Il suono del racconto. Forme letterarie e modelli musicali come dispositivi pedagogici

The patterns of the hypercomplex society are becoming ever tighter in the contemporary digital era, making evident the educational urgency to guide children and adolescents along the difficult path of the construction of identity; and this request is inevitably combined with the ancestral, never faded, necessity to narrate and tell about ourselves, which belongs to humans since the dawn of time. The pedagogical implicit held in the narratives, in fact, makes them privileged devices to reach the beating heart of the subject in formation. Narrations amplify experiences, giving new meanings to emotions, events, fragments of existence, so that they become indispensable companions in the formation of childhood and adolescence. We chose, therefore, to analyze a narrative that, among others, vividly embodies the metaphor of constant – and never ended – pursuit of completeness, of the tension to an identity that is as integral and total as ever: the trilogy I nostri antenati by Italo Calvino. Halving, ramping up, non-existing appear as necessary passages of a struggled growth which always reaches for an inner fulfilment, a story that accompanies the young reader and that saves him, because it reminds him that he is not alone in facing the multiple complexity of reality. Then, the analysis of this fantasy trilogy is dissolved in the reading of a realistic fairy tale, Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città, which expresses all the light dis-enchantment of a childlike gaze at the world. However, it is not only literary narration that appears to be an irreplaceable educational device to guide children and adolescents to create their own identity: the thesis, in fact, also takes into account another narrative category, within which the absence of words allows the individual to search and understand himself more freely, far from the definition of language, open to the fluidity of notes. Music contains the most archaic element of human connection with the surrounding world: sound. The sound becomes tale and story, intertwines with the auto-narration giving meaning to emotions, feelings and thoughts. In particular, the pieces of two composers that have marked the musical panorama of the XIX and XX century, Fryderyk Chopin and Sergej Vasil’evič Rachmaninoff, accompany the listener, opening for him an introspective world in which he reflects and, finally, recognizes himself. [edited by Author]