Music education in Italian schools from the Unification to today

Abstract

This paper examines the main stages in the history of Music Education in the Italian school system, from the Unification up to our day, in order to reconstruct the political-cultural debate around the importance of musical disciplines in the education of citizens. This reconstruction aims at showing how both the technically-oriented idea of teaching that was typical of programmes in the first half of the 20^th century, and the lucid-evasive vision that emerged from the “protest” climate of the 1960s and 1970s, have hindered a serious organization of the epistemological status of the discipline.