Musical appraisal in the training in Art Instructors professionals

La apreciación musical en la formación del Instructor de Arte

Elemnia Álvarez Merino[1]

Urbano Félix Machado Gallardo[2]

Elio Hernández Pérez[3]

Abstract

The article addresses the need for students to acquire new knowledge and skills, particularly those related to Artistic Education, and their significance, while taking on ways of behaving, acting and thinking and the real possibilities of its bearer of the competencies to achieve it. The comprehension of text through the analysis of the content of the musical work constitutes an essential element that must master the future graduates to direct with quality the process of teaching learning of the Artistic Education, from the musical appreciation. 

Keywords: Artistic Education, musical works, professional training

  Resumen

El artículo trata la necesidad de que el profesional en formación adquiera, durante el período de estudios, nuevos conocimientos y habilidades, particularmente aquellas relacionadas con la Educación Artística y su significación, mientras que a la vez desarrolla el modo correcto de pensar, de sentir, de actuar y las competencias para desarrollarse en la profesión. Las posibilidades reales de alcanzarlo están vinculadas a la comprensión de textos a través del análisis de contenidos de obras musicales, porque constituyen un elemento esencial a aprender por parte de los futuros graduados, para dirigir con calidad el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje de la Educación Artística, desde apreciación musical. 

Palabras clave: educación artística, obras musicales, formación profesional

Introduction

Jose Martí said that a good song is a good guest, and how the verses last. They last longer than the empires in which they were sung, and that the strongholds that defended the empires, paraphrasing the Cuban National Hero, we assume that today, we have had to live a world full of different sounds, some pleasant and some less pleasant, but the succession of equidistant sounds, is music. The song that has accompanied the man in all moments of his life, which gives pleasure and enjoyment, which represents us contextually with a significance that transports us to different moments and enriches the experience lived with joy or not; It is that song that lasts in our hearts to which Marti refers, the one that identifies us and differentiates us as a social being located in a time-space context (Martí, 1975).

The defense of culture and the preservation of identities are now a challenge. In this context, the degree in Artistic Education has a special mission to guarantee the education of new generations from the earliest ages and the people in general with a correct scientific conception of the world: that of dialectical materialism, to educate a free man and cult, act to participate actively and consciously in the building of socialism, indispensable premise for the preservation of musical identity (Álvarez, 2015).

This expression ponders the importance of culture and within this music, in the education of man (Gamboa, 2019a, b), as an indispensable part of society; It is through his way of acting and in his performance where he demonstrates his knowledge, the values formed and also reflects how he has prepared for life, from a healthy enjoyment. Musical appreciation is a viable way to make this possible.

In order to graduate a professional with a broad profile and high competitiveness in its areas of action, the "E" Study Plan (2017) was approved, which despite advances in all the disciplines that compose it, manifest in the students’ limitations in the musical appreciation, so that it can transmit a set of spiritual values, of aesthetic beauty to its students, through musical works.

In this direction, the musical appreciation in the training of the professionals of the Artistic Education occupies an important place because it responds to the most current conceptions and exigencies that are part of the discipline Artistic Education, being understood as one of its objectives: to appreciate the local musical works, national and universal, taking into account their particularities and links from a chronological approach that facilitates the understanding of artistic culture, and the work of cultural promotion of those who will be carriers in their future profession. It is also in accordance with the evolution of the pedagogical, psychological, and didactical approaches in the different aspects of music teaching/learning (DeCicco, 2019) and assessment best practices to engage higher education faculty in the assessment process, to improve instruction, to guide curricular development, and to ultimately improve student learning (Ward, 2019). This objective, in turn, is concertized in the Music Language Subjects, coinciding fully in the aspiration of the professional model.

Development

To work from the musical appreciation the text in the musical works with the students of the major Artistic Education from their tastes, allows to promote the capacity of appreciation, as well as to develop abilities for the understanding of the same, taking into account the intentions of the composer and the demands of our society. In order to understand music, it is important to know the different aspects that compose it, from its theoretical part to the same story, of how the composer makes use of each and every one of the elements that this gives him, of how the listener accedes and interacts with music.

