Once again, the Vancouver School Board is considering eliminating Bands and Strings programs or imposing an annual user fee. Children who cannot afford music lessons will be the victims. This will have long reaching effects not only on the music community but on the intellectual development of Vancouver students.

As Bramwell Tovey said:

"What kind of message does this give to our children about the values of our society?

“Here’s an instrument. Now give it back.”

The social benefits of music are extraordinary – If a student holds a musical instrument then he or she can’t hold a knife, or a joint, or a needle or a crack pipe – or a gun.

If a student is in a choir or a band or an orchestra, they are communicating through the universal art of music at the heart of our community.

After a recent VSO educational concert of Beethoven’s music at the Orpheum in Vancouver, a teacher wrote to us with a comment penned by a young student who had spent his brief life in foster care due to a litany of misfortune that made Beethoven’s disability seem negligible by comparison. He wrote:

- “It was the most beautiful building I have ever seen
- It was the most wonderful music I’ve ever heard
- It was the greatest day of my life.”

That is the power of music – to heal, to inspire, to communicate, to transform and so much else besides.

Beethoven had no choice but to live in a world of silence.

Please, do not let your choice bring silence to the world of a single child."

Why music is essential to creating great thinkers:

Letter from Jonathan Girard, Director of Orchestras, UBC School of Music

The benefits of musical training:

http://trainingthemusicalbrain.blogspot.ca/2014/04/in-support-of-school-band.html

The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra explains the importance of Elementary Band and Strings:

http://www.cknw.com/2016/04/01/vancouver-symphony-orchestra-says-elementary-band-and/

Student musicians in one of the many programs to be eliminated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWn7Argui7g