An Ethnomusicological Approach to Curriculum Development
Abstract
An Efhnomusicological Approach to Curriculum Development by Paul Austerlitz Recent years have seen increasing interest in multicultural music education. During the 1989-90 academic year, an ethnornusicologically oriented music program funded by the Connecticut Commission on the Arts was implemented at the Cold Spring School in New Haven, Connecticut. I came to this small, private, progressive elementary school to teach world music and to develop methods in multicultural music pedagogy. To many people, the term “ethnomusicology” refers to the study of socalled “ethnic” (or non-Euro-American) music. Ethnomusicologists, however, usually define their field as the study of music in (or as) culture. According to this definition, the subject matter of ethnomusicology is world music, which includes the musics of Europe and the Americas, as well as the other continents' and the theoretical perspective of ethnomusicology stresses the relationships between music and other aspects of culture. In keeping with this perspective, an ethnomusicological primary (or secondary) school curriculum need not expose students to a large number of world musics. Indeed, relationships between music and other aspects of culture are often best illustrated by focusing on one music culture at a time. An ethnomusicologically oriented music curriculum should teach performance of one