ST Century Music Composition and Visions for Music Education

A great part of the theoretical and practical field about music composition in the Portuguese classrooms, from the creative music movement to our days, is clearly connected to social constructivism (Vygotsky, 2007) and cultural psychology (Bruner, 1986, 1990, and 1996; Barrett, 2011). These perspectives advocate that mental activities, including creativity, cannot be separated from action, the materials that are being used, and the social and cultural context in which they occur.

It was in this context that Margaret Barrett proposed a definition of music composition “as a meaning-making process that is fundamental to the intellectual, social, and emotional life of the child” (Barrett, 2003, p. 3) consisting in a “dialog between the child as musician and composer, the emerging musical work, the culture that has produced the composer and the emerging work, and the immediate settings in which the transaction takes place” (Barrett, 2003, p. 6). This definition, based on the ways children create meanings from their creative musical activities, is of great significance for Portuguese teachers and researchers, once that, on one side, is focused on the process, and, on the other, reminds us that any evaluation of musical products resulting from music composition activities cannot be separated from the specific context in which they emerged.

Following a theoretical axis based on these perspectives, in 2001, the Portuguese policy makers designed a curriculum model that was named as “National Curriculum for Basic Education: Essential Competencies” (NCBE) (2001). The idea of this document was not to replace the older syllabus inspired in the MMCP, but to be the ground in which this document should be approached.

Music education appeared in the NCBE as a part of artistic education, that was itself organized around four building blocks: creativity, expression and communication, artistic languages, and arts in context. Within this whole, music education was then approached around a series of musical competences, highlighting music as a social practice. These competences were, in turn, also focused on four main building blocks, namely perception, performance, creation, and musical cultures in context, suggesting also different possibilities to relate music with other arts and with other subject matters. Writing about this document Graca Mota stressed that:

It should be noted that the publication, in September 2001, of the Essential Competences of the National Curriculum for Basic Education (Portugal, 2001) contributed to a clarification of the place that music “should assume in the curriculum . . . [embracing] an unequivocal epistemological status regarding its structure and development, in the set of all other disciplines” (Mota, 2014, p. 44). Music composition, included in the block “creation,” was clearly considered as a practice on its own right, that should be promoted and developed by teachers in their classrooms. In fact, not only was creativity one of the building blocks of art education, to which music composition could give an obvious contribution, but the document also contained several practical suggestions to develop music composition in the classroom. These suggestions were not of the “recipe type” Rather, they worked as models to foster the imaginative skills of teachers, to enhance more creative learning contexts and to foster the development of music composition activities and projects.

The philosophy underlying this proposal was highly innovative and in line with contemporary theoretical understandings forecasting music education as a social practice and seeing pupils as active and creative practitioners. In this sense, the NCBE gave professors from universities and colleges a new tool to strengthen those teaching philosophies that emphasized the creative work of pupils. The ideas presented in the NCBE from 2001 were strongly discussed among students and professors in the music education academy, not only in the regular classes but also as part of the numerous short-term training courses and workshops that these institutions offered. As a consequence, many music education teachers began looking at their practices through a different lens, searching for literature about creativity and music composition in the classroom, reflecting on the learning situations they were creating for their pupils, and embracing, as much as possible, this new vision that emphasized creativity and composition as a crucial tenet on the development of music education.

However, in the recent past, and similarly to what happened in many other European countries, Portugal suffered from a major financial and economic crisis, which affected both individual, community, and institutional dimensions of Portuguese lives. This crisis also had a strong and negative impact on the Portuguese education system. In what concerns music education, many ambiguous and negative aspects emerged, concerning not only the place of music education in the Portuguese curriculum but also the role, status, and professional development of music teachers. In 2011, the ministry of education revoked the NCBE, arguing that education should be focused on declarative knowledge and measurable goals, and not on key competences.

The minister added that it was his intention to create a curriculum based on target goals, but the truth is that these goals were never defined to music education. Instead, and at that time, the government proposed again the old syllabuses from 1991 (first and second cycles of education), that are nowadays completely out of date. Most teachers, and especially those graduated after 2001, felt an enormous frustration when the NCBE was revoked. Their education during university or college had been decisively supported by this document and by the theoretical perspectives underpinning it. Therefore, teachers felt disappointed, deceived, and very confused, as the legal documents used since 2011 were in total disagreement with what they had learned.