The perception, the affective valuation and the intellectual awareness of any artistic product form the third link in the chain to which in rare occasions, and still less, in the musical field has been dedicated the due attention. Traditionally and to date, almost all the time and resources used in musical training have been devoted to two aspects of obvious importance, such as musical creation, centered on the figure of the composer and interpretation, centered on the figure of the interpreter.

Instead, the necessary dedication to a third aspect of ultimate transcendence has been avoided in any artistic manifestation. We are referring to the appreciation of the work, which is centered on the listener. Logically, every person who listens becomes a listener. But there are many ways to listen, and in this will intervene factors as important as the attention capacity and musical training of the listener. Many people have a great auditory knowledge of many great works of music, even if they do not know how to read or interpret a score.

In many cases, their opinions and tastes are excellent, but they do not know how to express it in an appropriate language, which can give them a sense of frustration and insecurity that prevents them from communicating their opinions to the musicians. These conversations are often would become a "Tower of Babel" without possibility of understanding. In fact, the lack of a specific, correct and universal language and techniques of composition, although very shallow, constitute a considerable barrier to the full appreciation of a work. Therefore, it would be important to teach these contents in the training of the first-year students of the Artistic Education major in order to carry out their professional work with quality.

It is not excessively strange in the world of the plastic arts, the proposition of some more or less complex notions that help the individuals who begin, say, in painting or sculpture, directed towards the understanding and appreciation of works, as mere recipients of them, although this has never been the fundamental content of teaching (Hemsy, 1989). But even more rarely has this happened with regard to musical works of art. It is a quantitative fact that the transcendence of artistic creations focuses more on the individuals who receive the works than on the authors: there has only been one Juan Sebastian Bach, and there are many of us who have appreciated his works but, unfortunately, many more those who have not been able to capture it in its true artistic magnitude.

Thus, the importance of providing the listener with the necessary tools for the full acquisition of musical works is a necessity, given the superiority of the auditors vis-a-vis the composers and performers, as well as being the third of the great areas that as an inseparable links of the same chain complete the artistic process: composer, interpreter and listener. Hence, students are expected to understand music in an increasingly rich and complex way.

That is why hearing is a propitious vehicle for that purpose. During lessons, students and teachers usually come to the task of identifying instruments, sound qualities or musical functions, based on the certainty that a greater and faster identification will guarantee a better understanding of the stimulus captured. In the case of training future music Art Instructors, we share Smith (2022) thoughts, who beliefs that professional guidance during initial formation is paramount for the future work, centered in the curriculum subjects and their organization. When we translate this thinking to the field of music Art Instructors, although not explicitly, it promotes a covert variant of supposed instrumental virtuosity: auditory virtuosity.

In these cases, in which the recorder ignites with the confidence of producing a state of fascination, or in its defect as a means to differentiate the bassoon from the horn, or the natural sounds of the artificial the student's ear is considered as a neutral without previous records, whose behavior is measured on the basis of the amount of information retained.

According to some authors, the part is a complication of the field and it is born when the attention is directed of variable way on diverse regions of the field, thus, the perceptual field of sound then cannot be characterized as empty amorphous. There is a selection by the subject, who organizes a text: group, separate, hierarchical. The auditor is public and composer at the same time.

In the act of perceiving, and therefore of listening, history, desire, culture, unconscious, experience, norms intervene. These records modulate, condition and impose their limits. Usually less is perceived than what happens. It is necessary to make a distinction between perceiving a work, giving it an immediate, arbitrary, syncretic organization, and to think that same work from the internalization of previous concepts like form, texture, among other aspects.

Music is a construction in which sounds and silences are articulated intentionally. This attribute distinguishes it from other natural or mechanical sound strings. The characterization of sound, texture, rhythm, form and melody, as the most frequent contents in the syllabuses of Language of Music, admit, as we have said, a partial study instance. But the very concept of syntax entails the production of meaning, and not only in the interconnection of the elements, because in their correspondence with the cultural context and with the subject who listens and interprets (Lehman 2010). The universality of formal concepts is permanently counterbalanced by its historical situation. It is enough to think of the function of sound in primitive life, and the role it occupies today.

