A Comparative Study on the Basic Music Education in Chinese and Western Primary and Secondary Schools

China’s basic music education is still in a state of passive development. Most primary and secondary schools do not pay enough attention to basic music education, and the society’s cognition of basic music education is not comprehensive enough, and even often biased, with old ideas and closed ideas. Compared with China’s basic music education, the western basic music education has more extroverted personality characteristics. Western basic music education fully meets the law of children’s learning, development and growth, and schools and society also have corresponding music institutions to meet the needs of students to explore music. In addition, the development of basic music education in China is in the environment of exam-oriented education. Under the strong pressure of exam-oriented education, the neglect of music education is not conducive to the mental health development of students, which leads to their emotional indifference and lack of empathic ability. Therefore, according to the current situation, the author chose to conduct interviews and relevant literature reference and found that Chinese students do not have music perception, practice and artistic practice, so it is necessary to change the basic music education.