Since the early twenty-first century, music education across the world has been shaped by neoliberal discourse extolling the benefits of music upon academic achievement, health and wellbeing, and social development. However, such benefits are far from universal; on the contrary, music-making often reveals our shortcomings and dependencies. This highlights an urgent need for music education to be reframed by an understanding of ‘musical vulnerability’: our inherent and situational openness to being affected by the semantic and somatic properties of music-making.

Drawing on existing vulnerability studies, this book evaluates how music-making can foster both positive receptivity and negative susceptibility, depending on its delineation of self-identity, social identity, and space, and its embodiment through aural receptivity, mimetic participation, and affective transmission. Through phenomenological, ethnographic research with teachers and pupils, it exposes how values espoused in the music classroom require the personal and interpersonal negotiation of conflicting musical expectations, identities, and abilities. It makes recommendations for music education policymakers, teachers, and researchers in diverse global contexts, suggesting the importance of developing ‘pedagogies of vulnerability’ in order to foster caring classroom music-making praxes that acknowledge music’s capacity both to heal and to harm.