Facing the music: Three personal experiences, five historical snapshots, seven conceptual shifts and twelve continua as an accessible pathway to understand different approaches to cultural diversity in music education

Abstract

Across questions of appropriate repertoire, pedagogies, teacher training, and educational philosophies, cultural diversity in music education has sparked lively debates for over five decades. This article tries to connect a number of the key issues in this area. Drawing on autoethnography and historical research, with a goal to clarify a number of conceptual issues, it summarises ideas presented by the author during two lectures on the topic at Sibelius Academy in 2009. The paper refers back to a 2007 article on the occasion of the opening of the World Music & Dance Centre in Rotterdam, and proceeds to present a model based on Schippers' 2010 monograph Facing the music: Shaping music education from a global perspective (Oxford University Press).