Music, language, and aesthetic education: a study from a dialogical perspective ^{1 2 3}

Abstract

This article aimed to explore the relationships between music, language, and aesthetic training, pointing out methodological implications for contemporary music education. It presents reflections that enable the elaboration of a theoretical-practical contribution from philosophical foundations for music as a language, which makes it possible to sustain the nature and value of musical education as an aesthetic training in basic education. To establish the proposed dialogues, the paper is based on the theoretical conceptions of Bakhtin and the Circle, a group of Russian intellectuals whose work and thought currently have a vast spiral of potential for research in human sciences. The article presents possibilities for music education based on students’ musical experiences.

Keywords
Music education; Basic education; Aesthetic education; Bakhtin and the Circle

Resumo

O objetivo deste ensaio é explorar relações entre música, linguagem e formação estética, ampliando possibilidades metodológicas para a educação musical na contemporaneidade. Apresenta reflexões que viabilizam a elaboração de um aporte teórico-prático a partir de fundamentos filosóficos para a música como linguagem, os quais possibilitam sustentar a natureza e o valor da educação musical como formação estética na educação básica. Para estabelecer os diálogos a que se propõe, o trabalho se sustenta nas concepções teóricas de Bakhtin e o Círculo, grupo de intelectuais russos cuja obra e pensamento possuem hoje um vasto espiral de potencialidades para a pesquisa em ciências humanas. O ensaio apresenta possibilidades para a educação musical a partir das experiências musicais dos estudantes.

Palavras-chave
educação musical; educação básica; educação estética; Bakhtin e o Círculo

Introduction

[...] there is a huge need to understand music and the processes of teaching and learning this art. Until its real role is discovered, until each individual, and society as a whole, becomes convinced that it is a necessary part of human culture, not a peripheral part.

(Fonterrada, 2003, p.12)

There are many ways to think about music education – for example, the application of musicalization methods, such as the established active methods that emerged in the early twentieth century, developed by Dalcroze, Kodaly, Orff, Willems, and Suzuki. These methods aimed at the active participation of students in musical processes developed in the classroom. Another relates to valuing instrumental techniques used in conservatories and specialized music schools. In addition, musical education can also be proposed, prioritizing epistemological conceptions of music. In any case, it is necessary to consider the spheres of production and enunciative-discursive circulation in which musical education will take place, such as conservatories, music schools, basic education, etc.

In this essay, we will deepen the reflections concerning music education in basic education to explore the relationships between music, language, and aesthetic training, supported by the theoretical conceptions of Bakhtin and the Circle. Such reflections also enable the elaboration of a theoretical-practical contribution based on a philosophical-aesthetic framework for music, which makes it possible to sustain the nature and value of music education in basic education.

According to Fonterada (2003), the philosophical framework of a given area allows us to understand what its space is before other areas of knowledge, as well as its impact on society due to what it has to offer, by elucidating its objectives, goals, and references that can be shared with other areas. For the author, “it is from this that new ideas can emerge and become appropriate, beneficial, and meaningful practices” (p. 11).

Our adherence to such an epistemological point of view is because we believe that more relevant than the application of a specific method or the teaching of instrumental technique for music education in basic education would be the reflection and adoption, by the teacher, of a music epistemology. It is vital to remember that there are many possibilities to conceive this nature of music: either through phenomenology or through its consideration as a game, among others; our choice is to consider music as a language phenomenon.

We support the idea that an epistemological approach to music can contribute to autonomy in the training of music teachers. In the same direction, Del Ben (2003) proposes and adds reflections on the training of the music teacher, who should be concerned with overcoming the “transmission” of contents and methodologies to be “applied” by the future music teacher.

To establish relationships between music and language, we rely on the work of Bakhtin and the Circle, whose vision of language, literature, and the world expands and includes, beyond the field of letters, the universe of arts and artistic production in its different features and dimensions. To explore the concept of aesthetic training in music education, we use authors such as Icle and Pereira (2020), Fior and Silva (2020), Paviani (2011), and Ingold (2010), among others.

Thus, the text consists of three sections: the first brings reflections on possible epistemological conceptions of music, emphasizing it as a language and relying on the dialogical conception of language developed by Bakhtin and the Circle. The next section presents music education as aesthetic training, to the detriment of technical training, the transmission of skills. The third section stems from adopting the concept of music as a language, which expands the possibilities of methodological itineraries for teaching music. The last section considers the centrality of the body in cognitive processes, including music education.

