WE SAY: Music food for souls of our kids

If you've got a job it translates to living to work, when working to live is a far healthier approach, that is if the circumstances allow.

We all need some way of winding down from the relenting cycle of getting up, going to work, coming home, then back to bed.

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Life needs balance, whatever your age. While you obviously don't have the very specific demands of work as a child, there still needs to be a break in the daily routine.

And just maybe that break can offer something that can turn down-time fun into something uplifting for the soul.

For many, that comes with music; listening, learning and developing playing skills that last a lifetime.

Kathryn Pyle had such a connection from back to an early childhood spent on the family farm at Finley.

It took her into another, blissful world, one from which she never wanted to leave.

"When the grownups asked me what I wanted to be," she says, "I don't think I ever said I wanted to be a music teacher, but I do remember that it was blissful laying down listening to and analysing all the sounds I was hearing on Mum and Dad's His Masters Voice stereo!

"I was spellbound most of the time listening to Elton John, Bill Haley and the Comets, Queen, Disco Dazzler, Ripper '77 ... ."

And so that love - one that manifested in her imagination's ability to turn the sounds she heard into colours and shapes - became her calling.

Decades later she continues to teach music, the past 20 years through her Musikids program on the Border.

She estimates she has shared her passion with at least 1800 students over that time; this year alone, 200 are enrolled in her Wodonga classes.

Ms Pyle should be congratulated on the tremendous achievement of all those years.

And that's not just the number of kids taught - though, that is a remarkable statistic in itself - but also for what she herself describes as the community of families with the common link of the joy of music.