A universal musical minimum: capability, universal design and body percussion in Spanish primary music education

Abstract

Music is affirmed as an entitlement across the European Union, yet what children receive varies with the resources their schools and regions can command. This paper applies Universal Design for Learning at a level where it is rarely employed: not the individual lesson, but the statutory curricular minimum itself. Taking Spain as a case study, it examines what minimum of musical participation a state could guarantee in a form from which no school and no learner could be excluded. Joining universal design with the capability approach, the article argues that such a minimum must be defined as a capability rather than as a resource and specified in competencies rather than materials or gestures. It proposes an instrument-independent curricular floor: a legally protected minimum of rhythmic, ensemble-based and improvisatory participation achievable with the body and voice alone, complementary to instrumental provision and never a substitute for it. Body percussion serves as the analytical test case rather than as the content of the entitlement. The article presents a normative and doctrinal analysis, not an empirical evaluation. It advances a central hypothesis and four derived propositions, states the observations that would confirm or disconfirm each, and specifies the research programme required to test them. Its principal claim is conditional and structural: the current architecture permits variation in what children receive, an entitlement defined in capability terms would remove one mechanism through which that variation operates, and whether it does so in practice is a question for empirical evaluation rather than for theoretical argument.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Frontiers in Education, 2026 · DOI ↗