Music and(is) language(?)

Throughout his work, Bakhtin and his Circle have thrown into the world of a language other possibilities for thinking language, society, and human activity. Some of them came from the need to expand what Saussure had already discussed, especially regarding the structuralism that emerged at that time, which represented, in some aspects, the idea of language as a (semi-)closed system unrelated to ideological values (Macedo, 2009). The notion of language, for Bakhtinian thought, was defended, then, not as an abstract object but as a social activity, founded on the needs of communication so that its nature would be essentially dialogical and not synchronic. Bakhtin privileges enunciation as a reality of language, stating that “linguistic matter is only one part of the enunciation; there is also another part, non-verbal, that corresponds to the context of communication” (Brandão, 1995, p. 9, cited by Macedo, 2009, p. 4).

For Bakhtin and the Circle, the human being is defined by language. That is, all spheres of human activity, in their various forms, are always related to the use of language. Human activity, in turn, is understood as an “act” with the character of the action. Thus, thinking is an action; listening is an action, and verbalizing is an action. And this “act” is composed of two natures: it is “responsible” and “responsive.” Responsible in the sense that there is no alibi for our acts, but responsibility and responsiveness in the sense of response since every act promotes a response from the interlocutor (Bakhtin, 2010).

In this perspective, language is conceived as social interaction in which the other plays a fundamental role in the constitution of meaning. Developing a dialogical conception of language, Bakhtin considered that human being, through otherness, is constituted by their social relations. That is, they are constituted by the other, and they constitute the other. Let us examine:

The very being of man (internal and external) is deeper conviviality. To be means to live together. ... Being means being for the other and, through him, for oneself. Man does not have a sovereign interior territory, he is all and always on the border, looking into himself he looks at the other in the eyes or with the eyes of the other.

(Bakhtin, 2011, p. 341 [emphasis added])

Thus, the use of language is due to the social phenomenon of verbal interaction conducted through statements. This idea leads us to the concept of a Concrete Statement. According to Brait (2017), the statement is conceived by Bakhtin and the Circle as a unit of communication or unit of meaning, necessarily contextualized. The statement is unique and unrepeatable within specific situations since its extralinguistic character, and the context in which it was produced must be considered essential for understanding. The statement has the character of “eventiveness”; it never repeats itself.

Thus, the use of language is conducted in the form of concrete statements stated by the members of a specific field of human activity. The specificities and purposes of these communication fields will determine both the thematic content and the style and, finally, the compositional construction of the statement.

According to Brait (2017), the performance of a statement is, in fact, a historical event, as something that did not exist before speaking and that will not exist afterward. Therefore, the enunciation is the process that produces the statement, and leaves marks of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and otherness, characterizing the language in use. In addition, the author states:

The notions statement/enunciation have a central role in the conception of language that governs Bakhtinian thought precisely because language is conceived from a historical, cultural, and social point of view that includes, for understanding and analysis, effective communication, and the subjects and discourse involved in it.

(Brait, 2017, p. 65)

In the work The word in life and the word in poetry, attributed to Volochinov (2019), the term statement relates to verbal discourse. According to the author, this emerges from an extraverbal pragmatic situation, maintaining the closest possible connection with this situation to the point that we cannot divorce the discourse from it so as not to lose its meaning.

According to Volochinov (2019), the potentialities, including the artistic form, are embedded in the bases of the statement of the speech of life and everyday actions. As stated above, the statement directly links to the context in which it was produced, called by the author “extraverbal context”, composed of three aspects: “1) the common spatial horizon of speakers (the unity of the visible: the bedroom, the window, etc.); 2) knowledge and understanding of the situation common to both; and ultimately 3) common assessment of this situation” (Volochinov, 2019, p. 118 [emphasis added]).

On the whole, they constitute what the author defines as the presumed part of the statement, or else the spatial and ideational horizon shared by the speakers. Therefore, when we produce a statement – whether written or oral – in everyday life, we always do so by directing it to a listener with the strength of determination about the statement.

In the same way that we know its spatial horizon, we know in which physical context the object of the statement and the listener are inserted. Because of this, we presume this receiver’s knowledge and understanding of the situation and their assessment of it. Thus, we selected and adapted the necessary resources for preparing the statement, adapting both the thematic content, style, and form so that active understanding occurs in this listener. Consequently, a concrete statement comprises two parts: the part perceived or realized in words and the presumed part.

