Proceedings, Oxford, UK (2002) - World Federation of Music Therapy

patterns transmitted by the mass media including music, games, clothes,
food and behaviors. Outdoors childhood plays have been replaced by
cartoons, computers, video-games. These changes resulted from a new
social organization where new technologies, small apartments, shopping-
centers, day-care-centers and some other circumstances removed
children from the streets, squares and parks. Our folkloric traditions
through nursery rhymes, songs, dances and tales are becoming less
frequent among children although some music educators and artists have
been making efforts to maintain this cultural heritage. The music therapy
space made the presence of some aspects of this heritage possible in a
spontaneous way mingled with the popular music transmitted by the
mass media.
CULTURAL APPROACH AND MUSIC AND IDENTITY
Reading the chapter Culture, Mind and Education from Jerome Bruner’s
The Culture of Education (Bruner, 1996), a series of essays written in the
nineties, I got to know the author’s cultural approach derived from the
changes of the conceptions about the mind. During the fifties and sixties
Bruner dedicated his studies to cognitive aspects creating a new theory of
instruction in the U.S.A. In this recent book, Bruner focuses the
culturalism which “takes its inspiration from the evolutionary fact that
mind could not exist save for culture ” (Bruner,1996,p.3). According to
Bruner, psycho-cultural approach presents the “macro” side, which
looks at the culture as a system of values, rights, exchanges, obligations,
opportunities, power, and the “micro” side which “examines how the
demands of a cultural system affects those who must operate within it ”
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