# The unmusical self *Written 5 August 2026.* As part of my doctoral research, I interviewed Polish immigrant parents of young children living in Iceland who had decided to sign up for and attend family musicking sessions offered in the Polish language. *You will be able to read more about the studies in research papers I co-authored with my supervisor Professor Helga Rut Gudmundsdottir which will be published soon, and in our upcoming book chapter.* One of the fathers I interviewed played ukulele and guitar. He had tried writing songs. When asked about his own musicality, he said: > [!quote] > I think that I am the biggest no-talent that walks the Earth as far as music is concerned. (…) I hope that our children won't inherit this from us.[^1] So, he *did* the thing. He did not believe he was *the kind of person* who did it. And he was worried enough about the belief to hope it would stop with him. **I put a first version of this argument to the History Standing Committee's mentoring session at the ISME World Conference in Montreal in July 2026: six minutes, no slides, and an open request for help with it.** It is worth saying plainly that this is an early draft of a line of enquiry that grows out of my doctoral work with immigrant families and that I intend to pursue properly in the future, not a completed study, and nothing below should be read as one. The working concept is the *unmusical self*. The claim I want to test is that the sense of being unmusical is not a psychological trait but a *historical artefact*: something manufactured, over roughly three centuries, by processes we can name. Start with how common the conviction is, and how poorly it tracks ability. The evidence below comes largely from a research programme conducted by Isabelle Peretz, who opened the Montreal conference with a keynote titled *How Music Sculpts Our Brain* and is an author on all three of the studies that follow.[^2] In a study conducted by Cuddy et al. (2005), nearly 17% of more than two thousand first-year psychology students reported being tone deaf; two hundred were then tested with the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, and many turned out to have *no* perceptual difficulty at all.[^3] That second group has a name. They are *false amusics*: adults who are neurologically ordinary and have nonetheless *concluded* that music is not for them (Sloboda et al., 2005).[^4] True congenital [[Amusia|amusia]] is rare. Measured across twenty thousand participants without relying on self-referral, its prevalence is 1.5%, against the 4% repeated for decades on the strength of a single test from 1980 (Peretz & Vuvan, 2017).[^5] The same study also found that self-report predicted amusia well enough to work as a screening index, and both things hold at once: saying you are tone deaf raises the odds that you are, and at a prevalence of 1.5% the overwhelming majority of people who say it still are not. So the *belief* is tracking something. It is not tracking the ear. ## Three layers The first layer is the late-eighteenth-century recasting of musical ability as *genius*. Other models of musicality had been available and remain available elsewhere: a social accomplishment, a craft held in respect without being thought exceptional, a form of participation nobody thought to assess. Romanticism raised the inspired creator above all of these and made his relationship to music different in kind rather than in degree. At this stage the separation is an *aesthetic* idea, not yet a way of teaching anyone anything. The second layer is the nineteenth-century conservatory, which *turned the idea into an institution*. It defined what would count as musical competence, and by defining it, defined everything outside its walls as amateur or—effectively—insufficient. A great deal fell outside: traditional and vernacular musics, and the whole range of ordinary musical activity (Small, 1998).[^6] The third layer is the filtering of that standard into twentieth-century general music education. School curricula across many European countries took on the conservatory's hierarchy, often without critically examining it: competence as demonstrable technical skill, assessed against professional benchmarks, in a classroom where nobody intended to become a professional. Children who could not meet the benchmark learned something durable about themselves. The *sorting* happened early, and it held. ## Why the belief survives the evidence A [[Spoiled identity|spoiled identity]], in Goffman's (1963) sense, is what results when a person's actual social identity diverges from what others expect of them: the discrepancy cuts the person off from full participation, and those so marked manage the damage by *passing*, concealing it, or by *covering*, keeping it from taking up much room.[^7] The *unmusical self* behaves like a spoiled identity of this kind. It is not an assessment of ability; *it is a self-perception that, once settled, organises a lifetime's relationship to music*. People who hold it have not failed to acquire a skill. They have learned to see themselves as the sort of person who does not make music, which is why the father's ukulele did not disturb his conclusion. The identity was never built out of evidence, so evidence does not dismantle it. ## Why systems keep producing it Taste is the ground on which class position most easily passes itself off as discernment, and musical taste does this better than almost anything else (Bourdieu, 1984).