In turn, the aesthetic paradigms in the teaching of Musical Appreciation, are presented as a linear succession of styles that progressively become from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, then to the Baroque, and so to the present. The alternative of working around the great worldviews of the time, and returning to them from each syntactic structure, allows a gradual approach by the students to the historical contexts and favors the possibility that they carry out a similar process when listening to auditions of their preference.

But what is it to appreciate? To appreciate is to analyze the particular order of creation, establishing that mechanisms trigger the aesthetic experience that the work of art provides. Appreciation is not an exercise that seeks the homogenization of hobbies by one or the other art. On the contrary, appreciation affirms and deepens the aesthetic choice. To appreciate is a task of creative approach that allows us to reaffirm or readjust our preferences by providing criteria to verify the artistic congruence of the works. In appreciation, the subjective criterion of particular tastes plays no role.

What is the difference between liking and appreciating a musical work? Taste is not appreciation. Taste is a personal response that reveals references for subjective reasons. Appreciation pretends within certain limits, to be objective. The three basic operations to appreciate are: analyze, interpret and value, if you want to have an experience with the musical work that does not stay in the trivial. To analyze, it is important to observe, listen or, if necessary, interact with the work. At the same time, it is important to make a description of the constituent elements of the work, from the simplest to the most complex: author, musical genre to which it belongs, tone, air or movement of the work, among other aspects.

But, when interpreting, we must consider the expressive languages of music: sound qualities, elements of music, musical function of the work, analysis of the text. The purpose of valuation is to discover the degree of originality of a work. Every person carries specifications in his or her personality (González, 1982). The viewer, taking into consideration the qualities, likes, dislikes, needs, among other aspects, also has options to appreciate a musical work:

-          Identify and enjoy the aesthetics of its elements of configuration under the principles of harmony, contrast, space, composition, and rhythm.

-          To perceive the possible effects that a work produces in its sensitivity, transforming its taste, its way of perceiving reality, of thinking art, to cite some examples, as perceived by (Alén 2006).

-          Associate the work with any kind of knowledge, experiences, experiences, memories, and other works or expressions in other media, not necessarily artistic. In other words, linking the work with an intimate, personal history, with another objective of references between artistic works (plastic arts, dance, theater, music), and artistic works with other aesthetic manifestations (crafts and designs

-          The enjoyment of a work, can come from unexpected circumstances and details, surprise, beyond any calculation or strategy to approach. Details of its technical realization, of its production, notable changes between a reproduction and the original work, are just some examples of the pleasing surprises that art saves to those who are willing to dedicate time and attention to it.

-          Another way of intensifying the enjoyment of the work is to formulate hypotheses of meanings, meanings and possible effects of the work, and share them with other people, explaining and analyzing them. Looking for differences and consensus to validate our aesthetic judgment.

Although there are now various theoretical positions regarding the nature and construction of musical knowledge, one of the points on which there seems to be a basic agreement is the acceptance that this knowledge and its appropriation imply the necessary confluence of three ways of access or forms of knowledge: the execution, the composition and the auditory perception. The latter includes both the treatment of information at a sensory level and all cognitive processes linked to interpretation.

Such forms of access, which raise particularities in their development, also occur in a necessary interconnection. Thus, musical knowledge does not refer to a particular performance, but to multiple operations in which the experiences of interrelated execution, composition and perception, allow to configure it. The dancer thinks the movement with his body: the plastic hand thinks the work.

When the instrumentalist listens, he puts his whole body into play, in a more general way, by linking each musical twist to the bodily sensations (visual, muscular, tactile) and to the states of concentration or emotion experienced touch. The relationships of grouping, height, duration, meaning, make possible, from musical practice, new records. An aseptic hearing, devoid of the other senses, whose recurrence favors the acquisition of habits that allow to dispense with the instrument, obliterates the transcendence of musical practice. The development of hearing is an essential resource as long as it is articulated in a balanced way with other tools.

