Abstract

In 1989, the issue of the Decree-Law nº26 on January 21^st, 1989 proposed the creation of the professional education as an unprecedented and original experience, not only for Portugal but also for the rest of Europe. This was the more important as the Portuguese April Revolution was still very young (1974) and the memory of a society with differentiated access to education advocated by the Estado Novo was still very much present. Therefore, the claim for the democracy of education found its echo in the enactment of the above-mentioned Law, and the legal creation of schools for the Professional Teaching and Learning System (PTLS) within the scope of the non-higher education system, public and private. This legislation was especially important for the specialised artistic music education which during the dictatorship, and according to the prevailing discourse, was of a social elitist nature and to which only a few had access.

After the enactment of Decree-Law nº 310 of 1983, which promoted organisational and curricular changes relevant to the democratisation of artistic education, the subsequent legislation, Decree-Law nº344 of 1990, established the general bases of the organisation of artistic education, proposing two complementary educational systems, the rehabilitated centenary Public Music Conservatoire System and the (new) Professional Music Education System.

After thirty years of professional music Education in Portugal, the accomplishments and the results presented by the above-mentioned school system quickly revealed that something new and different was happening, which could change the elitist and deficient panorama of music education in Portugal. The present project aims at developing a systematic and comparative study between the professional music schools (PrMS), with particular incidence on the three PrMS – the Professional and Artistic School of Vale do Ave (ARTAVE), in Santo Tirso, the Professional School of Music of Espinho (EPME), in Espinho, and the Professional School of Music of Viana do Castelo (EPMVC), in Viana do Castelo – and the Public Music Conservatoire (PuMC), from 1989 to 2019.

This research borrows its theoretical main corpus from the scientific domain of the sociology of organisations (Knudsen & Tsoukas, 2005) with complementary theoretical incursions in the field of the sociology of education and culture.

The knowledge we intend to obtain from this organisational reality is strongly rooted in the subjectivity and intentionality of the actors involved, the social environment in which it operates and the political power that formalised it. Such knowledge will be mediated by an explanatory metaphoric rationality, through a cultural model concerned with the artefacts, basic values and assumptions (Schein, 2010). Given the questions raised by the project, a theoretical analysis based on an interpretive-symbolic sociological perspective (Bush, 2020) was elected as to look at the organisation, education and culture. Further, the contribution of the domain of Psychology of Music on a macro-level may contribute to a deep understanding of the motivations of the main actors involved in the creation and development of these schools.

Methodologically, a number of research questions were devised and grouped under the umbrella of two major lines of inquiry: 1) mapping the overall history of the PrMS, with special emphasis on the above listed three, and of the PuMC, namely the Porto Music Conservatoire during this same period, and 2) mapping the related outcomes with the aim of finding evidences that tell us that the PrMS were able to bring about a significant change in the Portuguese musical, educational and social panorama when compared with the results of the traditional PuMC (emergence of individual musicians, orchestra musicians, chamber music ensembles, schools, pedagogical practices, teachers, local audiences and social and cultural changes).

This will be achieved according to a mix-methods methodology (Cresswell & Clark, 2007), made concrete in a multi-case study (Sloboda, 2018). A number of complementary methods will be devised including extensive analysis of documents, construction of questionnaires, and semi and unstructured interviews. Regarding former and present students of the PrMS and PuMC this project is anticipating the construction of thirty sociological portraits, a methodology devised by the French sociologist Bernard Lahire (2002, 2003 e 2010). The sociological portraits allow us to get closer to the participants’ life stories or, at least, to key moments in their trajectories, while considering their socialisation inside any given musical project and the internalisation of dispositions and skills potentially useful to other dimensions of their lives.

The project will be implemented by a research team with diversified profiles in the following areas: Educational Sciences, Music Didactic and Pedagogy, Music Theory, Analysis, Aural Training and Instrumental Teaching. Therefore, it is expected to unveil a complex as well as profoundly significant reality that may have been paramount for the development in Portugal of music education in general and instrumental music in particular.