Uruguay 9th Grade (Tramo 6) Curriculum - Music Education (Arte - Educación Musical)

This curriculum focuses on developing a comprehensive musical education for students, encompassing sensory perception, interpretation, creative production, cultural understanding, musical language, and collective musical practice.

Specific Competencies:

• Sensory Perception: Students connect with their sonic and musical environment through perceptive skills, enabling them to recognize, discriminate, identify, and appreciate the acoustic world. They develop internal images (auditory, visual, spatial, kinesthetic) to establish connections with sensory stimuli. This involves developing musical thinking through inner hearing, auditory memory, and the ability to think with sounds.
• Interpretation: Students express their inner and outer worlds through articulated sonic and musical messages. They utilize musical language tools to analyze, evaluate, and produce communication, interacting in various modalities and formats. This involves developing rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic senses, leading to confidence in mastering musical language elements and self-affirmation. Students interpret vocal and instrumental works individually and in groups, enriching them with personal contributions.
• Productive-Creative: Students engage critically and sensitively with their environment, innovating in individual and collective creative processes. They generate multiple solutions to problems through divergent thinking, demonstrating ethical, aesthetic, and poetic appreciation of various expressive and cultural manifestations. Students explore and experiment with diverse sound sources (traditional, alternative, new production forms, digital recording and reproduction processes, data processing systems, MIDI sequencers) to develop meaningful productions. They master various concepts and resources of musical language, applying them to create complex productions with their own aesthetic and formal criteria.
• Cultural: Students recognize, identify, and appreciate music from diverse cultures and eras, as well as the sonic environments within their own cultural framework. They demonstrate interest and autonomy in expanding their cultural knowledge and musical repertoire beyond personal preferences. Students make connections between diverse musical manifestations and their own productions, based on formal, aesthetic, contextual, and sensitive elements. They share a collective sonic and musical memory ideal, contributing to its construction through individual and collective musical projects within the educational community and social environment. This promotes understanding of a heterogeneous and democratic community and contributes to heritage preservation through the study of different cultures.
• Musical Language: Students discriminate and differentiate musical language elements aurally. They interpret and create vocal and instrumental musical works, applying technical and conceptual aspects of musical language. They develop musical skills by applying these elements and communicate with the sonic and musical world using them. Students reinterpret previous musical experiences and relate them to new ones as they deepen their understanding of musical language. They engage in metacognitive processes, explaining, demonstrating, and generalizing about musical language aspects in individual and collective musical experiences. They encode and decode musical language elements disciplinarily and interdisciplinarily, based on their own constructions and the understanding and implementation of known and established codes.
• Collective Musical Practice: Students incorporate aesthetic-musical experiences into their inner sonic world through collective vocal/instrumental musical practice. They acquire musical mother tongue during these experiential processes. They reflect on musical practice and conceptualize technical aspects based on vocal/instrumental interpretation. Students engage in metacognitive processes, explaining, demonstrating, and generalizing about musical language aspects in vocal/instrumental practice. They become aware of and generalize about musical skills developed in collective musical practice. They experience the interpretation of different vocal/instrumental musical works, encoding and decoding various productions. They experience music-making in interaction with others to create collective products with a respectful and open attitude towards change.

Suggested Thematic Areas:

• Elements of Musical Language: Rhythm (pulse, accent, time signature), melody, dynamics, timbre, harmony, rhythmic and melodic phrases, thetic, acephalous and anacrustic beginnings, music reading and writing, elements of improvisation and composition (repetition, variation, and contrast).
• Music of the World: Latin American and Uruguayan music, instrumental and vocal interpretation and creation, knowledge of diverse styles and genres, musical groups, musical form and structure (section and theme, sentence, phrase, motive or phrase member, and cell), song form.
• Interrelation of Artistic Languages: Audiovisual language, audiovisuals, video clips, 20th-century artistic productions (translinguistic productions).

Achievement Criteria for Evaluation:

• Autonomous aural recognition, discrimination, and identification of musical language elements.
• Group interpretation and production of vocal or instrumental musical works with teacher support.
• Awareness, reflection, comprehension, and integration of conceptual and technical aspects of music.
• Enjoyment, interest, and appreciation of musical works of appropriate complexity from different cultures and eras, recognizing musical language elements and basic formal elements.
• Expansion of musical repertoire based on the works studied.
• Integration of the interrelation of different artistic languages into musical interpretation and creation.

Methodological Guidelines:

The curriculum emphasizes a practice-theory connection through reflective processes leading to metacognition and musical learning construction. It utilizes a teaching model that addresses the didactic axes of music education: listening, interpretation, creation, and critical reflection. The curriculum also focuses on the different stages of the musicalization process: absorption, communication, and generalization. A workshop methodology is suggested, prioritizing learning by doing, participatory learning, inquiry-based learning, interdisciplinarity, and a holistic approach. Evaluation is seen as a cyclical and reflective process, informing both student learning and teaching practices. It is recommended to use evaluation matrices or rubrics, checklists, or evaluation sheets for communicating results and recording evaluation processes.