ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the experiences of a classical music teacher who is a survivor of trauma, or rather part of collective that has been and continues to experience the impact of colonization and its associated trauma. Colonization has disrupted the intergenerational transmission of this collectives' languages, rituals, and cultural knowledge and complicates the teacher's “day job,” which is to lift up, sustain, and celebrate the classical music practices of the colonizing settlers. This critical autoethnographic chapter describes how these two seemingly disparate worlds are reconciled in the music studio and how the teacher pedagogically responds to other members of the collective when they encounter musical objects or musical situations that may trigger a trauma response. This chapter reports testimonies witnessed through “studio-ing,” a concept adapted from Small's musicking metaphor. It reconceptualizes the one-to-one voice teaching studio for a South Pacific context by moving away from Eurocentric historic and conceptual frameworks and exploring the scholarship and practices of local educationists and researchers. It demonstrates that music education sites, and in particular the one-to-one studio, can act as a meeting ground and creative space that promotes healing and builds resilience through music.
