Revista Internacional de Educación Musical

Musical language organizes general musical training in conservatories and music schools, becoming an attractive, active and dynamic way of learning music, often including rhythmic, body and game activities, and didactic elements such as songs, dance and musical listening. In the case of adult learners, teaching musical language must adapt to psychosocial characteristics of this group. This paper aims to design, validate and apply an instrument shaped as a rubric to evaluate musical language performance in a sample of adult students, based on specific analysis of documents. Scale contains 21 activities that evaluate four skills. The results confirm that there are four main items that would explain most of the academic achievement in musical language in adults: to recognize melodic and harmonic intervals, internalizing tempo, musical dictation and vocal creation, with preparation. Likewise, the results allow to raise a teaching methodology that combines perceptive, corporal, symbolic and communicative aspects in this subject, updating and consolidating the present orientation that teaching has gradually taken.

This paper presents the most relevant data obtained from a study conducted with the participation of 1255 choirs, most of them registered in the database of the Music and Dance Documentation Center from the National Institute of Performing Arts and Music of Spain. The main aim of the study of such an extensive array of choirs is to get sufficient information to describe the basic profile of choral activity in Spain. In order to conduct this study a questionnaire was designed including some specific questions for each one of the three types of choirs in which the sample was classified: children/youth choirs, mixed choirs and equal voices choirs. The questionnaire includes variables referring to the basic profile of the choirs, institutional linkage, repertoires, financing, data about the activities of the choirs and the conductors’ profile. The results show, among other things, that the choirs establish long lasting associative experiences and that, though many conductors are trained as musicians, they are not specialized in choral conducting. Finally, the qualitative and quantitative importance of the choral activity to enhance cultural heritage, musical education and social relevance of the choral movement in Spain stands out.

This research focuses on collaborative compositional practices, dealing with how theories and practices in the field of teaching and creative learning can be articulated in the planning and accompaniment of creative-musical projects. Its objective is to understand how participation in this type of projects can contribute to the construction of collaborative processes in creative learning, in a setting of a school music class. This research, qualitative in nature, consists of a case study, carried out by this Brazilian researcher in a German school. Methodological design includes planning and pedagogical actions in a group of fifth graders, including observation and registration of classes. Four projects were implemented, with varied approaches and composition themes, entitled: popcorn sounds; watching music, listening to images; musical journey; and musicking poems. The results show that children have been critically and enthusiastically involved in projects, negotiating ideas and taking group decisions. These collaborative processes have contributed to the construction of a shared system of musical ideas within the group that supports creative learning. The continuity of studies of this nature can favour the construction of a new approach, theoretical foundations and methodological perspectives for music education in a global context.

Los alumnos inician sus estudios de conservatorio motivados por aprender a tocar algún instrumento. No obstante, desde el primer curso se encuentran con que deben asistir también a clase de Lenguaje Musical, una asignatura que, con frecuencia, les resulta poco atractiva y les genera ansiedad. En este artículo presentamos una investigación realizada con alumnos de los dos primeros cursos de las enseñanzas elementales del Conservatorio Profesional de Música de Segovia. Los objetivos del estudio son identificar los aspectos que provocan ansiedad a los alumnos en dicha asignatura y analizar la utilidad de nuestras propuestas educativas para reducirla. Hemos aplicado una metodología cualitativa que combina características de los métodos de estudio de casos e investigación en el aula.

La investigación presentada nos permite afirmar, entre sus conclusiones fundamentales, que la aplicación de una pedagogía flexible, dinámica y positiva, el cuidado de las relaciones, la implicación de las familias, la aceptación de los errores como elementos naturales de todo proceso de aprendizaje y la realización de interpretaciones musicales en público de forma habitual contribuyen a reducir la ansiedad.

Several studies have already been carried out to analyse the reasons of why a boy or a girl starts to study music outside school and chooses his or her instrument. These results make it possible to raise some knowledge, one of them about the gender differences that exist in this educational sector which leads to the perpetuation of stereotypes linked to them, thereby limiting the possibilities according to the sex with which they were born.

