Despite a growing body of advocacy for the beneficial effects of music education upon individuals' development and wellbeing, lived experiences in the music classroom are testament to a diversity of both positive and negative musical encounters. For some pupils, classroom music-making is characterized by opportunities, achievements, and friendships. But for others it is redolent of shortcomings, disappointments, and conflicts. This reveals an urgent need for researchers and practitioners to acknowledge pupils' "musical vulnerability": their inherent and situational openness to being affected by the semantic and somatic properties of music.In this essay, I offer a detailed conceptualization of musical vulnerability and its place in music education. I outline Judith Butler's seminal theory of linguistic vulnerability, and evaluate how her conviction that language can cause hurt and harm may help redress the simplistic coupling of music and wellbeing lauded by music education advocacy. Drawing upon feminist vulnerability studies, I then reflect upon the distinctive experiences of inherent, situational, and pathogenic musical vulnerabilities in the classroom, and their relation to institutional, interpersonal, and individual responses to music's particular semantic and somatic properties. I conclude by proposing how the conceptualization of musical vulnerability could transform music education through cultivating a renewed ethic of care.
Participatory performance, as defined by Thomas Turino, holds the potential to contribute to enhanced social bonding, cooperation, and the realisation of community among participantsdespite the conflict or 'paradox' between selfexpression and collective affiliation which it often provokes. This study considers how managing this underlying 'paradox of belonging' can positively contribute to the development of participatory performance's social benefits. It presents a case study of practitioner research situated in a UK secondary school, in which pupils (aged eleven to thirteen) faced the paradox of belonging during participatory performances of Terry Riley's In C. Pupils perceived an emerging conflict between individual ability and interpersonal affinity, and in response proposed and practised different models of leadership to avoid, activate, and transcend the paradox. The study concludes by evaluating how these same responses could allow other participatory practices in secondary music classrooms to equip pupils to negotiate the paradox of belonging.
Although teachers and researchers frequently acknowledge that music education can benefit pupils’ academic achievement, health and well-being, and social development, classroom music-making can have long-lasting, detrimental impacts. Individuals’ experiences of failure, disappointment, and exclusion in the music classroom highlight an urgent need for music education to be reframed by an understanding of “musical vulnerability”: individuals’ inherent and situational openness to being affected—positively or negatively—by the semantic and somatic properties of music-making. Drawing on existing vulnerability studies, I evaluate how classroom music-making can foster both positive receptivity and negative susceptibility, depending on its delineation of identity and physical embodiment. I then present reductive analyses of phenomenologically-informed interviews in which 12 secondary music teachers described their past experiences of being pupils, and their present experiences of teaching pupils, in music classrooms in the United Kingdom. Using excerpts from their observations of teaching pupils, I describe how interactions between individuals’ interpersonal and personal vulnerabilities—including personality, musical, and neurological differences—affected occasions of musical receptivity and susceptibility. As individuals negotiated conflicting musical expectations, they sometimes fostered fruitful resilience but sometimes encountered profound resignation. I draw on these findings to construct a preliminary typology of musical vulnerability and emphasize the need for future research into proactive differentiation in the music classroom.
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