Coda: Current Trends and Future Development in Transmitting Traditional Music

Abstract

This chapter summerises the issues raised by all the authors in terms of changes in sociocultural contexts and environment in the modern world, and proposes a number of trends for consideration of future development of traditional musics. Formalization of teaching and learning traditional musics is the first trend observed. Including traditional musics in the school curricula and teacher education is found in developed countries, while teaching traditional musics in schools may be ignored in developing countries. Secondly, politicisation in transforming contexts is observed, in which some governments promote their nations in a political and economic way by promoting traditional musics. The third trend is the Westernisation of transmission approaches, such as adopting conservatory tradition in training professional musicians for traditional musics, while authentic pedagogy approaches are advocated. Finally, modernisation is observed, in which traditional musics are often to be connected with modern technology in order to promote and popularise. The author argues for an interdisciplinary collaboration between ethnomusicologists and music educators to further develop a diverse methodology in research.