Music and formation: the "musical"

Authors

  • Giorgio Monari La Sapienza Università di Roma

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17421/2498-9746-05-02

Keywords:

music, musical, voice, representation, formation

Abstract

The role played by the “musical” —as a quality— in the formative process of persons is today as much up-to-date as in the past. In order to acknowledge it better, it is necessary to focus on what the “musical” should be in a time when we see an unprecedented presence of “music”, but one mostly incarnated by multiple new opportunities to enjoy it in a just passive way. We should keep it as a sign of “reproduction” prevailing over “representation”, and of triumphant “aesthesic”: it all seems very unfavourable to any human and personal formative process. On the contrary, an active musical praxis of “making” music and “listening” can make the very human longing for the “musical” —i.e., the “harmonious”— and for “music” emerge today as Augustin’s scientia bene modulandi (the science of “doing well”). It should emerge as tension onto the urgency of “representing” and “self-representing”, which puts in-tensely body, soul, and spirit into play, and makes itself a reflection of the Eternal Light on the path to identity, and to becoming subject, man and person, in a life of harmonious relationship with him/herself, and with the human community, the creation and God. That should be today the contribution of musical activity in formative processes, since infancy and until the adult age, under the guidance of competent professionals, who should be conscientious and well prepared for developing the artistic use of the voice, and of the moving body, in its many personal and communitarian articulations and dimensions.

Published

2021-05-04

Issue

Section

Art and beauty in human formation