Music in Higher Education after the Bologna Treaty: Or, in Search of a New Educational Culture

Abstract

If the logos of current pragmatism regulates and places and manages, the logos of metaphor and cadence deregulates and displaces and offers a migratory movement out. Pragmatism addresses the functional brain. Metaphor and cadence address the whole imagination. An age of pragmatism without imagination, and age of postmodernism without meaning, is and age without spirit, prophecy or hope. (Peter Abbs, 2003) At the beginning of the academic year, a student stops me in the corridor of our college and asks, “Do you know if I am already in Bologna?” After a short moment of a little perplexity, I answer jocosely, “Well, I would say that right now you are in Porto, Portugal.” Being in Bologna (or not) means, for our students, that their request to change from the pre-Bologna Treaty course syllabus to the new one, according to the Bologna guidelines, has been institutionally accepted. Bologna is in this sense a metaphor for a new graduation model—for some students, a better solution for their future ambitions of more easily entering the teaching profession and, who knows, perhaps even another European country. Beautiful Bologna, this lively Italian university city with its Renaissance palaces and its innumerous ochre-colored arcades, means little or nothing to my student. She simply wants to know how her graduation prospects will look in the next three years.