This article presents a research carried out with students in different educational centres in the Region of Murcia and the province of Alicante, with the aim of knowling the influence that gender has on the instruments selected, those of the environment and those that these students prefer. From this perspective, students’ initial motivations towards music and their instrument are also analysed. The results, parallel to other researchs, show important similarities in all of these matters. They also provide data that can be related to the musical environment of this research.

There are evidences that establish that from early childhood musical education has a positive effect on the cognitive development of the child, as well as different musical components contribute to the development of psychomotor, emotional and social skills. The musical processing is a complex issue. From a cognitive point of view production, music perception and aspects of the musical discourse, such as timbre, intensity, pace, and tonality, are processed in different parts of the brain and their structure may vary from one person to another, depending on their musical experience. Throughout this review, we will present the background related to the benefits of musical training in cognitive development of children during early childhood, emphasizing differences that involves receptive training compared to active, extending the effects to the field of music therapy and the use of techniques with therapeutic purposes.

This article contextualizes the origin of the expression ‘good practice’ in economy. The orientations in education developed from it are studied. The meanings assigned by different authors and their consequences in education are analysed. Finally, the presence of the expression, its meaning and use in music education are analysed. Furthermore, literature on successful educational actions is reviewed and its use in music education.

This article introduces the special issue about decolonial music education the authors have edited, while presenting some core concepts of the “modernity / coloniality” framework and approaching them on the music education realm. Particularly, it provides some basis of a theoretical perspective to understand instituted forms of music education in Latin America as derived from the modern civilizatory project, Besides, this framework allows to rescue, visualize and understand, as well as imagine and configure, music education experiences that offer resistance to such process and promote epistemological alternatives. As a presentation of this special issue the article also proposes some keys for reading the papers that follow it.

This paper proposes a theoretical frame of reference to reflect on coloniality in musical pedagogy. First, coloniality is addressed as the matrix of power and Eurocentrism as a form of cultural domination. The meaning of “the American” is re-elaborated, proposing to think of it as a result of these relations of power and dominion. This approach is articulated with the notion of stratified crossbreeding, proposing to understand American identity and, in particular, American music, as part of the symbolic economy of cultural goods. Finally, based on the elements presented, we seek to generate questions that guide decision-making in the pedagogical practices of music teachers from and to Our Americas.

Music as a form of expression and communication has been a fundamental part of the human being throughout its existence. However, the development of music skills in non-academic spaces tends to be underestimated with the argument that they lack the required theoretical foundations within the learning of classical music. By moving through music education from social to institutional spaces, the standardization of knowledge has privileged abstract learning over that which takes place in practical environments. Music in its written form is conceived as a work of art in itself, creating a division between those who can interpret the ‘cultured’ music and those who cannot. Classical music is therefore considered as an object worthy of being consumed by the dominant social classes in order to reaffirm their position. This has an impact on the value given to music with indigenous roots. This article proposes to implement, in the Mexican educational system, a pedagogical model that considers the form of circulation of knowledge from the perspective of local cultures. In particular, the learning of the Huasteco ‘son’ musical genre is proposed as a means for the knowledge, diffusion and revaluation of the Huasteca culture and its worldview.

This article focuses on the genesis of a cooperative school born from historical needs in the Buenos Aires tango of the 1990s. In a musical scene dominated by the rules of the game of neoliberalism, the tango lived a revitalised renaissance by a “neo-contentiousness” in public milieus with voluntary donations. In this co-management modality, a proper way of circulating knowledge was structured. Defined by one of its founders as “very little formal, but very serious”, the Orlando Goñi School constitutes a successful experience in the construction and circulation of knowledge in the language of tango.

This work aims to characterize the Goñi School as a decolonial experience, based on the analysis of the main features of its genesis process, as well as on the progressive identity and institutionalization by means of precepts and norms, taking as a starting point the conversation with Julián Peralta, one of the founders, teacher, cultural manager and renowned tango musician of the last twenty years.

