ABSTRACT
Music, like other art forms, has been extolled as a vehicle for transformative education and social change. Music has also been criticized as a cultural form that helps sustain social inequities, in part, by leaving them unquestioned. While affirming the emancipatory and transformative potential of arts education, Maxine Greene calls upon arts educators to pay more attention to the need “to break through some of the crusts of convention, the distortions of fetishism, the sour tastes of narrow faiths” (Greene, 1995, p. 146). There is “no question,” she continues, that the distortions and omissions in arts curricula, shaped by the metanarrative of Eurocentric aesthetic sensibilities, must be corrected to welcome multiple worldviews (p. 162; see also Hanley, this volume). She adds that “we need openness and variety, as well as inclusion . . . avoid[ing] fixities, even the stereotypes linked to multiculturalism” that essentialize differences (pp. 162-163).
