How to deal with classical music? Music teachers’ thoughts of Western art music as a subject in music education

Abstract

Classical music has traditionally played a crucial role in German music education. Nowadays its importance in contexts of music education has become controversial since the world of music as well as educational concepts have become more diverse. So far there has been little empirical research about either music teachers’ perspectives on classical music or on its role in music education. This paper offers an insight into my doctoral research project focusing on the following questions: How do music teachers regard classical music as a subject for music education and how do they deal with it in schools? After presenting the research process (eight interviews with music teachers in general schooling in Germany, analyzed using the Grounded Theory methodology), provisional results are provided. The interviewees name a wide variety of music educational goals and advantages of integrating classical music into their music lessons; at the same time, however, they all report how unfamiliar many pupils are with this type of music. The teachers develop different strategies for dealing with the pupils’ unfamiliarity with classical music. The unfamiliarity of classical music appears to be the tentative core category in the process of coding and data interpretation. According to these findings, the debate on classical music as a subject in music education could be part of current interor transcultural music pedagogical discussions and (music) pedagogical discourses concerning unfamiliarity.