Note that, unlike the statement in life, discourse in art does not have all the resources of the extraverbal context. Therefore, much more is required of discourse in art, for much that remains outside the statement in life must find sign representation in art; nothing must be left unsaid in a poetic work. But this does not mean that, in art, the speaker, the listener, and the hero come into contact for the first time without knowing anything about each other (Volochinov, 2019). A poetic work is also closely entangled in the non-artistic context. Presumed value judgments play an important role, as these social evaluations organize how they are directly expressed.

According to Volochinov (2019), poetic work is a powerful condenser of social evaluations – every word is saturated with them. Still, regarding value judgments, he states that,

first of all, the evaluations determine the choice of word by the author and the perception of this choice (cochoice) by the listener. The poet chooses words not from the dictionary, but from the life context, where they were segmented and impregnated with evaluations. (p. 131) [emphasis added].

Therefore, we can affirm that these value judgments are responsible for the artistic form, which indirectly interferes even with the content. Thus, it is through the mediation of the artistic form that the creator takes an active position with respect to the content. According to Volochinov (2019), the form must be studied in relation to the content, as its ideological evaluation; and, in relation to the material, as the technical realization of this evaluation.

To conclude this topic, we highlight that, in the search for studies establishing analogies between music and language, we find some authors who do so, although they distance themselves from Bakhtinian dialogical thinking. For example, the studies of Barbeitas (2016); Tinoco and Alexandria (2011); Carlos (2014); Schroeder and Schroeder (2011) manifest other purposes. Barbeitas (2016) contemplates convergences between music and spoken language; Tinoco and Alexandria (2011) and Carlos (2014) discuss the possible dialogical relationship between literature and music, that is, poetry and melody. To defend this approach, Schroeder and Schroeder (2011) establish analogies between music and verbal language, but do not relate it to aesthetic training.

Thus, also aiming at overcoming the “transmission” of content or “applications” of methodologies by the teacher in music, as Del Ben (2003) criticizes, we propose reflections on the epistemology of music, which can provide us with itineraries for its teaching. The conception that best suits our objectives is music as a language. Such a conception can lead us to another convergence: musical education with aesthetic training.

Aesthetic music education

For aesthetics as a science, the work of art presents itself, of course, as an object of knowledge, but this cognitive attitude towards the work has a secondary character since the first attitude must be purely artistic.

(Bakhtin, 2014, pp. 21-22)

The ethical act somewhat differs from the pre-existing reality of knowledge and aesthetic vision. This relationship is usually expressed as the relation of duty to reality.

(Bakhtin, 2014, p. 32)

Agreeing with the perspective of theoretical confrontation on aesthetics discussed by Bakhtin (2014), we share with Fonterrada (2003), an important Brazilian music educator, the arguments that support the importance of a philosophical reflection to guide choices and attitudes in music education, as well as to understand, among other issues, the place and reasons that justify its presence in the school.

According to the author, in the second half of the twentieth century, a theoretical turn defended musical education based on aesthetic quality. North America featured prominently in this defense, as in 1958, the National Society for the Study of Public Education provided directions for a philosophy of education. The ideas produced at the time influenced music education in several countries, including Brazil. It is also important to highlight that, in the 1970s, the controversy between “utilitarian” educators and “philosophers” emerged: the former focused on the organization of practice in the classroom, in pedagogical procedures, curriculum, and musical contents, and the latter prioritized reflection on practice, emphasizing the evaluative aspects and seeking to determine the nature and value of music and music education. (Fonterada, 2003, p. 104)

One of these philosophers that stands out is the American Bennet Reimer, who in 1970 published the work A Philosophy of Music Education. Mendonça (2009) points out that, for Reimer, the valorization of musical education requires the construction of a philosophy that guides the work of the music educator. A justification for this philosophical framework would be precisely the aesthetic approach to music. For him, aesthetic education would be the “Education of Meaning”, and for this, the musical educator should offer conditions to feel it, that is, value the expressive power of music, called by him “oriented expressiveness”. Nevertheless, at the same time, they should focus on raising awareness of elements of music, namely melody, harmony, and rhythm. This materiality (the musical elements) will provide expressiveness, providing insights into human feeling, which he called “sensitive formalism.”

