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Musicking Otherwise: Disrupting the Classical Music Paradigm Through Personal Testimony, Feminist Frameworks, and Music Therapy Concepts
Book chapter

Musicking Otherwise: Disrupting the Classical Music Paradigm Through Personal Testimony, Feminist Frameworks, and Music Therapy Concepts

Stephenie Sofield and Jasmine Edwards
The Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Music Education, pp 99-125
14 Oct 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197612507.013.0024

Abstract

disruption embodiment emotion Music Education and Pedagogy therapy Trauma
This chapter explores, through a music therapy framework, music’s capacity for catalyzing human emotional and embodied experience. The authors explore ways to hold music pedagogy accountable in its reenactment and perpetuation of oppressive systems, such as adultism, racism, and gender-based violence. Music is explored as an opportunity for disruption in the face of these various forms of hierarchical violence. The authors suggest that the myriad of functions of music in music therapy practice hold potentially powerful insights for music education. Current educational practices support a genealogy of trauma through a pedagogy that inadvertently supports a disconnection from the Self as necessary for mastery over and objectification of musical processes. Thus, music becomes an object through which rationality and objectivity (White, male, and adult) are held as ideal over embodiment and emotionality (non-White, non-male, and child). The authors suggest that aspects of music therapy theory and practice hold frameworks that could be potentially useful to music educators in terms of their pedagogical practice. The reflections in this chapter are largely influenced by the authors’ experiences as classically trained musicians who are now practicing music therapists and educators. This chapter draws from intersectional feminism, Black Feminism, trauma theory, feminist therapy practice, and restorative pedagogy.

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