Aboriginal Music. Education for living

"Music can be a way of crossing cultural barriers, of coping with the unexpected and the expected, and of communicating with peoples of different ages and different lifestyles. To the Pitjantjatjara tribe of South Australia, music has traditionally symbolized and organized their perception of the world.
An accomplished ethnomusicologist, Catherine Ellis draws on her wide knowledge of Western and Aboriginal music to explore the educational possibilities of the medium. Western methods of music education and music therapy are compared with traditional tribal methods, which emphasize the growth of the indyvidual and "preparedness" as a prerequisite for learning Aboriginal music.
The structure of tribal and Western music, and the concepts they encode, are a key to handling cultural problems. Catherine Ellis proposes that the problems of people living in an alien culture and of parents and children living within different cultural frameworks can in part be restored through a system of music education that derives from traditional concepts."