Multicultural Resources: Including Technology and the Internet

In the fourteen years since the 1990 MENC pre-conference symposium on Multicultural Approaches to Music Education in Washington, D.C., music educators have come to recognize the need to include a variety of world musics in all music curricula, from elementary classrooms to advanced performing ensembles. Accordingly, a significant increase in the availability of teaching materials has occurred, both in new classroom basal series and in teaching anthologies specifically targeting world music cultures. Given this new wealth of multicultural resource material, music educators can now select books, recordings, and other resources to involve students in many new forms of music without placing an undue strain upon increasingly limited classroom-music budgets. Some multicultural resource materials are general and provide overviews of two or more cultures; other resources focus upon a specific culture or ethnic group. This column examines a mixture of older materials and newer materials, including a DVD-only guide to children's music from Zimbabwe, a practical instruction manual for playing digeridoo, and a just released text seeking to demystify the music of South India for the music educator and ethnomusicologist alike. Both the guide to digeridoo playing and the South Indian resource also have Internet-based supplemental materials that expand on what is offered in print and are updated as needed by the authors to assure a continual flow of information to the music educator.