According to anecdote, Jean Monnet, when looking back on his work on European integration, said: “If we were to start all over again, we would start with culture”. Having this in mind, Jean Monnet Module “Musical Identities and European Perspective: an Interdisciplinary Approach” deals with academic studies in the field of arts, especially music and musicology that are not commonly associated with EU studies. Paradoxically, European orientation is one of the key concepts in the field of interdisciplinary oriented musicology, due to international nature of the music history and music itself.
Republic of Serbia, as part of the region without a strong tradition in European cooperation, has a long history of academic artistic and music studies. However, even if European dimension of the studies is inherently present, European Union angle has never been in explicit focus of the music and cultural education. Likewise, the musicology studies at the Faculty of Music of the University of Arts in Belgrade recognize importance of the European musical and cultural tradition and practice, in teaching both European and national musical history, but without apparent emphasis to the Europe-related topics.
Due to the fact that there are no EU related studies at the University of Arts in Belgrade and at the Faculty of Music, this project aims at European integration processes in the field of culture and music in order to bring this subject closer to the target group – MA and PhD students of musicology and of the musical performance at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade.
Besides introducing of topics of European integration in the curricula of faculties of arts project objectives are: raising the awareness about importance of crossing cultural and musical boundaries in the European context, promoting understanding of each individual European musical culture as product of the intercultural dialogue and part of the greater European culture, identifying and contextualizing dynamic issues of musical identities, both from pedagogical and research perspective, designing multidimensional, culturally responsive and innovative teaching and researching process, as well as disseminating project results to different beneficiary groups. Europeanization of the curricula focuses Europe-related identity of the chosen topics aiming to encourage the future professional activities of students and their academic dialogue with their European colleagues. Furthermore, students attending the Jean Monnet Module at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade would obtain relevant knowledge for creating dialogue between academic world and media, in order to promote European values in culture and music.
Project implementation team consists of eight musicologists, professors at the Department of Musicology of the Faculty of Music of the University of Arts in Belgrade: Dr Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman (chair holder of the project), Dr Sonja Marinković, Dr Vesna Mikić, Dr Ivana Perković, Dr Tijana Popović Mladjenović, Dr Marija Masnikosa, Dr Dragana Stojanović-Novičić and Dr Dragana Jeremić-Molnar.
Project activities of Jean Monnet Module “Musical Identities and European Perspective: an Interdisciplinary Approach” include teaching and research.
Teaching represents various approaches to musical identities and the European perspective, which equip students with relevant knowledge and prepare them to examine problems from multiple perspectives: social, cultural, religious, political, etc.
By the application of innovative teaching strategies, students and young professionals learn to:
- comprehend and use unique potential of arts, especially music to support intercultural dialogue;
- recognize different historical processes in musical culture as a result of various forms of intercultural dialogue;
- recognize European and local musical and cultural values, with the deep understanding of diversity as a vehicle to promote unity;
- encourage musicological dialogue on promotion of national tradition as the part of European cultural heritage;
- work on awareness rising in the area of European heritage in local musical traditions.
Project academic research is typically conducted openly, and publishing in the prestigious, high-impact media is one of its’ main premises. Papers in internationally recognized and peer-reviewed journals and monographs, as well as participation at international conferences are expected and encouraged. For that reason, round-table debates for MA and PhD students and the international conference “Musical Identities and European Perspective: an Interdisciplinary Approach” on the subject of intercultural dialogue between European and Serbian musical culture and history are planned to hold. The international conference would be designed to encourage interaction among participants, provide opportunity for leading scholars and young researchers to discuss, as well as to contribute to the achievement of concrete academic results of the research-oriented learning, initiated by the Jean Monnet Module “Musical Identities and European Perspective: an Interdisciplinary Approach”. Dissemination of results would be realized by conference proceedings in English.
