About historical dance music and the possibilities of studying it in children's music schools

Abstract

An indispensable aspect of musical education, beginning with its school stage, is the mastery of the very "language" of music with its specific possibilities. In the process of this mastery greater attention must be bestowed on the genre-related means of music, since genres, as a rule, are distinguished by a high level of inner correlation of stylistic and content-based features. The language of music possesses broad and continuously renewable funds of genre-related "vocabulary" the wealth of which is stipulated not only by the genre-related diversity of music per se, but also by the variety of the forms of manifestation of the aspect of gerne in musical compositions. An indispensable basis of the genre-related approach is the familiarization with the genres themselves and the ability to recognize them directly. Through the prism of "genre foundations" all the other sides of the art of music acquire features of living reality and contrast of language in the perception of children. In the article the given thesis is disclosed on the example of mastery of the "vocabulary" of historical dance music (from the Renaissance and Baroque periods). A methodology for creative and genre-related practical work, adapted for the elementary level of education, is proposed, at the core of which is a pragmatic approach to musical "models": however, the principles of this methodology are also applicable in the context of historically oriented disciplines of high-school and higher educational levels, especially in studies of musical performance.