Historia de la Educación (Nov 2013)
The individual circulation of musical expertise in Portugal between 1901-1930
Abstract
In an effort to analyze the modes of transmission of musical knowledgewithin the boundaries of my History of Education PhD investigation, I came across a question related to the international circulation of expert knowledge. In this article, for which I set the chronological borders of 1901 and 1930, I seek to underline the process of distinction that allowed a schooling network to be established simultaneously for all and only a few. While the State, through the extension of choir singing in primary schools and later on in the secondary curricula, was clearly promoting the massification of musical education — even though this was only fully accomplished in a later period — it was also concurrently obstructing the expansion of vocational schooling, which became a pathway for only a few. Based on an inventory of published monographs that circulated in Portugal in this period, I developed an analysis that in fact indicates a very limited circulation of musical expertise, by showing that it was profoundly individualized and circumscribed to the top of the musical elite, thus remaining highly dependent on personal strategies for the acquisition of knowledge.
