In this article the work of power through discourse in music education in primary schools in the Netherlands is examined. After introducing the central concepts of culture, practice, discourse, and power, the current dominant musical discourse in the Netherlands is presented as expressed in three nested perspectives: the perspective of music as a specialist domain, the perspective of music as (essentially instrumental) performance, and the perspective of music as Art. Then, a central document in current music educational developments in Dutch primary schools is analyzed. It is demonstrated that specifically the perspectives of music as a specialist domain and (partly) music as (instrumental) performance have a strong presence in the document. The article finishes with calling for more attention to the workings of dominant musical discourse in music pedagogical debates.
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Inleiding op het themanummer over Curious Minds - Kunsteducatie van Cultuur + Educatie, waarin de uitgangspunten van talentkrachtige kunsteducatie worden uiteengezet.
Evert Bisschop Boele explicitly refers to different conceptualizations of culture by describing earlier concepts of culture in education in the Netherlands to explain the proposed logical shift to “idiocultural” music education. Idiocultural music education, according to him, encompasses the fact that each person is highly individual as well as highly social simultaneously, thus, idiocultural music education should take this into account and perceive individuals and social beings with complex and dynamic cultural backgrounds that deserve respect and should be the origin for the individual’s further musical development. Bisschop Boele’s description of earlier concepts of culture connects each concept prior to idioculture, e.g., monocultural, bicultural, multicultural, in five stages with a societal development throughout the last 70 years in the Netherlands. Two different theoretical lenses are applied to theoretically underpin these different conceptualizations of culture.
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