VIRTUAL: Applying Education
Abstract
The report intends to focus on some particular didactic strategies employed by Leonard Bernstein in his “Young People’s Concerts”: selection of topics; segmentation of the chosen pieces of music; verbalisation of the content; and the way of interacting with the students. The communicative strategy consisted in formulating a direct and captivating verbal text and in carefully calibrating the rhythm and pauses between the moments of dialogue and the listening of musical pieces.
The aim is to offer a lucid and objective analysis, highlighting criticalities and strengths, and above all to offer a hypothesis for the development of these methodologies in today’s classrooms. What can and should be saved from that model? What can no longer be proposed and why? The presentation will start with the exposition and viewing of some very short extracts from the lectures concert, which highlight the above-mentioned aspects. These aspects will be compared with some modern methodologies of music education, within the framework of Edgar Morin’s complexity theory. It will conclude with hypotheses for updating some of the strategies implemented by Bernstein, and considered still valid if modified and developed for the purpose of interdisciplinary, integrated and above all creative and applied teaching.
I am an Associate Professor at the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna. I teach Philosophy and Musical Aesthetics in Bachelors Degree DAMS and History of Music in the Media in Master’s Degree in Music and Theatre Disciplines. To the pedagogy and dissemination of music, the primary field of my research, I dedicated, in addition to various essays and articles, two latest monographs “Storia dell’educazione musicale nella scuola italiana. Dall’Unità ai giorni nostri” (Milan, 2014), “Musica in programma. Quarant’anni di divulgazione musicale in Rai-tv (1954-94)” (Udine, 2020).