Integration of 'locality' and 'globality' in intercultural music festivals and its consequences for piano teaching: the case of the Paradigmatic Revolutions music festival in Canada

Abstract

The relationship between the local and the global in intercultural music festivals is usually described either as a confrontation between preservation and homogenization or as a mere juxtaposition of materials from different cultures within a single programme, whereas festival practice of recent years points to a different mechanism – the reproduction of the local already within global artistic frameworks. This mismatch between the explanatory schemes and the actual structure of the event constitutes the research problem. The aim of the study is to reconstruct the model of integration of the local and the global realized in intercultural festivals, drawing on the conference-festival Paradigmatic Revolutions (University of Alberta, Canada, April 2025), and to determine the consequences that follow from it for piano teaching. Structural-functional and conceptual-categorial analysis, the comparative method, the method of analogies and the author's modelling of the transfer of festival principles into instrumental-class didactics are applied. Three models of the local-global relation are distinguished – additive, assimilative and integrative-hybrid, the documented format of the festival under consideration gravitating towards the third. It is established that the integrative model shifts the didactic foundation of the piano class from the reproduction of the canon to intercultural interpretive competence, redefining the status of technique, the notion of authenticity and the position of the teacher. The reproduction of the local within a global frame means that the renewal of piano pedagogy is achieved by reconfiguring already existing didactic means rather than by constructing a separate «intercultural» course.