Quem tem medo de Euterpe? Para uma genealogia dos currículos de música em Portugal nos séculos XIX e XX

Abstract

The history of the curriculum has brought some contributions in the sense of thinking the child of the future that the State, through the school institutions, wants and rejects. In this sense, it would be important to establish a discussion about one of the less studied disciplines, Music Education. Instead of articulating this child of the future considering the discipline of Musical Education with the others that make up the curriculum of nursery, primary, secondary education, I propose to articulate it with another curriculum, contained in Conservatory formations and of the Normal School, thus also covering its adult counterpart.Here we find a possibility to understand the power of Euterpe and the ways in which types of people are created with highly differentiated social destinies from the same topical of music education. In Portugal, the State seized vocational music education in 1835. From the formation of the Lisbon Conservatory (1836), a curricular tradition was inaugurated and has remained practically untouched until today. At the same time, other forms of awareness for musical art were created, with different attempts to install music education in primary education during the nineteenth century. Finally, at the end of this century, formation began in normal schools, and consequently in primary schools. At the beginning of the 20th century, initially only for girls, the experience of musical education began in the scope of secondary education. Contrary to what happened in the Conservatory, one did not learn to understand or produce music, but to sing in chorus. During the Estado Novo, this policy was encouraged. In 1968, a policy of democratization began that has been going on until nowadays, replacing choral singing with musical education and finding ways to extend vocational training to more and more people.Thus, I propose a critical-genealogical analysis that seeks to interrogate who was the child of the desired and rejected future and what fear was installed in the successive curricular reforms that covered music and the possibility for the unknown Little Euterpes to come.