By the time you read this, NAME (The National Association of Music Educators) will no longer exist in its current form, having amalgamated with FMS (the Federation of Music Services) under a new name. This, therefore, may well be the last publication in this series of books and they are to be congratulated on a very readable publication. However, the audience for this book is unclear. It is divided into four sections: student exchanges; perspectives on teaching and learning; international collaborations; and international initiatives, and I am left feeling that these sections have something different to offer different groups of people. The back cover tells us that the editors hope the experiences and reflections ‘will help us challenge our own assumptions and make positive changes in our own practice’ yet the second half of the book tells us more about policy issues than anything else and as such I would say has little to offer teachers in the classroom in the way of making changes.

Section 1 provides an interesting view of music education from a student perspective and includes a chapter on EAS SF (European Association for Music in Schools Student Forum). This provides the opportunity for a few students from various European countries to learn from each other on a week's course, culminating in a group presentation. In this chapter we learn about how students work together, and the organisation of the EAS SF, but not about music from an international perspective. However, this is obviously an excellent opportunity for the students selected and enables burgeoning music teachers to keep up ties with other countries and, hopefully, extend these to an appreciation of music education as well.

Joakim Nygren obviously enjoyed his time in the UK, and benefited from the comparisons he was able to make between the UK and Sweden. However, one rather regrettable conclusion he reaches is that ‘the big idea with Musical Futures is to make students more interested in music so they want to continue it at GCSE and A level’ (p. 24). As music teachers, always hoping to have enough pupils opting for our courses to keep them running, this may well be the impression we give, but it is a shame if this is what he will take back to Sweden. For me, the chapter which provided the most insight into music education in other cultures was by Tomoko Ogusu. She makes direct comparisons between music classrooms in the UK and Japan, and discusses the reasons for these differences. She concludes that she is trying to adapt her teaching to different situations and does not believe that there is one ‘fixed music teaching ability which can be used throughout the whole world’ (p. 54); I found this insight refreshing.

Having started my professional life teaching performing arts, with an emphasis on a more holistic approach to education than some, I found the chapter by Eric Shieh appealing. ‘It's Revolutionary!’ tells of a school entirely interdisciplinary and topic based. He writes, ‘Primary among the reasons for my school is the commitment to what we call big ideas – the ideas that we as educators believe our students must grapple with as they grow into citizens of this world’, and he gives us a case studies map so that we can see what is actually going on. This degree of specificity about what is happening in classrooms is rare in this book and comes, perhaps unsurprisingly, mostly in the teaching and learning section. If this book is addressed to teachers then the 30 odd pages devoted to this could well have been extended.

I was pleased to be given the opportunity to learn more about how El Sistema is working in the many parts of the world where it can now be found. This system is founded on the principle that the social aspect of music-making is the primary objective and, as such, it has generally been kept separate from formal schooling, which often has negative connotations for many of the under-privileged children at which it is aimed. Yet in the UK I read that it is an initiative that has been taken into schools. Have we missed the point here? And is this going to be in place of, or as well as, wider opportunities?

When will we in the UK, and perhaps in Europe as a whole, come to understand that the way we do things is not necessarily the best way and certainly not the only way? Knight reminds us that ‘We need to develop sensitivity to a culture that is different from our own and shy away from cultural imperialism’ (p. 45), and in the article by Dudt, about developing a European agenda for culture in a globalizing world, the following unfortunate phrase crept in: ‘the promotion of a common cultural heritage lies at the very heart of the European project’. Thankfully they do go on to say that culture also has a ‘unique and indispensable role to play . . . in the promotion of cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue’ (p. 129). But how much will we listen (as encouraged to do by this book) and not just talk? And to what extent has Europe, and all that is European, taken over the quasi-colonial attitude dispensed by individual European countries in our recent history?

‘Listening’ in the final section of the book on international initiatives covers not only El Sistema but an interesting chapter about how music festivals flourish in the rest of Europe, especially Germany, but not in the UK. I was left wondering why this is the case, especially since they are still very much in evidence in many parts of Northern Ireland.

In an age when many in Europe are questioning what a union has to offer, and especially the many levels of bureaucracy involved, the final section taking us on a journey through international and European music education policies only to be told that ‘money must be spent applying the existing policies’ (p. 134 about the Bonn Declaration) is frustrating. Admittedly this is followed by examples of good outcomes from the publication of this document. However, if this book is aimed at teachers I wonder how many of them would feel that if the money had been spent giving them the opportunity to listen to what is happening in classrooms all over the world there would be more chances of them ‘making changes in [their] practice’.