Changes in Conceptions of Music Education in Junior High School Curricula during the Twentieth Century in France

International audienceThe paper aims at describing and analysing the emerging explicit and implicit values in seven series of curriculum for the teaching of music from 1925 to 1997. The dimensions and transformations which can be found in these official texts are analysed from an epistemic and didactic point of view according to the text analysis method (Tropes software). The analyses highlight different teaching approaches. Before 1977, the references employed show that these texts are more teaching-oriented than learning-oriented. The various sorts of knowledge are superimposed according to positivist cumulative even teleological logic as regards the history of music, solfeggio, audition and singing. 1977 marks a transition: training in art and through art. From 1977 to 1998, historic determinism is replaced by a constructivist representation of knowledge: the advent of the subject pupil, the primacy of sensitivity and of practice over knowledge. The auto-structuring aims (expression, invention) replace the hetero-structuring aims (works, history of music, solfeggio)