Musically Minded Brings Highland Students to the Arts

Music surrounds us. From the speakers in the hall and our car radios to the nameless melodies that ring in our ears, the combination of pitch, rhythm, and expression carry a value that is often so difficult to convey by word. At Highland, students taking choir, orchestra, band, and music theory classes strive to bring themselves closer to a musical understanding which this generation may be lacking. Teens are losing touch with music as an art, for as the media and pop culture engulf them, exposure to music as more than a source for entertainment is becoming rare. Think of the last time you heard a song and paid particular attention to its meaning. It may have been far off, but the Musically Minded program that the band and orchestra classes are part of brings the essence back into the music we hear.

“It’s just so much more expressive,” sophomore and violinist Annika Carson said of classical music, the genre that Highland students flock to get a taste of with Musically Minded.

Most tickets for the symphony cost nearly forty dollars, but by joining Musically Minded, students enjoy a discount of under thirty dollars to see not one symphony, but four, plus an opera. The Utah Symphony and Opera put on these performances, the four symphonies located at Abravenal Hall downtown, and the opera at Capitol Theater a few blocks away. Last year, the program included symphonies by Shostakovich and Mozart, as well as the spectacular performance of Puccini’s Turandot. This year’s opera and symphonies are yet to be revealed, and students eagerly await the day their tickets arrive.

Programs like Musically Minded are vital in order to bring young people the aspect of culture this generation seems to be losing as pop, innumerous club songs, and the Top 40 that blare through each and every wireless medium begin to overshadow the formal setting of a symphony or an opera. Think of the last time you sat in the audience before an arrangement of professional musicians, their notes resonating off of the shell and their movements expressive of ideas and emotions. When last were you curious enough to wonder about the meaning of a song, because its words didn’t tell everything? If your answer to any of these questions is never, you may be in need of the classical touch.