Musical Listening Between Everyday Reality and Sensory Experience. On the Aesthetic Education of Young People

A renewed form of worldview seems to be created, especially in everyday life of young people, through listening to music, at least when the music itself and the lyrics are experienced as meaningful in terms of their content and not simply as entertainment. The meaningful (non-stereotypical) experience of listening, in the vast field of popular music, offers interesting points for pedagogical investigation. In attempting to deal with these issues, the paper is divided into three parts: 1. the impact of the aesthetic experience of listening to music on young people through the sociological perspective of Pierre Bourdieu; 2. the possible intertwining of this approach with a more marked theoretical-pedagogical analysis of the topic, in particular through the phenomenological perspective of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, since he moves away from any aesthetic ideal and the related canons of the evaluation of beauty in order to grasp the potential of the aesthetic in the variety of sensory experience; 3. the resumption of the areas of formal and informal education in which the instance of signification can be suggested as a practice of constructing one’s own personality, attentive to different aspects of the ‘versions of reality’ involved. This idea is supported by an example of an educational proposal already implemented with foreign language teachers and secondary school students.