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This chapter begins by reflecting on two areas of school-music education that are of particular interest to those working in community music, music education and democracy, and life-long learning in music education, both explored predominantly through an American perspective. It then explores community music therapy (CoMT), cultural diversity in music education, and applied ethnomusicology, outlining their respected modes of practice and exampling projects. As siblings to a larger fields, CoMT, cultural diversity in music education, and applied ethnomusicology have been asking awkward questions surrounding the contemporary role of each respected practice. The chapter concldes by suggesting that in order for the field of community music to contribute more effectively within those domains that it intersects with there needs to be a conceptual framework through which one can argue for both its relevance and its vital and dynamic force.

How do autistic people make, experience, and find meaning in music? And why does it matter to them that they do? These are the guiding questions put forth at the beginning of the introductory chapter, which establishes the book’s purpose, conceptual framework, and significance. The widely recognized talents and affinities for music that many autistic people exhibit have historically been a focus of therapeutic interventions aimed at ameliorating autistic symptoms. In that context, autism is regarded as a disorder and autistic people as individuals in need of treatment. In this book, however, the conventional paradigm is turned on its head, with autism reconceptualized as a viable manifestation of neurodiversity rather than a disorder rooted in pathology. The ten autistic individuals who throughout the book will speak for themselves on the place, value, and meaning of music in their lives are introduced, and both the structure and rationale for the book’s conversational approach, which is re-presentational rather than representational, are outlined.

The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (CAETS), led by zoologist and anthropologist Alfred C. Haddon, was a key endeavor in British anthropology’s formative years. This chapter discusses its reports from 1901 and 1935, drawing on critical epistemologies of hearing to explore the expedition’s cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary framework. Before the rise of ethnomusicology proper, testing hearing became an important way of mediating translations from the laboratory to the field, from psychology to anthropology, from static stimuli to adaptive learning. Hearing tests in the Torres Straits promised easy access to a vital human capacity, but they proved inconclusive—no persuasive link could be drawn between hearing acuity and intelligence, undermining attempts to locate “savagery” and consolidate cultural difference. The CAETS researchers were unable to bridge the growing divide between reflexive anthropologies and the logic of cultures of measurement. Their hearing tests exposed a problematic relationship that still permeates the discipline today.

Years ago, long before he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the age of twenty-one, Donald Rindale described music as “the only love of my life.” It’s different for Donald now. “Honestly, if my trombone got run over by a tank, I’d be delighted,” he asserts, adding that being a musician “was a wonderful chapter of my life, but that page has long been turned.” We first meet Donald as a musicology graduate student on the verge of falling out of love with musicology and in love with the study of law. At chapter’s end some four years later, he has just graduated from law school and is envisioning a legal career involving autism and disability advocacy. But Donald retains a nostalgic fondness for music, which in his reckoning has been kinder to him than most people have: “The music did not laugh, or judge, or make nasty comments, or quizzical facial expressions and gestures at the sight of some unexpected behavioral tendencies, among other things. For those reasons, I will always love it.”

“I sort of ‘think in music’ in the same way Temple [Grandin] says she ‘thinks in pictures,’ ” states the autistic professor, social activist, and singer Elizabeth J. “Ibby” Grace. “Music was the nexus between my self and language for a long time. . . my communicative access,” she explains. “When I relax among myself there are not words going on in my head. There are intervals, tones . . . sometimes in order to think, I structure the thoughts into more like music, or they do themselves like that.” Thinking in music also enables Ibby to function socially “in ways I would have no chance of access to without it . . . . I think I can hear people’s own music sometimes, [which is] how I classify what their soul sounds like to me, [and] I can use this facility to predict if people will be liable to get along with one another.”

This chapter provides an overview of the movement to multiculturalize the curricular content and process of music in educational setting. Central to the chapter are a description and analysis of world music pedagogy (WMP), including an account of the historical strands that led to its emergence from the scholarly discipline of ethnomusicology and the practice of musically educating students in music as a cross-cultural endeavor. The chapter weaves in the principles of teaching and learning that encompass avenues for building musical skills, music and cultural knowledge, and a sensitivity to music and musicians both local and distant. Illustrations are offered to explain the five domains of WMP. A review of literature is undertaken to document empirically the impact of world music on curricular-instructional practices on student learning. The chapter also discusses the challenges of teaching music in global and multicultural ways and the integration of WMP with other pedagogical approaches.