Music matters. As a product, it's easy to get, but as a personal expression of creative artistry, well, the themes and how-tos have to be passed down, from parents to children, from teachers to students.

“;Well, what do you get from reading and literature?”; asked Timothy Shaindlin. “;It comes down to that abused word these days, culture. The arts are the measure of any culture, in any age. Regrettably, in the United States, orchestras and band and arts are disappearing from schools. In Europe the schools draw on the backgrounds of hundreds and even thousands of years of culture, but we're still a very young nation. There the culture is in the air; here it seems superimposed on people. To us—people who love classical music—it is a major, major thing in our lives.”;

Pianist and opera conductor Timothy Shaindlin and brother Peter Shaindlin, a hotelier with deep roots in classical culture, were introduced to music at the knee of their father, a pianist and composer for 20th Century Fox. They talked about the family connections that keep musical culture alive.

“;Music is an aural literature; it used all of the senses,”; Peter said. “;Having the Honolulu Symphony here helps create a spiritual depth, and you have to expose children early. We're trying to promote arts and culture in a country that values things like football more highly than art. They may be apples and oranges, and each have wonderful values, but the arts suffer. Don't misunderstand! Tim and I are huge sports fans! But you have to put it in perspective. Which has the greatest depth and enrichment for your children in the long term?

“;Sports has diminishing returns. You can be 95 and in a wheelchair and still read Proust or Shakespeare or listen to Beethoven and still think and be enriched and enjoy it. Children are getting short shrift when they're herded toward sports. It's not balanced between body and mind.”;

Timothy said, “;One of my favorite jobs was called Opera in the Neighborhoods for the Chicago Lyric Opera. It was an outreach program. We went into the inner cities and neighborhoods with a one-hour opera in English. One principal told me something that stopped me in my tracks—we were playing for thousands of kids who had not only never heard opera before, they didn't know that music could be performed live on a stage. Their entire worldview was that music was something on TV or on a DVD.”;

How do you engage a child's interest in music and the arts? Both Shaindlins are applying their parents' philosophy to their own kids (they each have two teenagers).

“;From our father we had the active, hands-on practical exposure to the arts, someone doing it at the highest level,”; Peter said. “;Our mother has an incredible nose for the arts, a sense of taste and style. You put the two together and shook them up, and it was a heady combination! But a certain degree is innate. You have to have the fire in the belly.”;

“;I just want to expose them and give them the opportunity,”; Timothy said of his own children. “;One boy is pretty good at playing guitar—if it's a wonderful hobby, that's fine; if he wound up playing gigs here and there for money, that's OK, too.”;

Even if one does not become a professional musician, the principles of playing and the mathematical analogues of musical theory open up channels in the brain that make a person well rounded.

“;As a business guy, the arts gives me a nonlinear discipline that gives me balance and variety,”; Peter said. “;I switch from right brain to left brain and exercise both. Running a hotel isn't that much different from conducting a symphony. It's vision and execution and an expression of the highest quality. Universal principles; a performance by a large group of people, unified in one purpose. That's the beauty of it all.”;

Timothy said: “;Years ago the whole point of higher education was your growth as an individual. Today the entire of education seems to be limited to, How much money can I make at this and how soon?

“;We forget the reason we went into this: because we heard something that gave us goose bumps.”;