The spaces of music and its foundation of values – music teaching and young people's own music experience

Abstract

How do young people experience music today? Can their experience be counted as knowledge? What learning processes do they employ, and what forms of acquisition of knowledge can they participate in? These are among the central questions which arise with regard to educational strategies and quality enhancement at the university colleges of music in Sweden. For it is at these institutions that young people's music teachers receive their own education.

In the world of the young there is no dissection of a subject into fragments, nor are there firm boundaries between subjects. Music is linked to the person and to the interaction with the world around. Young people try it and judge it directly on the basis of their own experience and practical everyday knowledge. When their own experience comes into conflict with the process of acquisition of knowledge offered by (for instance) the school, it is understandable that they will begin to form their own values, their own attitudes, their own practice – values, attitudes and practice which are not to be found within the established institutions.