It coincides with the supposed that in art it is very difficult to understand when you do not practice it. In reality, few strategies to teach the profession of musician in any of its variables have historically been as effective as those that pose a concrete practice of music as a condition for access to complementary knowledge. From an educative point of view, these considerations renew the formulation of the great didactic pedagogical questions: what, what and how to teach musical knowledge about which we will try to reflect from the look of Musical Appreciation. It is clear that the word is not owned by the master class, as the planning of teaching-learning processes does not occur only within the behavioral model, nor the attention to the subject.

On the other hand, the renewal of didactic strategies also presupposes a permanent revision of the concepts and the technical vocabulary of the subjects. It is still possible to notice that in some official programs, one speaks of metric as synonymous with rhythm, or that in the classes one tries unnecessarily to discover the pulse, still in works conceived from paradigms foreign to proportional metric.

The current reality commits the educational system in the search for critical subjects facing art, attentive to social realities, and capable of not being held in their own subjectivity. This leads to consider the interpretation of musical discourse as a privileged purpose of teaching (Zambrano de León, 2009). Preparing teachers to appreciate musical works requires that they possess texts that name, characterize and contextualize from the universal, Cuban and locality so that they can direct, listen, sing, accompany with an instrument (guitar) or read it musically (Sánchez, 2017). The works that are included for its pedagogical treatment must fulfill certain requirements, according to Álvarez (2015):

-          Texts and music sheets in clear language, with well-delimited compasses, expressed, notes, silences and notes figures in correspondence with the requirements of the year for which they were selected.

-          To promote local musical identity, ethical and aesthetic principles, in accordance with their professional performance.

-          Have endured in time, as evidence of their interpretive quality and musical values, given in the rhythm, melody or content of the texts.

The following is an example of a work representative of the locality that meets the above requirements:

“The anthem of the city of Las Tunas”

Author: José Antonio Miranda (Tony Miranda)

                         Tunas

Your children are forged in the flame

That symbolizes a people who prefer

Burn twice what you want

Before they oppress what they love the most.

Your women Birama flowers

Who keep the tenderness of Guarina

But his head never tilts

When the example of Mercedes claims it.

From El Cornito you went to the Universe

When the soul of the bard was inspired

To immortalize yourself with your verses

That he sang to this land of dreams.

From the mambí you traced your way

That if you have to choose again

For your city, your children, your destiny

Burned before slave prefer

Burned before slave prefer

In understanding texts, one has to take into account their structural elements. Particular attention must be paid to the music of the Hymn, since it is conditioned by the interaction of the different factors that define the characteristics of the society in which it originates and because music, according to Martí (1975), is man escaping from himself, from what he assimilates, transforms and reflects the concrete socio-historical conditions of the period in which music is generated. From this connotation, a process of musical education is necessary in correspondence with the social needs, which constitutes a way to favor the understanding of texts of the students of the degree in Artistic Education.

Within the functions of music, there is hedonistic, communicative, educational, ideological and heuristic for its ability to provoke states of mind, controversy, diversity of criteria. It is necessary to take into account the content of the music since these intervene positively and negatively in the analysis of texts the student forms patterns that depend in their right measure of the teacher's conduction. For example: the work proposed in this work recreates the listener a real story and lived with pride by the people of the state that places them in the very center of rebellion, value and the dispossession of the material when defending the country is about and this story comes to them through music.

The study carried out on the comprehension of texts reveals the breadth of criteria and points of view presented by the different authors in this category. However, there are common points among all those consulted and the steps for this analysis. The analysis carried out for the accomplishment of this work is related to the previous knowledge that the students possess about the history of the locality, of steps to carry out a technical musical analysis, besides a marked vocation for the social work with responsibility, since it must To be able to stimulate action, stimulate, stimulate and orient interests and hobbies, it should foster the exchange between people and contribute to the strengthening of their sense of belonging and local musical identity to contribute to their spiritual enrichment and the elevation of their quality of Life and that of others.

To this end, we suggest presenting works with musical contents that will enable them to be assembled in the different subsystems of education, which will be directed to the preparation of man for life, as an objective of Cuban education, with texts related to patriotism, solidarity, love for nature, family, women and the environment among others. In the case of the instrumental works will be appreciated the rhythm, the beauty of the melody and the harmony.

