IN THE PERFORMANCE OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS: WHAT DOES SCIENCE SAY ABOUT GROUP CLASSES?

Recently, there has been a growing interest in music and music education research regarding musical group activities. These activities, even using technologies, platforms and applications of mass communication, contrast with the "Western standard" of the individual instrument lesson. This standard continues to be the main model for transmitting knowledge from the teacher to the student about learning musical instruments. We used the keywords "Music Learning" and "Group Lessons" through an integrative literature review, considering the works published in the Search Engines b-on and Google Scholar and the Science Direct, ERIC, WOS and SCOPUS Databases, between the years 2020 and 2024. We intend to obtain an in-depth notion about the various concepts that are often referred to about learning music in groups; to contrast the results obtained on the definitions referred to for these concepts and to propose some guidelines that will help us to achieve a concrete definition to be used in the learning of music, for the concept "Group lesson". All the information compiled was organised and studied in the webQDA software's internal sources and then coded and questioned using content analysis. As a result, we found a surprisingly low number of research papers on this topic, which seems to support the lack of clarification of the concept. The selected studies talk about "music group lessons", "piano group lessons", "violin group lessons", "music lessons on the internet", "music lessons on multimedia platforms", "group performance lessons"; " ensemble classes (such as orchestra, band or choir classes), etc. This fact also demonstrates the existence of many expressions that refer to similar or almost similar concepts, which makes us conclude the need for more studies in the area and the real need to clarify the concept of what a group class is.