Philosophers of music education presently find themselves suspended between modernism's universalist convictions and post-modernism's cultural relativist insights. In "Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education" (1995), David Elliott challenged longstanding conceptions of "music education as aesthetic education" to proffer a praxial philosophy, shifting attention away from music as an object and toward music making as a universal human practice. Now, in Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education (2015), Elliott and Marissa Silverman have acknowledged that culturally different musical practices "make sense only in relation to their cultural contexts," yet they vacillate between using the word "music" (suggesting a universalist perspective) and "musics" (suggesting a relativist perspective), also decrying neoliberal influences on education. Addressing how the universalizing commercial conception of "music" inherent in the visions of society and education currently advanced by neoliberals contributes to subverting the health of culturally pluralistic, democratic societies could make their philosophy historically important.