However, according to Fonterrada (2003), Reimer does not recognize music as a language. He describes a series of arguments demonstrating how the creative process distances itself from the communicative and, therefore, from language. For him, in the communication process, there is a unidirectional relationship between the sender and the receiver of the message, and good communication only occurs if the sender and receiver are aware of a code, a condition by which it would occur in a clear, objective, stable, and monodirectional way. In the creative process, Reimer states that the sender does not start from a precise idea, but from an impulse; in this process, the message is not completed before issuance. This impulse is, for him, a “germinal idea” and evolves through attempts until it reaches full realization, that is, the work of art. Hence, the creative process is subjective, dynamic, and multidirectional. Thus, the student’s aesthetic experience, for Reimer, is focused on musical listening to the detriment of practice.

Another prominent author is David Elliott, a disciple of Reimer, who, in his work Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (1995), opposes his master because he argues that the term “aesthetics” suggests mere contemplation, not “action.” Elliott refutes the idea of music as a specific representation of human feelings, as it depends on practice. He also points out that aesthetics is not synonymous with the Philosophy of Art. He also states that during aesthetic perception, listeners perceive and respond only to aesthetic qualities. Consequently, there is no connection between sounds and other human areas besides the homogeneity of musical diversity (Borges, 2007).

According to Elliott (Fonterrada, 2003), musicality and listening constitute two sides of the same coin because the knowledge required for effective listening is the same as that required by musical practice. Thus, listening is also a type of music making because, in the activity of listening, the listener builds music internally, which makes it a non-pre-existing object, but the result of interpretation.

Thus, Reimer and Elliott agree that music is cognition, but Reimer argues that an aesthetic route must achieve such cognition. Elliott claims that such a route is praxial, centered on musical practice. Given this approach, Fonterrada (2003) points out that art and aesthetics are insufficiently discussed among these musical educators.

Following this evaluation, we present the concept of aesthetic experience based on the text by Fior and Silva (2020), which clarify that the word “aesthetics” refers to “the one who notices, who perceives”, that is, it is the ability to sensorially, emotionally, and intellectually perceive. In other words, aesthetic experience is affected by the senses, only to be materialized later. And it is not restricted only to the subjectivity of students, as they share these sensations, emotions, experiences, and knowledge through the aesthetic narrative. According to the authors, “each time the student goes through an aesthetic experience, the teacher is sensitizing this apparatus of sensory and emotional perception, as well as intellectual” (p. 35).

The term “aesthetic experience” may, in this perspective, gain significant reinforcement from the moment we come to recognize aesthetics as “an unexpected interruption in the flow of daily life” (Gumbrecht, 2010, p. 55). This meaning thus refers to the manifestation of a feeling that goes beyond both the dimensions and concepts from which we face the world and life. The multiple characters of the approach developed by Grumbrecht distances, then, the notion of aesthetics from its meaning erroneously linked to the beautiful and/or splendid. This contributes to the reflections of this essay since it is in the relationships between the subjects and their ways of experiencing the dialogue between music and education that the focus of this study is. We agree with Bakhtin (2014), for whom “aesthetic analysis should not be directly oriented on the work in its sensitive reality, and ordered only by consciousness, but on what the work represents for the aesthetic activity of the artist and the viewer, oriented on it” (p. 22).

Adding, Icle and Pereira (2020) discuss appropriating the concepts of aesthetics and poetics in academic research conducted in the sphere of Education, with themes related to Aesthetic Education. The authors point out that in these studies, the aesthetic qualities and poetic potentialities have been employed without the necessary deepening – or else, they are approached prominently, as if the aesthetic were reserved only for the recipient of the aesthetic work. The poetic is destined only for the artist who produced the work.

Thus, in the following proposal, we defend the concepts of aesthetic and poetic in an integrated way, establishing a conception that aims to support musical aesthetic education. With this, we hope to overcome the conception of aesthetic training as a mere refinement of aesthetic sensitivity or even as a transmission of refined aesthetic codes. Now, if aesthetic training consisted only of this, we would be talking about the training of art contemplators. However, we believe that such training goes much further.

According to Icle and Pereira (2020), a considerable share of studies in the educational field with research related to aesthetic education “takes as a starting point the experience of fruition of works of art, understood as the main dynamo (and sometimes the only one) of a formative process understood as an engine of refinement of ‘aesthetic sensitivity’ ” (p. 197).

