Description:
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.
Review Quotes:
'An important contribution to critical music education studies, this book outlines new directions for theorising music education, most notably the concept of musical vulnerability. As MacGregor eloquently demonstrates, it is because people have powerful positive experiences of music that they can also have very strong negative experiences, and music education policy and practice must take this fundamental truth into account. As such, this book will be eagerly read by both music and education scholars internationally.'
--Anna Bull, University of York, United Kingdom
'With insightful examples and theoretical depth, Musical Vulnerability compellingly departs from the celebratory narratives of music for individual and social betterment to insist upon a more nuanced perspective on school music education. A thought-provoking impetus to reshape music education policy, practice, and research in compassionate, relational, and ethical ways.'
--Alexis Anja Kallio, Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University, Australia
'Grounded in solid empirical work and rigorously theorised, Musical Vulnerability offers a provocative challenge to the belief that the teaching of music is without risks. Drawing attention to music's semantic and somatic qualities, MacGregor argues compellingly for the importance of a "pedagogy of vulnerability".'
--Roger Mantie, University of Toronto, Canada