Multicultural Music Learning in Australia Dr Basil Jayatilika, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. Abstract Multiculturalism is now an everyday fact of life in Australia (A.B.S 1996). The great impact, diffusion and awareness of different cultures upon music education in Australia has opened up new and fresh avenues for music learning in Australia which hitherto, has had a mono cultural, chauvinistic and essentially eurocentric direction and stranglehold. Appreciation of diverse and different artistic music traditions tends to enhance social interaction, cooperation, trust, respect and understanding (Santos, 1994) of all those who now see international and global education as almost established features of education in Australia (Campus Review, 1996). The changing face of multicultural classrooms in Australia will present many new challenges. Teachers will have to deal with the unfamiliar in order to survive or flourish in this new learning and teaching environment. This paper seeks to outline perceptual differences and different learning processes and patterns music students from different ethnic backgrounds bring to bear on learning music. The paper also examines how cultures, widely separated by experience, values and environments, develop musical systems that emphasise different aspects of expertise and hence learning modes. For example, most Asian and African cultures are more tuned to melody and intricate rhythmic structures than harmony which appears to be the basis of Western tonalities. Thus, the implications for music learning can mean traversing quite different musical routes before arriving at the same destinations. In multicultural Australian classrooms many children with highly diverse learning patterns face teachers who do not give this phenomenon much thought. How do Asian, African and Latinos formulate their music learning patterns? Are these patterns necessarily the same as those of their European-American counterparts? Are Australian music educators aware of differences of prior musical training some migrant students have experienced? In examining and exploring the music of some of the dominant migrant cultures represented in certain schools, useful insights may be gleaned of the culture's music learning patterns Thus, in Australia, at our very doorstep lies a vast store and array of such untapped learning strategies which awaits to be explored and examined.

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