Based on Paviani (2011), we also relate aesthetic education to the education of the body because, according to the author, body and language are the same in a certain aspect. The subjects are constituted from the education of their body and, simultaneously, from linguistic education, according to the author’s words:

to be able to understand these statements, it is necessary, first of all, to turn the thought to the enigma of the body, to the body as expression, to the body as an element that unveils human knowledge and is the means of an explosion of self-consciousness in the world. There are multiple accesses to the body, from Biology to Psychology; however, it is in art that perhaps one of the deepest understandings of the relationships between the body and language manifest. (p. 2)

Therefore, it is evident that, when dealing with aesthetic education, we are addressing the education of the body. As stated above, the author defends art as a sphere of manifestation of effective relationships between the body and language. For dance, singing, painting, music, and other forms of language, at every moment, in a continuous process, seek to surpass their own limits. Still, Paviani (2011) argues that the language of the body and the body of language are simultaneously subjects and objects of education. In other words, the body and language cannot be considered means of education, but rather ends of education. But what can a body do?

It is the great question raised by Spinoza and rescued by Mossi (2015), according to which learning would be, before receiving something ready addressed to the mind, to build another body, a new body with the object seized. But what kind of body are we interested in building through education?

a docile, useful, disciplined, literate body, capable of following and repeating pre-formulated patterns ..., or ... a schizoid body, body of forgetfulness, machinic body, connected to all sorts of other bodies, in which none is the center of processes. A polyphonic body that is made, remade, and made in the anthropophagy of other bodies.

(Mossi, 2015, p.1543)

In this excerpt, two antagonistic ideas of bodies are clearly perceived, which we relate to the idea defended in this essay, that of musical aesthetic education. But what body are we interested in building with aesthetic training? A docile, useful, and literate body, capable of deciphering sophisticated codes, or a polyphonic body, which “is remade and made in the anthropophagy of other bodies [...]”? (Mossi, 2015, p. 1543).

To answer this question, we turn to Ingold (2010) in his text, From the transmission of representations to the education of attention, which suggests the idea of education of attention, defining it not as a transmission of representations, but a matter of “copy”. Copying, for him, is not about automatically transcribing mental content from one head to another but rather about following what other people do, involving a mix of mimicry and improvisation. In this sense, the learning process by directed rediscovery is transmitted more correctly by the notion of showing.

Still, Ingold (2010, citing Gatewood, 1985) suggests that “instead of talking about ideas, concepts, categories, and links, we should think about flows, contours, intensities, and resonances” (p. 216). In other words, we must think of knowledge not as a static object, ready, finalized and detached from the context in which it arose, but as a movement or itinerary capable of mobilizing and modifying the body of those who copied, improvised, experienced, apprehended, and transformed.

Considering the education of attention proposed by Timothy Ingold, we believe that pedagogical practice should be elaborated in such a way as to provide flow experiences, which, for Williges (2018), are experiences of integration between individual and action, a type of action in which mind and world integrate as if nullifying the usual perspectives of distance and exteriority adopted by the restless mind, which judges “from outside” what we experience.

For this, such flow experience requires presence, corporeality, and sensoryity, which requires living the present. It would be a type of cognition deeply dependent on how the body interacts with the environment. Thus, it is up to the educator to transform the classroom in this environment, where students are offered the possibility of experiencing, through their body, sensory experiences – corporeal – with their object of study: the curricular content. Thus, these present bodies, by relating to the environment – in this case, musical – through actions and “copies”, are transformed, and new bodies are formed through this interaction, through the flow experience.

Exposing the arguments supporting the importance of philosophical thinking to guide choices and attitudes in music education, as well as to understand, among other issues, the place and reasons justifying their presence in school, we present methodological possibilities below the defense of music education by aesthetic bias.

Methodological⁴ (cor)possibilities

Given the considerations pointed out in the previous topics, in which we defend music teaching through an aesthetic bias, we can affirm that a certain musical work, understood as a concrete statement, is unique and contextualized. To understand it, it is not enough to analyze only its musical elements expressed in a score, for example. It is necessary to investigate when, where, who composed it, and, above all, for whom this musical work was composed. After all, sound structures result from selecting material resources conducted by the composer, such as tonality, rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic elements. In this case, this selection is based on the value judgments of a particular social group in which this musical statement was produced. The composer considers its presumed receiver. That is, the thematic content, style, and compositional construction are determined and influenced by it, so this musical work reaches, communicates, produces senses, and causes a responsive attitude in its listener.

