Music education in the twenty-first century: a cross-cultural comparison of German and American music education towards a new concept of international dialogue

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Comparative Music Education is often considered to be an unnecessary subject because there seem to be more important issues for research than studying music education in various countries. Comparative music education is not a luxury, but rather a necessity in the twenty-first century. Scholars and music teachers in many countries are struggling with similar problems such as teacher training, performance-based or general music education, classroom management or standards in music education. It would be useful to improve the exchange between various traditions of music education both in terms of developing more effective methods in comparative music education and concerning teacher education programmes emphasising music education as an international endeavour. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the opportunities of comparative music education by comparing German and American music education, particularly investigating the fields of general, performance-based and multicultural music education.