Multicultural and popular music content in an American music teacher education program

Abstract

The teaching of multicultural music, and to a lesser extent popular music, has been the stated goal of music education policy makers for many decades. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to estimate the amount and percentage of time music education majors in a university teacher education program spent on 13 styles of music in history, theory and performance courses during a four-year program, both in and out of class. Subjects were the entire population of undergraduate pre-service music teachers from one large university music school in the southwestern United States ( N = 80). Estimates were provided by the course instructors. Subjects spent widely disparate amounts of time on musics of the western art (92.83%), western non-art (6.94%), and non-western (.23%) traditions, with little time (.54%) devoted to popular music. The discussion centers on solutions sometimes proffered for musically unbalanced music teacher education programs, implications relative to accreditation and national music standards in the USA, and changes implemented by the institution under study.