As said, such an epistemological conception of music as language expands methodological possibilities for pedagogical practice, which will take as its starting point the musical work itself, to unravel it then and reach the different levels of musical understanding, such as: Materials, Expression, Form, and Value (Swanwick, cited by Grossi, 2004). As for the responses directed to Materials, people relate sound to the sound source, “sensory”, then “manipulate” the materials, transforming sensory pleasure into exploration and willingness to control the materials. Concerning the Expression dimension, it appears first in a “personal” way, associated with feelings, moving to the “vernacular”, recognizing that music is narrated in terms of musical conventions, such as sentences and metrical organization. Within the Form dimension, students begin to “speculate” about possible relationships between events, associating the forms with the language or musical vocabulary, “idiomatic”. Finally, form and expressive character are unified in coherent and musical statements in Value.

Similar to this musical understanding, we relate to what Schroeder (2009) explains about how children acquire language: their first contact is with the concreteness of language, that is, children are immersed in the concrete system at the discursive level, which will allow them, later, to appropriate the other abstract systems – phonological, syntactic, and semantic. In the same direction, Lock (1980, referred to by Ingold, 2010) states that it is not through the transfer of specific syntactic and semantic content that children develop the ability to speak as one speaks in their community. In this sense, language is not acquired. Instead, it is being continuously generated and regenerated in the developmental contexts of children’s involvement in the worlds of speech.

Thus, for this first contact with musical works, we argue that the objective is to encourage students to develop effective listening, as Fonterrada (2003) argues. Such listening would be provided by the aesthetic experience with the musical work, as we maintain that the objective of musical education in basic education is not to train instrumentalists but critical listeners.

That said, we now point out possible theoretical and practical directions for teaching music in basic education, which provides active and transformative musical experiences, passing through reflections on musical genres and highlighting their historical, aesthetic, and cultural aspects.

For this, it is necessary to understand the concept of active experience. According to Dewey (mentioned by Vieira, 2016), “The experience occurs continuously, as the interaction of the living being with environmental conditions is involved in the process of living itself” (p. 115). However, according to the author, Dewey distinguishes a common, everyday, and passive experience from an active intellectual experience because that “surely, is a sufficiently ‘practical’ activity, … with the consistency allowed by circumstances” (p. 115).

On the other hand, an active intellectual experience is constituted by a peculiarity permeating the entire experience: it is delineated by the yearnings for the final outcomes, by the interests encountered along the way, by the conditions that accelerate and delay its advancement, by the feelings to which obstacles can contribute, relating to previous experiences, and culminating in a continuous movement. This is a desirable experience in the school environment.

Therefore, we present the outline of a proposal focused on aesthetic education that enables musicalization from students’ musical experiences. It takes place within the scope of Bakhtinian dialogism, insofar as a stage is constituted from the others, seeking to achieve deeper, representative, and relational meanings as a result of each of the stages; that is, what was expressed in a stage is related to what was experienced before and what will come after.

The proposal is divided into five stages, briefly described below.

1. Identification: – musical experiences: identify the musical experiences experienced by students, as well as their tastes and ways of accessing their favorite songs: what do they listen to? What is the way to access this music? Do they listen to it on their phones, in the car, or the family environment? Who chooses? In this stage, the objective is to produce information to understand the students’ relations with music, develop the other stages, contemplate, and adapt the contents to the universe of this audience, to make the aesthetic experience as meaningful as possible.

2. Aesthetic Appreciation – the familiar: this stage translates into the activity of appreciation of the songs mentioned by the students during the previous stage. The objective is to provide an aesthetic experience with familiar musical works to students, as we believe familiarity can facilitate this experience. Here, students will seek meanings provided by sound structures, focusing on musical elements such as melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics, structure, and musical form.

3. Aesthetic Appreciation – the unexplored: consists basically of the same activity performed in the previous stage, but with musical works selected by the educator. The objective is to bring compositions that, perhaps, are not part of this student’s universe but somehow relate to the repertoire already mentioned by students during the previous stages.

4. Aesthetic narrative - the production of meanings: encouraging students, through debates, to express their perceptions, sensations, emotions, experiences, relationships, affections, and senses aroused by the appreciation of musical works, instigating students to establish relationships between both repertoires appreciated.