The school as an institution, must guarantee, in close relation with the family and other cultural institutions, the education of feelings of love, respect and admiration for good music, as an element of its identity. The authors in this regard refer and share the view expressed by Córdova (2011), that music:

-          Presents the peculiarity of being an art that promotes socialization: it associates people by the preference of musical genre and the text of the works.

-          Favors supportive environments for fraternizing with friends and even creating new ones.

-          It is a kind of social bond: it unites groups of people.

-         It becomes an interesting factor of manipulation that facilitates the induction and proliferation of ethical behaviors and values that tend to generalize with a certain speed.

The rapid generalization of ethical behavior and values is achieved through aggression and violence imposed by audiovisual images, bursting the private life of man, his sonic environment, using the verbal threat, intimidation and humiliation.

Involving local music in the daily learning of students, we increase motivation, since we include a point of interest in learning, which encourages their collaboration and their involvement in this process actively (Verdecia 2005), making them participants in their own education and encouraged to feel important people, who have much to say in the teaching-learning process. Why not use it for it?

As well posed by Enrique José Varona, teaching to work is the task of the teacher, to work with the hands, ears, eyes and then and especially with intelligence, to make this expression valid is that teachers and all responsible personnel with education in Cuba should seek ways of solution and a way to achieve it Is the search for information, both bibliographical, as live or digitized sources (Verdecia, 2007).

For the analysis of texts, it is necessary to present to the students first the audition of the work and then write it on the blackboard to make the collective analysis and in the Hymn of the city it is proposed to emphasize the fact and names of figures such as Mercedes, Guarina, El Bardo, to give treatment and to be able to understand it because although it is written literally with a clear and affordable vocabulary it is important to conduct this analysis correctly.

The following results can be highlighted:

-          There was a significant advance in the domain of musical works related to the facts, culture by students (referred to musicians, groups, performers, composers, major works).

-          Students acquired skills such as research, independent work, appreciation of local music, auditory discrimination and work with historical musical documents, for the performance of teaching and outreach activities, as well as raising knowledge about music of the locality.

-          In the class shifts, a sustained motivation could be verified; Became an exchange of experiences and debates, enlivening the interest, by the own (sense of belonging)

-          The knowledge acquired by the students favored the interpersonal relationships between them, with teachers and the community, showing responsibility for the fundamental task in which they are immersed, anxious to learn and show the results of the search, strengthened the sense of belonging, love for cultural traditions, not only motivated to know the musical events, but also aroused the interest to know and master significant dates and important data of other manifestations of art through the research done by themselves.

Conclusions

Art instructors in their double condition of music teachers in the different education levels. In the subject Appreciation Workshops, which is directed to form active spectator public, capable of judging, commenting and valuating, and the final aim of upgrading the potentialities, and musical aptitudes in the students and workshop assistants. On the other hand, teachers in charge of the creative workshops with the aim of teaching Art Instructors how to interpret and appraise art in all its extension, are also responsible of selecting the music art works and the local music bands, taking as a point of departure the requirements proposed to develop appraisal abilities and a local musical identity. The study of the music art works is a tool that favors the integral formation of the Art Instructor of the specialty of Music, not only in an individual way, but also in their didactic performance in the workshops.  

The work proposed favors the analysis and study by teachers and students of the elements of the language that we must use to be able to direct the process of teaching learning and correct communication, for the sake of good words.

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[1] Licenciada en Educación, especialidades Educadora Prescolar y Educación Artística, Doctora en Ciencias Pedagógicas. Profesora Titular. Universidad de Las Tunas, Cuba. E-mail: elem@ult.edu.cu ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2099-6784

[2] Licenciado en Educación, especialidad Máster en Educación. Universidad de Las Tunas, Cuba. E-mail: umachado@ult.edu.cu ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6200-7660

[3] Licenciado en Educación. Especialidad Educación Artística. Máster en Educación. Universidad de Las Tunas, Cuba. Email: elio@ult.edu.cu  ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1822-4371