La música como simple elemento decorativo del currículo. Planteamientos performativos en Educación Musical

Abstract

It is nothing new to affirm that Music, as a curricular subject, presents a singular fit in the curricula for compulsory education that differentiates it from the rest of the subjects. It seems that it is not known very well what to do with it, so that, in most educational systems, its presence is reduced to the minimum expression. In some others (the case of Spain, for example) it is chosen without much consideration to suppress its mandatory nature, leaving the decision to offer it or not as an option in the hands of the educational centers. As a consequence of this, the initial training of music teachers in the corresponding higher education and research institutions is simultaneously devalued. What to do then, when the time allocated to the Music class has been reduced to a minimum, when the group-class is highly eterogeneous in terms of previous experiences and musical training, when the musical interests of the students are not necessarily coinciding with the curricular prescriptions, when the initial teacher training is conceived exclusively from the perspective of an instrumental virtuosity or an exclusive musicological elitism...? With these and many other adverse premises in which this area of knowledge develops in most Western countries, it is not feasible to continue with a pedagogical discourse that might have been useful in the past, but that hardly offers adequate answers to the complex challenges of the Present. In the light of interesting contributions that have been offered in different areas of knowledge (Deleuze in Philosophy, Bourdieu in Sociology, Fischer-Lichte in Theater, Butler in Queer Theory...), the proposal of a Performative Musical Education (PME) represents an epistemological turn in the educational field, emphasizing the eminently social character as an event of the musical event, along with its consequences.