The COVID-19 pandemic was unexpected and changed most aspects of our lives in a very short period; it led to surprising and unexpected experiences and changes for most people. To cope with these changes and hardship, Italians turned to songs as a medium of emotional and communicative expression. The songs that resounded from the windows, balconies, and homes of families came from the past and the present, connecting generations and serving as a medium to strengthen people’s individual and collective resilience. This study offers a reflection of qualitative research using a phenomenological approach on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the practical musical experience of local communities from a Transformative, Lifelong, and Intergenerational Learning perspective. Purposeful sampling for this study was conducted through invitations to choral- and music associations for families to volunteer to participate in the study. Of the more than 30 families who volunteered, 82 individuals from 15 families in the provinces of Emilia Romagna (n=50) and South Tyrol (n=32), Italy, best met the sampling criteria. The methodology relied on semi-structured interviews as a research tool, accompanied by a thematic analysis of the narratives according to the aforementioned perspectives. The results show that participants used communal singing and music-making as important forms of helping, caring and sharing. This demonstrates the positive role of shared music-making and singing in improving wellbeing and promoting various forms of learning during social isolation COVID-19.
The practice of music represents an irreplaceable experience of the human being. Gratifying in many aspects, it carries out a diversified web of experiences: sensorial, perceptive, cognitive, dynamic, social, cultural. In this, each individual comes to the progressive realization of music as an integrated and integrating experience, which is the deep meaning of culture and the ability to establish relationships. The education to artistic languages encountered in preschool and primary school, even when it is of less relevance in the curriculum, should represent a crucial base to the learning pathway, while promoting interdisciplinarity and warranting a new plurifocal access to knowledge and to individual growth, which is capable of reinforcing also other knowledge necessary in questioning and comprehending the essential, structural, communicative, creative, imaginative and psychological aspects linked to the use of every genre of art.
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