5. Aesthetic production – artistic making: The fifth stage is focused on textual production, that is, the writing of musical lyrics developed from the idea of musical genres, enabling students to manifest their perceptions, sensations, emotions, experiences, relationships, affections, and senses enunciated in the previous stage. The lyrics can be produced based on the “The fantastic binomial” activity proposed by Gianni Rodari in The Grammar of Fantasy (1982). The activity consists of choosing two words sufficiently foreign to each other, in which the approach takes place unusually, causing unusual situations. According to the author:

   it does not take one electric pole to spark a spark, it takes two. A single word “acts” only when it encounters another that provokes it, which forces it to leave its binary daily life and rediscover itself in new meanings. There is no life where there is no struggle.

   (Rodari, 1982, p. 21)

Therefore, Rodari (1982) argues that, by approaching two “foreign” words chosen at random, we remove them from their everyday context, or, in Bakhtinian terms, we distance both from their fields of production and enunciative-discursive circulation, breaking their meanings and relatively stable meanings, which are called discourse genres. Thus, the “The fantastic binomial” activity can be adapted and applied to the musical education proposed here, with the objective of students creating their own musical lyrics.

Thus, it is expected, through the experience at each stage, a deepening in the aesthetic qualities that the musical work contains, recognizing the importance of the nature of music, noting the relationship of art with life, without limiting only to an intellectual experience of recognition and appreciation of form, nor favoring only the aspects of externality, that is, the search for messages embedded in the non-artistic effects of music.

Final considerations

Returning to the objective of this essay: to explore the relations between music, language, aesthetic formation, and its methodological possibilities for music education in contemporary times, we seek, in the course of the text, to present reflections in order to enable the preparation of a possible theoretical-practical contribution from philosophical frameworks that are configured as arguments to discuss epistemological possibilities to face the theme in education research.

We emphasize that reflecting and defending an epistemological perspective of music is fundamental to music education. The reasons for such a defense is that it provides different implications in this education. The first implication refers to the role of teachers in the classroom: their function is no longer to transmit knowledge, but to assume themselves as mediators between historically elaborated knowledge and students. Thus, it is up to teachers to show, through their own bodies, how it would be possible to relate to this musical knowledge, allowing them the opportunity to “copy” this process. And as a result of this relationship, a new body emerges with the object of apprehended knowledge because, when copying, students improvise, resignify, print their own authorship, and, consequently, produce subjectivities by relating their experiential background with the new object apprehended.

Thus, we also highlight the centrality of the body in cognitive processes, whether in the sphere of music education or the acquisition of verbal language. We argue that education should assume the body as a way of saying because, according to Paviani (2011), “the body as a way of saying can express itself in a silent, contained, felt, suffered, resigned way, as it can manifest itself in an effusive, open, expansive, joyful or sad, exalted way” (p. 5). Thus, it is up to the educator to perceive and read these manifestations, interpreting them as responsive attitudes arising as responses to the pedagogical practice proposed in the classroom.

Another implication would be the methodological paths to be built by teachers themselves. We seek to point out changes in the teacher-student relationship, in the appreciation of the student’s position as a protagonist in the dialogue in the classroom, by bringing their background and musical experiences, thus overcoming pedagogical practices based on utilitarian views of music or instrumental techniques or the fact of conceiving the student as someone who only receives knowledge.

Our choice, in this essay, was to consider possible articulations between music, language, and aesthetic education, as we took this as one of the ways for the expression of subjectivities, the manifestation of affections, the resignification of meanings to occur in the classroom – in short, the production of authorship, whether by the teacher or the student.

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  References correction and bibliographic normalization services: Leda Maria de Souza Freitas Farah [e-mail]
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  Funding: Author (i) - CAPES (PROEX/PPGE-UFPR - Excellence Programs Scores 6 and 7); Author (ii) - CNPq - Research Productivity Grant.
• 4
  The term (cor)possibilities has been used in other studies pointing out theoretical and methodological possibilities in dialogue with issues related to the body, namely: Gonçalves, Koehler, and Gonçalves (2018) and Gonçalves (2020).

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1

Responsible Editor: Silvio Donizetti de Oliveira Gallo https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2221-5160

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  22 May 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  03 Sept 2021
• Reviewed
  12 Apr 2022
• Accepted
  16 June 2022