Is it possible to formulate and to envision a Musical Education for Peace and the Respect for Human Rights?

First, we should remember that an Education for Peace and Human Rights is an education that concerns itself with values. It is an education aimed at the development of critical subjects, i.e. subjects capable of understanding, facing, and solving conflicts, who have the ability to understand the problems of their times and of their community, sensitive subjects who are respectful of both cultural and racial differences, willing to understand the changes and the new proposals generated by their community, group, and time, subjects endowed with the judgement that will allow them to accept or reject such changes and proposals on the basis of their judgement, principles, and individual tastes. Finally, such subjects should be able to make decisions that will foster the development of a fairer and more equitable society. This education should encourage the formation of more humanising thought which can provide learners with the tools to develop critical thinking. Such critical thinking should contribute to channel discontent and dissatisfaction into change-oriented action.

Within this turn-of-the-century culture in which the hegemonic model fosters individualism, mercantilism in social relations, competition, and an ethical “anything goes”, it is absolutely necessary to assume our responsibility in the formation of critical subjects and to become aware of our potential to work in the classroom in the formation of such values as co-operation, solidarity, acknowledging of differences, respect, dignity, free expression, etc..

Whoever has been educated in these values and developed sensibility to them, has the natural ability to acknowledge Human Rights and to defend them. As pointed out by the Instituto Interamericano de Derechos Humanos de San José de Costa Rica, " The task here is to start building (in a collective and historically progressive task) a new vision of the person and of relationships between people based on dignity and such rights as are inherent to them as human beings ".

Is it possible then to articulate Musical Education with these values? Education for Peace and the Respect for Human Rights is a teaching style, a way to approach knowledge, to generate educational practices that aim at the development of values implied in those rights, that can be observed in the perception processes involved when a music work is to be known. Let us now go deeper into the observation of such processes.

When we undertake the study of a music work, we start by teaching how to perceive each one of the parameters that make up musical discourse: rhythm, theme ideas, pitch relationships (key code), texture, instrumentation. These parameters make up the syntax, thus building the form. Such constitution of form, such musical discourse is produced in time, the supporting framework of such discourse. However, the flow of musical ideas and the combination of the parameters mentioned before, bring about the appearance in our perception of a set of ambiguities that can not always be explained by a single answer. This gives rise to the challenge of finding and recognising an element acting as a sign that might solve the situation.

Students individually build a model of the form in which they perceive and, since the essence of the work of art is ambiguous and many-sided, various responses might be generated at the moment of analysing it, especially in a group class. Students discover, at this point, opinions other than, but as valid as, their own, and are faced with the conflict of making a decision. This generates anxiety, uneasiness, a desire to cling to the already known, and a need to obtain guaranteed answers. They find it necessary to reflect upon themselves, to rid themselves of limiting structures, and to listen to the flow of musical ideas without prejudice, to exercise their own perception, to observe it and describe it carefully, giving grounds for their decisions. The same conflicts appear at the moment of musical production, of the group creation of a piece. Teachers face the music piece with the same query. They need a high degree of tolerance of other people’s opinions, reflection on their own perceptions and on the theoretical tools they use as grounds for their answers.

It is evident that there is a relationship between the above stated principles regarding the meaning of Education for Human Rights and Peace, and the cognitive processes at play in facing a musical piece and a work of art in general. Besides, music teachers habitually use a very wide repertory for their classroom activities, one that has been selected to include different styles, historical moments and cultures. It is through these that it is possible to access the knowledge of musical expressions different from the ones usually dealt with. Approaching a new music piece from a technical point of view allows students to become acquainted with repertories that draw them close to other cultures, other manners of thought. Otherwise, they might not have come into contact with them, out of prejudice.

Finally, quoting Henry Raynor , we know music is not written in a vacuum, nor does it exist in one. Composers, whether they like it or not, live within a certain relationship with their time and their community. When we follow the path along which a given language has developed, going into the understanding of the syntax of music, the use of certain instruments, the texture, the principles of composition in general, we are, in fact, going into the language, the aesthetic and ethical principles of a certain time that includes a given ideology and a given social organisation. Art manifests, with its own means, a time, a society with its contradictions and similarities, its principles and its new proposals.

The musical work is influenced by what is going on in the world, by political and religious beliefs; it has therefore its own part in the development of ideas.When Human Rights in their wide sense, consider the setting of value on both occidental and non occidental perspectives, such statement of values might be re-written from the point of view of music as follows: the setting of value on other aesthetic propositions and other musical languages that put forth the ideas, the languages of different times, societies, or communities.

Musical Education for Human Rights, as well as General Education for Human Rights, goes much further than the knowledge of the declarations that set them forth, the remembering them on the day of their anniversary, the drawing of white pigeons to decorate the classroom. It means a complex process of formation in which concepts, procedures, and attitudes come together in the building of a future citizen that is able to recognise what is new and will not be afraid to face it, that is aware that something new need not be alien , but something that can be learnt, known, assimilated, and incorporated, a citizen that will not be afraid of knowing it and understanding it, and will therefore be in a position to fight for a fairer and more equitable society, from the standpoint of the respect for liberty, dignity, and Human Rights.

This road, where saying and doing meet and feed each other back, where ideology finds a form of real praxis in the classroom, where expert teachers do not separate “music” from “pedagogy”, and “ideology”, is not a closed, dead-end way. On the contrary, it is beginning to take shape, inviting all those who find that there are points of agreement between this proposition and their ideas, to discuss and participate.


Alicia Campastro ( acampastro@arnet.com.ar ) et Silvia Carabetta ( silviacarabetta@topmai.com.ar ) sont respectivement…….

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