Much attention was given to the practical considerations of world music pedagogy: textbooks, audio- and video-recordings, and internet resources; culturally-relevant transmission/teaching strategies; musical and cultural aims and outcomes associated with performance, listening, and study opportunities in schools, conservatories and universities. A number of community projects were presented, including two presentations on music in prisons, several university-to-school (and after-school) projects, music-at-work with disenfranchised youth, a project detailing John Langstaff’s Revels phenomenon, virtual musical communities (from the Microsoft perspective). Huib Schippers reflected briefly on the historical origins and growth of CDIME in Europe, and the efforts of a network of people to bring more of the world’s musical expressions honestly and opening to students of every age. Keith Howard, Jennifer Walden, and Trevor Wiggins spoke to professional and personal meanings of cultural and musical diversity in their localities. John Drummond’s placement of Western European Art Music in perspective offered a fresh understanding of “the music formerly known as ‘classical’” as none other than “Northwest Asian Court Music”. Ellen Dissanayake pitched motherese/parentese as an early means of social bonding through music, Charlie Keil encouraged us to believe that all kids are “born-to-groove” and that we should “untune nobody”, and Tony Seeger outlined some of the historic and continuing projects of musicians who stimulate an awareness in schoolchildren of the communities that surround them. Barbara Reeder Lundquist modeled the expert teaching style that she has honed over her long life of thinking musically and teaching with intercultural understanding very much in mind. Håkan Lundström, ISME president-elect, spoke to the ISME commitment to cultural and musical diversity in education. A session by Jon Kertzer, Microsoft, and Amy Schriefer, Smithsonian Global Sound, brought the possibilities of high technology to the forefont of fair and appropriate use of music on the internet in the education of children, youth, and university students.

We became a community of musicians and teachers. We made music together over the days together, and joined in workshops of Inuit song, music of Egypt, salsa music and dance, mariachi and conjunto music, Cambodian music for xylophones, Asanti drumming, Balinese gamelan, Mohican songs and sensibilities, and Turkish dombek. Some CDIME participants carried on in the evenings to the first Honk Fest-West gathering of community musicians, with 12/8 pathbands and groove-bands from up and down the west coast—and from Europe. (For information on this music-activist phenomenon that is gaining momentum as “y’all-come” participatory music, google Honk!, Honk Fest!, and Honk Fest West.) New perspectives and projects were evolving in the interactions between teachers, teacher educators, ethnomusicologists, and performing musicians.

The rains of the Pacific Northwest returned on Sunday morning, nurturing the cherry blossoms on the university’s “quad”, and providing an ideal setting for the traditional Japanese sounds of koto and shakuhachi. We came away with an action plan, both pertinent to our own localities as well as collective in the sense of ways to manifest and engage people in an understanding of music with a capital “m”, Music, in its rich variety, and of how music is a pathway to knowing the people of our local and global communities.

Avanti!
Patricia Campbell
University of Washington
Seattle USA