Music and school in Catalan-speaking lands: influences of the Segarra methodology on its implementation

Abstract

Our concern in this article is music and school. In the twentieth century, around the 70s, there existed already and ambitious legislative framework about the subject in line with the modern conceptions already experienced in other countries in Europe. However, teaching music at schools was not widely implemented in Catalan- speaking regions or in the rest of Spain until well into the 1990s. Even so, in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands the seed of a line of work was then planted and as time went by it became the methodological core of musical training at school by many teachers. The Segarra methodology was disseminated in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands from initiatives and institutions framed in the field of non-formal education. Through the School of Musical Pedagogy-Method Ireneu Segarra, the Musical Pedagogy Courses at the University of the Balearic Islands and Palma School of Music Pedagogy, thousands of active teachers and musicians were given valuable tools to put into practice musical training at school from a new perspective; a new approach that started from its own cultural substratum although it was open to universality and that continues to be used at present. We then analyze these training proposals from different perspectives and from invaluable sources such as the testimony of their forerunners, edited materials or internal documentation belonging to the same institutions.

Key words: Music pedagogy; School of Musical Pedagogy-Method Ireneu Segarra; Music Pedagogy Courses at the University of the Balearic Islands; Palma School of Music Pedagogy.