People don't come to liberal arts schools to play music at the highest level. I have a feeling that students who love music are as likely to love music here as they would at any college in a city. And in a way, you appreciate live performance more when you don't get it that often. It stokes the fire to hear it when it's not an everyday experience. Well, there are two opposite reasons.
Music is as much a part of culture as anything else, but plays into the way society works.
You receive an amputated version of culture if you don't include music. The other, sort of, opposite reason is that I feel music requires that you think and listen and use your brain in very different ways than other disciplines. It opens ways to think about things that were totally inaccessible before. One other thing is that insofar as liberal arts is about writing and about words, having to write about music is very difficult. You are translating things that words don't talk about very well.