The present work seeks to analyze the formative models of music educators at the conservatories of Buenos Aires, attentive to a certain difficulty manifested in students and novice graduates for generating significant musical practices in classrooms with a high level of cultural and social diversity. Firstly, ideas of diversity and interculturality in the current contexts marked by globalization, as a figure of a homogeneous world will be discussed. Then, a genealogical tracing of the ancient, but still valid, classical-popular dichotomy, will be coped with, showing that, far from referring to a strictly musical dispute, it drags from its origins an homologation of the classical to the cultured, and from the popular to the vulgar, defined from the paradigm of the Enlightenment in Modern Europe. Thus, it is argued that the construction of an intercultural musical curriculum must necessarily deconstruct these models, in order to reconstruct them in permanent dialogue between historical traditions, situated traditions and the multiplicity of current musical experiences.

Musical notation appears as a problematic aspect in the debate about the forms of coloniality of knowledge. It is often seen as an instrument of domination because it imposes itself as a mode of representation for music coming from oral tradition, which finds innumerable limitations in the notation for its record. The epistemology of musical notation that is questioned here as hegemonic is that which: (i) limits its possibilities to academic repertoire; (ii) warns about its (in)ability to register other music; (iii) limits and reduces its function to that of a register; (iv) encourages the development of reading skills in particular; and (v) assumes the activity of reading as decoding and writing as codifying with its concomitant pedagogy. This epistemology entails a Eurocentric perspective of musical notation that has colonized music education, naturalizing not only in the fields of musical training, but also in ordinary life.

In this article we propose to question that epistemology, providing empirical evidence and arguments that allow us to estimate alternative assumptions for thinking about musical notation as a system of representation, with the consequent decolonial possibilities that this implies.

This paper discusses the musical epistemology concomitant with an ontology of music centred on music as an object, both foundations of the hegemonic musical theoretical/pedagogical model: the conservatory model. In particular, it is proposed to investigate the scope and limitations of some of the categories derived from the privileged object-text of this ontology: the score, and its incidence in the processes of musical significance in which early undergraduate students participate. In this direction, it is intended to show how these musical epistemology and ontology deal only with partial aspects of the musical experience, while at the same time making others invisible or subordinate. Finally, it tries to highlight other ontologies of music, such as action and participation.

This research and discussion is based on the analysis of a classroom experience led by the author, with support in the ideas of pedagogy of potency, non-parametral didactics and Bonsai pedagogy by Estela Quintar and Hugo Zemelman and Coloniality of Power, Being and Knowledge proper to the decolonial perspective.

This article seeks to answer the influence of the coloniality of knowledge, the cleansing of blood and the hybris of the zero ground in the conception of the theory and musical analysis which is taught in our Latin American universities. The aim is to examine the survival of coloniality in the imaginary of musical theory and analysis in order to recognize the predominant hegemonic discourses and propose some options to decolonize these disciplines of professional music education. The rationale is based on the presentation of some concepts of decolonial studies, research on the conservatory model and the ideology of theory and analysis.

The article is divided into three parts. In the first one, an approximation is made to the concept of coloniality and its categories. The second takes the categories to review the ideology of the chosen fields of musical knowledge and the third proposes some options to decolonize our conceptions in higher education.

This article aims to make visible the relationship between the exploitation of tonewoods in the Global South and the acquisition strategy of stringed musical instruments rubbed and pulsed for El Sistema Nacional de Coros y Orquestas Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela (from now on, El Sistema) since 2007. This is the period in which this programme began to receive a great deal of national and international funding, with a view to including one million youngsters in the programme by 2019. The nature of this study is documentary, as it involves the application of content analysis to the acquisition plans of Fundamusical (the El Sistema's governing body). In addition, a correlation was made between this strategy for the acquisition of musical instruments and the information provided by environmentalists who demand an unprecedented deforestation in the Global South, in which Chinese companies position themselves as the world's leading importers of musical instruments and importers of tonewoods. Finally, it is evident that behind the rhetoric of social welfare, scenarios of environmental injustice continue to be reproduced to supply instruments to El Sistema. The decolonization of such practices must incorporate an ecological epistemology that allows us to trace the reciprocal influence between the Cartesian anthropocentric vision of music education and its impact on the current socio-environmental crisis.