to win a playoff game. No one criticized me for injuring myself for the sake of some foolishness. But when it comes to the pursuit of wisdom, to these noble and lofty things, these great arts, these great contemplative subjects of study and meditation, the Catholic life itself — why are we not working for them with the same zeal, with the same sense of abandonment, to say: if the pursuit of this art, this learning, this knowledge costs me a sore neck, or nerve pain in my arm, or a weak back, or my eyesight over time, it will have been worth it? There is a kind of self-sacrifice for the sake of learning that needs to be recovered by us.
I am not promoting any reckless nonsense. I am saying that to make progress in these lofty arts and sciences we have to realize that there is a price to be paid to get there — and that we have everything we need available to us. We simply are not putting in the kind of diligent, persevering work, over the course of an entire educational career and an entire adult life, that men in past generations put in to reach the levels of achievement they reached.
So that is the challenge I would set. We have the resources. We have to create an environment conducive to these studies. We have to engage in them diligently. And we have to persevere by stacking up days of diligent study and work, until we reach a level of progress where the effects and the fruits of these studies can be enjoyed. It would be a fine thing to see that with respect to the study of music in all three of its forms.
I hope that is a helpful answer. If there is anything you would like to dig into more deeply, or a topic you would like taken further, please let me know. I am always happy to respond to questions — though I prefer to do it by voice rather than in writing, because I have too much desk work as it is, and I would rather step away from the desk and give a question the attention it deserves. So please send your questions, and I will use them as a springboard for new topics and discussions.
God bless you all, and please join us for studies in the Academy. Things are going very well as we head into the new school year, and I would love to have you with us.
Mr. William C. Michael, OP
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
