Designing arts curriculum today is an extremely demanding task due to the challenges arising from the globally substantial neglect of arts in the education system, which is especially evident in the timetable, arts being represented with the least number of teaching hours. Effective learning cannot be obtained without appropriate teaching in different areas. It is easily overlooked that arts significantly influence the overall development of students and that the natural integration of different areas of human activity is achieved by interdisciplinary connections within STEAM. The theoretical part of the paper is based on the genesis of arts education, which is reflected in the comprehensive and comparative overview of the development of arts education in the world and in Croatia. For a deeper understanding of the matter, important parts of the work are related to contemporary research in the teaching of arts subjects, primarily aimed at finding connections between learning arts subjects and the overall development of students during primary and secondary education. The aesthetics of arts education has greatly influenced the theoretical definition of the curriculum throughout history, which is also problematized in the paper. In the didactic-methodological aspect, arts should be defined clearly and "plastically" enough: they are to be placed in a contemporary constructivist context and interdisciplinary connections are to be established, in this case through the prism of an open model of teaching and learning the subject of Music. In the arts curriculum, this is the first proclaimed model of open education (2006). The effectiveness of the didactic concept of open education, in relation to frontal instruction, is achieved in the development of student creativity, independence, curiosity, as well as a positive attitude towards learning and school. As this model has been derived from the broader concept of open education, which in the past decade lacked plausible theoretical definitions of the same model resulting from modern knowledge about education, empirical research on the sample of 217 teachers of urban and suburban schools from different parts of Croatia has identified the representation of the following dimensions of open education in the subject of Music: organizational opening (shaping the work environment - pleasant and supportive classroom atmosphere), methodological opening (learning as a self-active construction process of the individual - own learning path), content opening (self-determination and co-determination of content - student interests guided learning); social opening (social / personal opening with basic democracy and student participation in shaping lessons, framework conditions and structure of rules - participation and respect of students in the preparation and organization of lessons) and institutional opening of teaching and learning (connection of school and extracurricular life forms - possibility of developing democratic attitudes and competences). The results of the research indicate that the teachers of the subject of Music do not use freedom in the dimensions of organizational and content opening, which according to the definition of the open model should actually be the basis of the opening. The organization of the learning and teaching process is quite inflexible. A strong focus on textbook content indicates a lack of certainty in their own didactic-methodological ideas, a lack of ambition of teachers, but also a lack of critical thinking about relevant and current content. As expected, the dimensions of didactic-methodological and institutional opening have been confirmed to be low in practice. Conversation and demonstration methods provide opportunities for didacticmethodological opening, however both methods in practice are based on guiding through the processes of artistic reception, students being asked the same or similar questions about the components of a work of art. Limited time and inflexible timetable do not actually allow teachers and students to affirm the dimension of institutional opening, according to which more significant cooperation would be achieved with artists, cultural and artistic institutions, as well as with parents and the local community. As the traditional approach with limited student participation is still present in our schools, expectations of the social opening were low, but only new research should prove that it is not a question of apparent student empowerment - tokenism, and that students really do self-evaluation, peer evaluation as well as teaching evaluation. Socio-demographic data from the research indicate that the dimensions of didacticmethodological and social opening are more frequent among female teachers, but also that there is no statistically significant difference between work experience and assessment of the presence of open education dimensions, and that there is no statistically significant difference between the teachers' qualifications and their estimates of the frequency of the implementation of the dimensions of open education. The comparative advantages of individual professions in the model focused mainly on listening to and getting to know music do not come to the fore. In conclusion, it can be pointed out that teachers working in urban schools implement the content opening dimension more frequently than their colleagues working in suburban schools. Since this is the first systematic research of the concept of open teaching in the arts curriculum, its contribution to science is reflected in determining the qualitative characteristics and representation of certain dimensions of openness. In the future, the effectiveness of the dimensions of openness to educational outcomes can be explored, which is especially important for the design of the optimal subject curriculum, as well as the arts curriculum.