What great artists and writers say about music:

James Brown: "Music has to breathe and sweat. You have to play it live."

Elvis Presley: "Music should be something that makes you gotta move, inside or outside."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: "Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body."

Plato: "Music is a more potent instrument than any other for education, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul."

Martin Luther: "Whoever has skill in music is of good temperament and fitted for all things. We must teach music in schools."

Molière: "All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill our history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill in dancing."

Fred Rogers: "Music is the one art we all have inside. We may not be able to play an instrument, but we can sing along or clap or tap our feet. Have you ever seen a baby bouncing up and down in the crib in time to some music? When you think of it, some of that baby's first messages from his or her parents may have been lullabies, or at least the music of their speaking voices. All of us have had the experience of hearing a tune from childhood and having that melody evoke a memory or a feeling. The music we hear early on tends to stay with us all our lives."

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927) Founder of the Sufi Order in the West: "According to the thinkers of the East, there are five different intoxications: of beauty, youth and strength; then the intoxication of wealth; the third is power, command, the power of ruling; and there is the fourth intoxication, which is the intoxication of learning, of knowledge. But all these four intoxications fade away just like stars before the sun in the presence of the intoxication of music. The reason is that it touches that deepest part of man’s being. Music reaches farther than any other impression from the external world can reach. And the beauty of music is that it is both the source of creation and the means of absorbing it. In other words, by music was the world created, and by music it is withdrawn again into the source which has created it."

Even more info, as found in the New Art Center's recent letter:

Young people who participate in the arts are:

Four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement

Four times more likely to be elected to class office within their schools

Four times more likely to participate in a math and science fair

Four times more likely to win an award for writing an essay or poem

Three times more likely to win an award for school attendance

Likely to participate in youth groups nearly four times as frequently

Likely to read for pleasure nearly twice as often.