The paper aims to present and analyse the curricula of Musical Education and its implementation, at primary level, in Portugal, in the second half of the twentieth century (1960-2000) as well as to discuss the underlying pedagogy. Additionally, it also intends to discuss the relevance of images as sources to this kind of research in History of Education, particularly in History of Disciplines, through the appropriation of conceptual tools from other areas of knowledge, like Johari Window (Luft & Ingham, 1955).

The main study problem for the research project, a PhD thesis, is formulated as follows: How (far) were the curricula of Music Education and the process of teaching/learning set in Portugal in the second half of the twentieth century (1960-2000) influenced by the contemporary theories of education and European methodologies in Music Education?

For this particular paper we decided to take two research questions: 1) How did the programs, the manuals and the educational practices appropriate the contemporary theories of education? 2) How have the programs, the manuals and the educational practices appropriated the European Music Education methodologies?

The theoretical framework is grounded in Cultural History (Chartier, 1988) and in the History of the Present (Chauveau & Tétart, 1992). It is assumed that History of Disciplines and History of Curriculum along with the concept of school culture (Frago, 2007; Chervel, 1998) constitute the cartographic ground for the research. To this framework also contribute the contemporary pedagogic theories of Dewey, Bruner, Gardner, Perrenoud and Apple as well as the European authors of Music Education methodologies, Orff, Kodaly, Willems, Martenot, Dalcroze, Schafer, Painter and Swanwick.

Although intending to enlighten a topic of History of Education the present research requires the use of different areas of knowledge and a complex thinking (Morin, 1990), allowing interpret different data gathered from bibliographical review, oral histories and archived documents like teachers’ reports, drawings, photos and videos.

At this point it is possible to share the first results of the research establishing the state of Music Education in Portugal during the defined period taken from the data assembled either in legislation or in some archival material. We wish it will also be possible to stress the first evidences of the influence of the different pedagogic theories and European music education methodologies.

Behind this research there is a professional (personal) understanding of the issues raised by music education experience and the intuition of the divorce between theory and practice in teaching. The gap exists even if it is clear to most of the music teachers that the music education theories and methodologies developed in the whole world, particularly in Europe during the last two centuries provide an adequate intelligence of music learning plus didactic ways of increasing it. This fact is quite worrying when we believe that music education in childhood should contribute to the musical literacy and the growing of citizens by developing the capacity of hearing music as well as by subsidising the cognitive process development.

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