Music teachers with cultural sensitivity and a commitment to the many varied and valid musical traditions in the world have come a long way in a short while. Their high energy and earnest commitrnent to the pluralistic nature of their classrooms and communities show in the music they select for listening, performance, movement, and creative music experiences with their elementary and secondary school students. In this era of the global village, music teachers are finding new musical pathways to the development of their students' musical understanding, skills, and values. Curricular models are beginning to emerge, testimony to the interaction of music teachers with teachers of social studies, language arts, and visual and performing arts. Throughout the country, fewer teachers make the mistakes that were once commonplace: playing Nigerian songs on the piano, strumming Autoharp chords to accompany Japan's" Sakura," or arranging a Native American song for xylophones. The profession now searches broader and deeper for music that can beconsidered representative of a culture, simultaneously paying attention to how it can bemade more meaningful to students in American classrooms. These are marks of great progress in a collective response to teaching music from a multicultural perspective. Yet, despite a rather successful track record, there are still some deep-seated concerns emanating from the movement. Despite all we know about music, children, and teaching, unanswered questions and even unsought solutions remain regarding school music instruction in a pluralistic society. For continued progress toward teaching the world's music traditions to diverse populations, research may illuminate the plan by which we achieve musical and multicultural goals. Pioneering efforts have confronted some of the more serious issues involving music and multicultural education, but the calls to identify the unknowns, to control them, examine them, and interpret them in light of classroom practices have largely gone unheeded.

Past Studies For more than fifteen years, issues that concern world music and multicultural music education have surfaced in dissertations, federally-funded projects, and research publications read by music teachers. In a review of fifty-nine studies, I found that almost two-thirds (thirty-seven) were concerned with the development of curricular lessons, units, and teachers' sourcebooks for teaching the music of a specific ethnic group.