Dorothee Barth's Intercultural Music Education: The Significance of the Meaning-oriented Concept of Culture as a Basis

<p> Dorothee Barth criticizes the intercultural music education methodologies established in the 1980s, which continue to influence German schools, asserting that their basis in an ethnic-holistic concept of culture has caused a We–They dichotomy. She states that intercultural music education should instead be based on the meaning-oriented concept of culture. Ideas stemming from Clifford Geertz's cultural hermeneutics underlie Barth's theory.</p><p> This study clarifies how Barth's theory changes conventional intercultural music education and resolves the We–They dichotomy problem, examining the significance of the meaning-oriented concept of culture as a basis for intercultural music education.</p><p> According to Barth, in the context of the meaning-oriented concept of culture, culture is the allocation of meaning shared among people; understanding another culture is interpreting this allocation of meaning. Conventional intercultural music education based on ethnic-holistic concepts of culture emphasizes understanding commonalities and differences between one's own and others' musical cultures through features such as musical elements or instruments. In intercultural music education based on the meaning-oriented concept of culture, children study various musical cultures by focusing on shared intersubjective meanings within cultures. Children can research why people prefer a given type of music or what worldview and attitude correspond to a particular musical practice, exploring how participants allocate meaning and their own context in a given musical culture. Therefore, scientific knowledge, as a foundation of conventional music education like musicology which includes musical elements of this kind, is considered to be one of the various allocations of meaning. This kind of learning offers children various musical experiences; an understanding of music's features, and the awareness that although we practice the same music, we see the world differently. Thus, the meaning-oriented concept of culture changes the focus of intercultural music education from understanding music to understanding people's perceptions.</p><p> Based on the meaning-oriented concept of culture, Barth says that people belong to the same culture when they share the allocation of meaning, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, or region, and that the allocation of meaning is dynamic. Therefore, in intercultural music education based on the meaning-oriented concept of culture, the traditional music of a child's homeland is not considered that particular child's musical culture but is treated as one among various types of music. With this idea, Barth's theory resolves the We–They dichotomy problem. Thus, children are encouraged to form open cultural identities. Establishing musical identity should not mean accepting the radical decisions of one's own culture; instead, it should be a process of experiencing new possibilities of the self and new descriptions of the world.</p><p> The above-discussed education is significant because it provides new learning content based on the exploration of one's own and others' allocations of music meaning, relativizing the paradigm of science-like musicology as a foundation of conventional music education by considering the paradigm a culture, namely an allocation of meaning; it also provides children with ways to find new perceptions of the self, others, and the musical world.</p>