Raritan Music Center

About

Raritan Music Center opened in April 1997 and has been growing ever since.

Currently we have over 30 teachers who provide private lessons in piano, voice, orchestral strings, woodwinds and brass, and guitar. All of our teachers are highly qualified with various backgrounds to meet your needs.

Raritan Music Center holds seasonal recitals throughout the year and end-of-the-year recitals in June, where all students are given the opportunity to perform in front of an audience. In addition, Raritan Music encourages students to become involved in outside music competitions and evaluations, such as The Associated Board of the Royal School of Music (ABRSM), the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) and the Mid Atlantic Music Teachers Guild (MAMTG).

During the summer, Raritan Music holds a variety of weeklong programs that help to fine tune your child’s skills as well as ignite their passion for their instrument.

Whether you have a young child ready to embark on a lifetime of music, an older student preparing for auditions, or a spouse who has always wanted to learn to play an instrument, Raritan Music Center teachers and staff have the experience to help you achieve your musical goals.

MUSIC IS A SCIENCE

It is exact, specific, and highly organized. It embodies many levels of physics from acoustics to architecture.

MUSIC IS MATHEMATICS

It is rhythmically based on the subdivision of time in space into fractions, which must be done instantaneously, and not worked out on paper, in a highly specific form with regard to exact placement and symmetry. It is disciplined and logical.

MUSIC IS LANGUAGE

It is composed of phrases, thoughts and ideas. Its goal is to communicate and to reach apart of us where words no longer suffice. Most of the terms are in a foreign language, mostly Italian, German or French. The line notation is certainly NOT English, but a highly developed and organized symbolic system.

MUSIC IS HISTORY

It is the only art form we can hear as people hundreds of years ago heard. Unlike paint, whose image is always there once created, music is perpetually "repainted" each time it is performed. The feelings and thoughts of countless generations are forever cast into sound.

MUSIC IS PHYSICAL EDUCATION

It required fantastic coordination of fingers, eyes, hands, lips, cheek and facial muscles, in addition to extraordinary control of the diaphragmatic, back, stomach and chest muscles. There are as many calories burned by a symphony trumpet player in one performance as there are by a quarterback in a professional football game.

MUSIC IS ALL OF THESE THINGS AND MORE, BUT ABOVE ALL, MUSIC IS AN ART

It allows a human being to take science and technique and create EMOTION. This is the one thing that science cannot duplicate - human feelings and emotions.

THIS IS WHY WE TEACH MUSIC

Not because we expect to produce music majors. Not because we expect people to play all their lives. Not so you can relax.

BUT SO YOU WILL BE MORE HUMAN

So you will recognize beauty. So you will be more sensitive, especially to all the thoughts and feelings put into sound throughout the ages. So you will be closer to the infinity of your own heart and soul. So you will have something to cling to. So you will feel the beauty of being alive. And so you will come to know the value of your own self.