La musica como desarrollo personal

Abstract

The fundamental aim of this research is to evaluate a possible correlation between the level of emotional intelligence (QIE) in teenagers and their capacities for understanding the emotions transmitted by the musical language of the Spanish artist Isaac Albeniz (1860-1890). This classical music composer takes inspiration, in his masterpiece (Iberia), from carols and popular rhythms from Spain, particularly soaked in primary and secondary emotions (Ekman, P.,2008). In order to detect this relation, the starting point was a reference construct of emotional intelligence, which was formulated by Petrides K.V. e Furnham A. (2001) and used in an Italian version (Di Fabio, A., Palazzeschi L., 2011). Both a quantitative and a qualitative survey has been done; in the first case, the semantic differential (Licciardello, O., 2013) was delivered, so that, after listening to the three tracks, the implicit meaning each subject gave to the understood emotions would have arose. In the second case, there was a questionnaire made up of both long answer and multiple choice questions, in order to identify the emotions in the tracks and the ones felt (Carli, R., Paniccia, R.M., 2010). The sample chosen was formed of 45 students attending either 3rd or 4th year of high school (classic, scientific, linguistic and artistic courses). They listened to tracks (Evocación, El puerto, Al Albaicín), carefully chosen from the collection Iberia after a general phenomological analysis (De Leo D., 2008) was carried out, also fundamental parameters of musical sense were taken into account: rhythm (Gagnon, L., Peretz, I., 2008), modality (Van Der Zwaag, M. D., Westerink, J.H.D.M., Van den Broek E.L., 2011), and structure (Gabrielsson, A., Lindström, E., 2010). Both for the quantitative and qualitative analyses, the final result was that there was a strong correlation between the emotional intelligence and the understanding of emotional language of Albeniz music. This correlation discovered by the following research showed that teens with a higher emotional intelligence manage to appreciate the musical language more easily; even when it is far from their everyday life, they manage to catch the emotions that the composer wants to communicate. It is also to be highlighted that no significant differences emerged between those who previously played or listened to classical music (e.g. students coming from an artistic environment) and those who do not usually listen to this kind of music. To sum up, going deeper and broadening the research it could be possible to identify a new evaluation technique for the emotional intelligence which would take into account the auditory/musical perception and not only the visual one.