Popular songs as a basis for learning music: the case of Majorca

Abstract

Great music educators of the twentieth century have not hesitated to take popular music and songs as the starting point for musical education in children. Hungarian Zoltan Kodály, a great supporter of this proposal, has pointed out how easily children assimilate music which is part of their own culture, of what they have heard and lived in their own environment. Without wishing to delve too much in Kodály’s ideas, which have been widely studied, we shall analyze and discuss the contributions of three Majorcan musicians of the present day: Bernat Julià, Antoni Martorell and Baltasar Bibiloni. All three have used popular Majorcan songs as the basis for their compositions at some point in their respective careers. While the first two introduced the popular element into their musical adaptations for elementary and intermediate levels of piano study, Bibiloni incorporated the popular component into his compositions for schools, in vocal arrangements for one, two, or three voices, for voices and Orff instruments, and for voices and piano. In this article we examine and analyze the contributions of these three musicians whose homeland is Mallorca.