ABSTRACT
The child who is not singled out as gifted will continue her music lessons with only half her mind on the job. Progress will be slow, falter, or come to a stop. A series of laboured, if not straightforwardly atrocious performances will be the unheeded signposts to a showdown. The child begins to avoid practising. The teacher urges her to practise and then grows indifferent. The parent urges her to practise and then gets angry. Learning the language of music is a means to a number of different ends of which performing music is just one. The Winnicottian music lesson would work against and seek to dismantle the structures of compliance that hold the traditional music lesson in place. The first and most subversive step in this direction would be to depose performance as the governing principle of the music lesson and enthrone play in its stead. Music lessons conducted under the principle of play would promise no results.