[^8] In a chapter written with Piotr Majewski, we put it this way: "there is hardly a better way of justifying social inequality based on class belonging, than highlighting someone's, so-called, poor taste in music" (Switala & Majewski, 2023, p. 149).[^9] The hierarchy also did not need to be imposed in order to travel. *[[Self-colonisation]]* names the process by which the elites of Europe's semi-peripheral societies absorbed imagined Western patterns voluntarily, treating the West as a kind of "civilisational superego", the one authority able to grant recognition (Kiossev, 2011, quoted in Switala & Majewski, 2023, p. 146).[^10] On this account the conservatory model was in some settings adopted precisely because adopting it was a claim to legitimacy, and where that happened its hierarchies were even sharpened, defended more fiercely than in the places they came from. The resulting condition has been called *[[Self-orientalisation|self-orientalisation]]*: institutions internalising the position of the other and taking up the very frameworks that place them below (Kovačević, 2008).[^11] ## What makes it a loss There is a scale beyond the individual. Speaking at the ISME World Conference in Helsinki in 2024, David Maggs argued that our failure to act on climate change owes less to any shortage of planetary facts than to our *inability to engage* with them, and that closing this *culture gap* is work the arts are needed for.[^12] My interest is narrower. One of the ways a society ends up with fewer people able to do that work is by teaching them, early and durably, that they are not the kind of person who does it. The argument finally rests on a premise about human capacity. *Making special*, the shaping of sound and movement into something more patterned and charged than function requires, is a condition of being human rather than a refinement available to some humans (Dissanayake, 1995).[^13] If that premise holds, then three centuries of manufacturing unmusical selves is not a series of unfortunate individual outcomes. It is dispossession: people *separated, by schooling, from something that was already theirs*. The father was not reporting a fact about himself. He was reporting the outcome of an education. Whether it reaches his children is a question *about schools*, not about the children. [^1]: From interviews conducted as part of my doctoral research. Switala, A., & Gudmundsdottir, H. (in preparation). *Family musicking with immigrant parents and toddlers: Experiences of Polish parents in Iceland*. Manuscript in preparation. The participant's name and his child's name are withheld here, and the ellipsis marks material omitted between two non-contiguous statements in the transcript. [^2]: Peretz, I. (2026, July 27). *How music sculpts our brain* [Keynote address]. 37th ISME World Conference, Montreal, Canada. https://www.ismeworldconference.org/isme26/12416355 [^3]: Cuddy, L. L., Balkwill, L.-L., Peretz, I., & Holden, R. R. (2005). Musical difficulties are rare: A study of "tone deafness" among university students. *Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1060*, 311–324. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1360.026 [^4]: Sloboda, J. A., Wise, K. J., & Peretz, I. (2005). Quantifying tone deafness in the general population. *Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1060*, 255–261. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1360.018 [^5]: Peretz, I., & Vuvan, D. T. (2017). Prevalence of congenital amusia. *European Journal of Human Genetics, 25*(5), 625–630. https://doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2017.15 [^6]: Small, C. (1998). *Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening*. Wesleyan University Press. [^7]: Goffman, E. (1963). *Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity*. Prentice-Hall. [^8]: Bourdieu, P. (1984). *Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste* (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1979) [^9]: Switala, A., & Majewski, P. (2023). The "Happy Island" of Polish music education: Self-orientalization of educational philosophies in post-Soviet Europe. In D. G. Hebert (Ed.), *Comparative and decolonial studies in philosophy of education* (pp. 141–162). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26221-0_9 [^10]: Kiossev, A. (2011). The self-colonizing metaphor. *Atlas of Transformation*. http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/s/self-colonization/the-self-colonizing-metaphor-alexander-kiossev.html — an unpaginated web text; the phrase is quoted at Switala & Majewski (2023), p. 146. [^11]: Kovačević, N. (2008). *Narrating post/communism: Colonial discourse and Europe's borderline civilization*. Routledge. [^12]: Maggs, D. (2024). *Keynote address*. 36th ISME World Conference, Helsinki, Finland. The keynote is unpublished. Maggs sets out the wider argument in *Art and the world after this* (Metcalf Foundation, 2021), https://metcalffoundation.com/publication/art-and-the-world-after-this/, and uses the phrase in his talk "The Culture Gap in the Climate Crisis" (National Arts Centre, Ottawa, 15 September 2024), https://nac-cna.ca/en/event/36991 [^13]: Dissanayake, E. (1995). *Homo aestheticus: Where art comes from and why*. University of Washington Press. (Original work published 1992)