Musical vulnerability: Receptivity, susceptibility, and care in the Key Stage 3 music classroom

Over the past decade, music education policy, pedagogy, and research in England has been shaped by a neoliberal discourse of invulnerability, in which the benefits of music upon academic achievement, health and wellbeing, and social development have been extolled for their influence upon the education of prosperous and independent individuals. However, research in music studies suggests that such benefits are far from universal. On the contrary, music-making—especially within compulsory classroom education—often reveals individuals’ shortcomings and dependencies.

Such diverse experiences 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 by the semantic and somatic properties of music. Drawing on existing vulnerability studies, I evaluate how music 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.

Using a two-phase phenomenological ethnography, I investigate teachers’ and pupils’ lived experiences of musical vulnerability in the Key Stage 3 (KS3) music classroom (ages 11–14). In Phase 1, interviews with music teachers reveal the interaction between interpersonal and personal vulnerabilities—including musical, personality, and neurological differences—in instances of musical receptivity and susceptibility. Phase 2 comprises ethnographic observations and a focus group interview with pupils in one KS3 music class. It exposes how values espoused in the music classroom require pupils to negotiate conflicting musical expectations, identities, and abilities while making music together. While this can prompt fruitful compromise and resilience, it can also cause exclusion and resignation. I therefore conclude that music education policy, pedagogy, and research should prioritise a ‘critical pedagogy of care’, acknowledging music’s capacity both to heal and to harm, and equipping teachers and pupils to respond critically and care-fully in situations of musical vulnerability.