Should we study music and/or as culture?

In the light of an apparent paradox that has resulted from the integration of ‘world music’ into the school curriculum in many countries, the present paper proposes a tri‐partite approach to music education. Such an approach would clearly distinguish between the teaching and learning of: ‘inherent meaning’, or the study of music for music's sake; ‘delineated meaning’, or the study of music as culture (drawing on recent work in the field of music sociology); and ‘music as praxis’, the act of music creation through performance and composition.