Abstract:

The paper will discuss some aspects of the social function of music and of its role in the relational processes among people coming from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds and will consequently suggest hypoteses in the educational field. It will be mostly based on original data and observations from the research project “Music culture and the social function of music in South Tyrol“, which I am carrying out at the Free University of Bozen - Bolzano (Faculty of Education) in cooperation with a researcher in Sociology. The research is realized on the basis of surveys and in-depth interviews in the South Tyrol, an Italian northern province where three different cultural and linguistic groups cohabit (the German-, the Italian- and the Ladin-speaking communities); it involves both general population and people who participate in musical activities (choirs, bands etc.). In particular, the paper will focus on and investigate in depth a very important element introduced briefly in the paper I presented at ICERI 2013 (“Music education for intergenerational dialogue: the Junior Uni experience”): the ambiguous correlation / relationship between individual music tastes and activities and the choice of friends in people´s lives.
On the one hand, the existing scientific literature suggests that such a relationship between individual music tastes and activities and choice of friends in people´s lives exists and plays a relevant role, and the data from this research confirms this; on the other hand, the same sources indicate that people seem not to be conscious of it. The implications of such a problem are very important in multicultural contexts (like for example South Tyrol). In such a kind of context, how do musical activities and tastes affect the relationships between people from different traditions? Do they facilitate those relationships? Are they irrelevant or do they indeed contrast them?
Data and observations from the research suggest that music activity can be an important facilitator. At the same time, they indicate that often this role finds evident limitations in several concrete practices, characterized de facto by strong cultural connotations and more or less clearly influenced by more general aspects (language, habits; but also stereotypes etc.).
In this perspective, the problematic invests directly education and music education. The educational system can play a relevant role in creating the conditions to go beyond the actual situation in music practices and by these means in personal relationships. To this aim, a reflection on the contents, methods, repertories, terminology of music education becomes necessary, in order to stimulate a clear awareness regarding the ambiguous role of music and its actual potentiality in promoting good relations and good individual relational capabilities, especially in multicultural contexts.

Keywords:

Music and society, Empirical researches on music, Multicultural societies.