Music education should be a priority in schools

The main goal of the appeal to artistic culture is the spiritual and creative formation of personality, building the dignified value consciousness. There are two areas of music education: professional and general.Some people believe that creative disciplines are not needed in the common curriculum. In fact, this is not right. Let’s find out why.

Tasks of the music education

The activity of teachers is aimed at:

• development of culture of feelings, love for music, creative emotional-aesthetic response to works of art;
• acquaintance of pupils with folk, classical, modern music, first of all, with masterpieces of musical art in all the richness of its forms and genres;
• pedagogical management of the process of mastering the musical knowledge in its spiritual connection with life;
• development of musical-creative abilities, skills of students in listening, performing and composing activities;
• development of the need for interaction with highly artistic music;
• purposeful preparation of students for the musical self-education;
• helping a child in realization himself as a person in the process of communicating with music.

The orientation of musical lessons towards the specific components of general education (the experience of emotional-value relations, creative activity, artistic and imaginative knowledge of the world) meets the goals of modern academic science, is based on the principles of humanization of education, its practical orientation and contributes to the creation of a single integrated educational space of a modern school.

The following steps will help to improve this area:

• separation of the moral and aesthetic aspects of music education as the main ones;
• improving the quality of curriculum, overcoming the knowledge-centric approach in building the content of musical disciplines;
• mastering of new technologies of dialogic training by the teachers.

Types of activities at music lessons

Artistic education implies a variety of approaches and ways of instilling creative culture in students. Music should in no case be separated from the life of the child, his inner world, personal experience, surrounding reality.

If in the 19th – early 20th centuries, it was believed that choral singing should become the centerof general musical education, at the end of the 20th century, new positions were revealed.There are three main areas of the musical activity:

1. Performing.
2. Composing.
3. Listening.

Performing

Choral culture is possible at schools when the note takes its place along with the figure and the letter. Choral culture is impossible without teaching musical notation (in an updated methodical version).

The culture of instrumental performing, like the choral art, has proper conditions for development only in classes with a musical-aesthetic orientation. Most children cannot play musical instruments.

Improvisation and composing music

12% of teachers deny this form of work. 56% would include it in the curriculum if they had the appropriate training. 32% believe that it is necessary to do this only in the sphere of additional education. 16% are specially engaged in improvisation and writing music at lessons.

Listening

Listening to music is formally considered a well-developed activity. Teachers can note the successful holding of quizzes with recognizing the studied music. But is the students’ culture really formed? What kind of music does the youth, society in general, prefer to listen?Many pedagogues do not know the answers to these questions. So, much work still needs to be done in this direction.

In addition to the above types of work, students pay much attention to the theory. They study the biographies of famous composers, reflect on what thoughts they wanted to convey through works of art. The topics of written works can be very diverse and sometimes complex. In order to cope with such assignments with dignity, it is better to turn to a reliable assignment writing service.

Relevant trends in the music education

In the modern world, the system of music education is characterized by such features as sociol-cultural conditioning, focus on people. The attention to the human personality and the desire for its diversified development have become more acute. Musical and aesthetic education has proved to be a universal means of overcoming sociocultural problems and contradictions, allowed to achieve inner spiritual balance.

The educational potential of musical art provides the formation of a new type of a human, which is characterized by artistic, aesthetic and social activity. This trend reflects fundamental changes in the sociocultural sphere as a whole. Musical education is a means of activating the spiritual potential of the individual, compensating for the lack of its manifestation in other areas of life.

In aesthetics and art history, the very category of spirituality (borrowed from the religious culture), is understood broadly and indicates belonging to high ideals, purity and beauty. Pious, sublime, secular music (in a narrow sense, liturgical) fulfills the higher calling of soul – to increase love in humanity, becoming a real force of its revival.

A special role is played by the category of beauty. The questions of artistic and musical education in the general school must be solved with the understanding that beauty has the most direct relation not only to the aesthetic, but also the spiritual and moral sphere. The beauty and high purpose of the human are questions of one problem field. Aesthetics and pedagogy are mixed here. Beauty can nurture those aspects of the personality that are associated with the development and realization of its ability to share disinterested love, truth, good, freedom, etc.

Another important point is the study of biographies of outstanding people of history. Such practice most beneficially affects the spiritual and moral education of students. The characters of art itself, although they have an impact, still do not replace the need for real life patterns.

The living content, clothed in figurative form with the help of artistic means at the level of the masterpiece, always absorbs the spiritual and moral position of the master, opens up to contemporaries and descendants in dialogical communication with the work. And beauty is an auxiliary force capable of influencing the feelings, will, and mind of students.