THE TEACHING OF FOLK MUSIC AT SCHOOL : Reconfirming the Validity of the Method of Judging Children's Appreciation

Abstract

In music education, the phrase "appreciating the beauty of music" is a commonplace. And teaching-learning activities of music appreciation consist merely of the teacher's giving the pupils a musical piece and the pupils' receiving it passively. How, then, can the pupils perceive and appreciate the beauty of the piece; in other words, can the true "learning" be achieved through such a simple process? The first thing that the teacher must do about this is, as we mentioned in the last paper, to learn what pieces the students can appreciate independently without any special instruction by the teacher. With this knowledge, the teacher can make an effective selection of musical pieces which have a high educative value. This paper concerns the results of the experimental research in which we have reconfirmed the validity of the method we used in order to see whether some musical piece can be appreciated by the learners without any help of the teacher. The subjects of this research were pupils of primary, junior high and senior high school and college students majoring music education.