The Teaching of Bowed String Instruments in Classroom Practice: 15 years of Spanish Doctoral Dissertations

Abstract

Doctoral studies allow many professionals to look into ways of improving their practice. Students can check out various databases and guide themselves on how to focus their research. In order to help them, teachers can check some databases and assist in coping with problems they encounter. In order to avoid troubles, they can also take into account review studies of doctoral dissertations. These kinds of studies have never been done in relation to the violin-family instrumental teaching. For this reason, this work provides new methods for working in this field by performing a bibliometric analysis and a content review of Spanish doctoral dissertations in the last 15 years. For this purpose, the Teseo database was consulted, looking for studies whose finality was to apply its findings to the common instrumental classroom practice. On one hand, the objective of this paper is to show interesting statistical data. On the other hand, it is to review and show easily accessible recommendations for teachers of these instruments. Results of this work demonstrate how new these ideas are in Spain and how they have reached a boom in recent years. Moreover, wo approaches appear in the theses studied: methodological proposals and empiric researches in the classroom. Although these dissertations provide valuable contributions and reveal outstanding findings, a low percentage of studies related to musical teaching continues to demonstrate the need of increasing this kind of research.