Foreword

Préface de Simha Arom

Musical pedagogy and ethnomusicology are two distinct disciplines. Why would I, an ethnomusicologist, write a preface for a book about music teaching? Because, over the course of our respective work—Robert Kaddouch, as a pedagogue, and I in my ethnomusicology field work—we both aim for emergence: of creativity, in the former case, of implicit knowledge, in the latter. And to achieve this, we apply the same method, that is, maieutics.
My own research on the processes which underly polyphonic music has revealed that—independently of the geographical areas, time periods, and cultures involved—the principles which they follow are omnipresent. For his part, Robert Kaddouch has demonstrated, with supporting videos, that in very young children aged 16 months to 4 years improvising at the piano, these same processes appear spontaneously. In February 2018, the convergence of our respective work led, at the Music Department of Oxford University, to a “four-handed” lecture entitled “Polyphony: Typology and Ontogenesis.”
This book is of great value in that it presents a pedagogical theory and systems that allow for the emergence of the unsuspected richness possessed by all human beings—the ultimate aim of any teaching.
Simha Arom