Traditional Music: The Different and the Common in the European Identities

Traditional music is a constitutive element of any society. It helps us to know better its way of life and the values system of the people who created it and transmitted it on for centuries. The industrialisation of western societies, together with the strong pressure done by the urban culture, creates a frame where traditional music suffers many troubles to survive, and the new generations ignore their roots increasingly.

This activity is aimed at students between fourteen and sixteen years old. It would consist in the following aspects:
- Recording popular songs from the student’s geographic frame.
- Analysis of the lyrics (lexical, topics, symbols, metrics…)
- Analysis of the music (key, rhythm, instruments…)
- Playing our own songs and the collected from other countries.
- Final product: making of a website and a CD with the collected songs.

This task would involve the departments of Music, Social Sciences and Languages.

We try that this activity of exchanging experiences and knowledge helps to develop a few objectives such as:
- To study of music as a system of communication and cultural transmission.
- Awareness about the own cultural heritage and to appreciate it as a constitutive piece of the international mosaic.
- To value that cultures are complementary: not superior, not inferior either.
- Sensitisation and knowledge about other societies, and thinking over the common and the different elements.
- Approach to the European linguistic diversity, valuing the importance of learning languages.