A Hermeneutic Approach To Music Education

Music appreciation is one of the important music courses of middle and primary schools. Through participating in appreciation activities, students can constantly develop their sense of sounds and accumulate music aesthetic experience to gradually establish an ability to fully understand music. However, because music has indispensable links with its maker and ethnic background, and the appreciator also has his own personal or social background, so, the feelings and understandings toward the same music are varied, which leads to music’s multiple solutions that make music appreciation teaching difficult.To this extent, music is both a appreciation target and people-to-people medium. To treat music as a appreciation activity for teaching, teachers should not only know this characteristic of music but also overcome understandings’extreme subjectivity and randomness, helping students to further understand music. Hermeneutic, a method of humanities is a philosophical theory that was established based on phenomenology brought by Heidegger and Gadamer to explain how people interpret textual meaning. Phenomenology gives an explanation to the diversity and endlessness of textual meaning based on the thinking of "existence" and horizon fusion". According to their theory, understanding textual is only one aspect of knowing things, another one is to find the channel to communicate with the world through text, also known as knowing related interpretations of all the histories, cultures and traditions behind the text to launch experience exchangement with the world, letting the explanation toward the text deep enough to think of meaning of existence rather than superficial issues to realize the universal meaning of interpretation. Putting the hermeneutic principle into specific teachings is the Germany " music teaching interpretation" method which is based on " horizon fusion" to extend teaching’s original textual understanding meaning to understanding relationship between teachers and students, which has reference significance to domestic music appreciation teaching in primary and middle schools.This thesis firstly discusses music existence and its existing way, then music text and its understanding method according to hermeneutic theories linked to text, existence and horizon fusion. Meanwhile, through analysis of theories and methods of German’s "teaching interpretation", the thesis further studies application situations of hermeneutic theory in specific teachings. Finally, according to hermeneutic theory, the thesis launches a case study in domestic primary and middle schools and proposes feasible suggestions toward music appreciation teaching with hermeneutic principle.