THE HISTORICAL AND STYLISTIC APPROACH TO TEACHING MUSICAL-THEORETICAL DISCIPLINES (from the experience of the Music Theory Department at the Ural State Conservatory)

Abstract

The idea of historicizing music-theoretical education has a long tradition in Russian pedagogy, but it began to be implemented in practice during the last decades of the twentieth century. At that time, the Ural Conservatory developed and introduced into the educational process new curricula with a historical and stylistic orientation in a comprehensive course in Music Theory and Solfeggio. This article highlights the principles of constructing these courses, the logic of deploying their content, the main approaches and methods, and also summarizes the long-term experience of teaching them. Each of the programs is presented in several versions, focused on different specialties. Of the two versions of the Music Theory course (for musicologists and for performers), the emphasis is on the latter as the most vividly realizing the key idea — the integration of musical-theoretical disciplines under the auspices of the historical style. The considered samples of Solfeggio programs (among musicologists and among vocalists) differ in the number of academic hours (1 year – 3 years), which allows the course to be organized differently based on the historical and stylistic approach — either synchronously or diachronically. At the end of the article, attention is drawn to the main difficulties encountered in the process of mastering these programs, and the most important results.