Beyond Excellence: Aesthetic Care in Gifted Music Education

14.3.2026 13 Like 0 kommenttia

Does elite music training undermine the spirit of the young artist? This blog post, written by Chun Li, delves into ‘aesthetic care’ in gifted music education—a transformative framework devised in a doctoral research project at the Sibelius Academy. It transcends the notion of ‘care’ as just performance maintenance, promoting a pedagogical change that values a student’s lived experiences over technical mastery. 

Introduction

A child with extraordinary musical gifts may build a dazzling competition record, yet grow increasingly silent about the music itself. A masterclass is meticulously designed, every gesture corrected, every phrase optimized, yet there is no space to speak of spontaneity.

When a music education system for children gifted for music appears highly successful, producing flawless performances while gradually eroding sensitivity and lived experience, we are left with a troubling question: Can such a specialist education still be called ‘aesthetic’?

In this blog post, I describe the core ideas related to the first publication of my doctoral research project, Aesthetic Care in Music Education Professionalism: An Action Research Project in a Specialist Music Program in Finland, where we delve deep into aesthetic care and aesthetic experience in gifted music education (Li & López-Íñiguez, 2026).

The Hidden Costs of Musical Excellence

Empirical research suggests that psychological strain is not an exception but a common condition in gifted music education. Studies consistently report high levels of performance anxiety, maladaptive perfectionism, chronic stress, and identity-related pressure among musically gifted students, particularly in competitive and highly selective training environments (e.g., Papageorgi et al., 2013; Heye, 2025). Although these difficulties appear systematically across age groups, institutions, and national contexts, they are particularly salient in the small vulnerable minority of gifted and talented learners. Together, the evidence challenges the assumption that technical excellence and psychological flourishing naturally coincide in gifted music education.

What Do We Mean by Care & Aesthetic Care

In gifted music education, care is a word that appears frequently and yet is rarely examined. It is most often understood in instrumental terms: care as support that helps students succeed more efficiently, care as emotional regulation in the service of sustained performance. Within this logic, care functions as a stabilizing mechanism, ensuring that talent remains productive and excellence uninterrupted.

What is aesthetic care? While traditional constructs like aesthetic judgment (Kant, 1790) or aesthetic competence (Eisner, 2002) focus on evaluating performance and mastering technical standards, they often create a ‘sterile’ environment where every gesture is corrected, yet the human element is sidelined. In contrast, aesthetic care distinguishes itself by moving beyond individual achievement to embrace the relational and ethical dimensions of learning. Unlike aesthetic sensitivity (Reimer, 1965), which emphasizes the perception of sound and form, or aesthetic experience (Dewey, 1934), which centers on an individual’s internal emotional response, aesthetic care in music (Li & López-Íñiguez, 2026) explicitly includes pedagogical responsiveness and relational attentiveness. It acknowledges the student’s vulnerability and agency, ensuring that musical refinement is not pursued at the expense of the person.

By bridging the gap between artistic excellence and ethical responsibility, aesthetic care attends to the fragility of musical experience itself—to moments of uncertainty, excess sensitivity, or not-yet-articulated meaning. It requires patience with what has not yet taken shape, and a willingness to dwell with sound, rather than constantly training it toward predetermined ends. Furthermore, it aims at transforming music education from a purely technical discipline into a holistic, supportive practice that nurtures both the artist and the human being.

Why Aesthetic Care Matters in Gifted Music Education

The need for aesthetic care in gifted music education does not arise because talented students receive too little care, but because the kind of care currently available is narrowly framed. Much of what counts as care is oriented toward sustaining performance—helping students cope, regulate, and endure—so that musical excellence can continue uninterrupted. Yet this leaves largely unexamined a more fundamental question: how students are actually touched by music, and how their relation to sound, expression, and meaning is allowed to form.

In gifted contexts, the deeper risk is rarely failure. It is premature closure—the early solidification of identity into a recognizable, performable type of musician, before aesthetic experience has had the space to unfold in its own time. Aesthetic care intervenes precisely here. It is concerned not with how well music is executed, but with how musical experience is lived, sustained, and protected from being reduced to function. The question, then, is not whether gifted students receive enough care, but what kind of care is imaginable within our current aesthetic regime.

Conceptualizing Aesthetic Care as a Teaching Framework

Aesthetic care can be understood as a guiding principle that shapes both the goals and the methods of gifted music education. Conceptually, it prioritizes the student’s experience of music over mere technical mastery, attending to moments of vulnerability, curiosity, and emergent expression. Operationalizing this principle in the classroom requires creating space for exploration, reflection, and attentive listening—practices that encourage students to ‘inhabit’ music rather than simply reproduce it. In practice, a teaching framework informed by aesthetic care might include: offering exercises that invite uncertainty rather than immediate correctness, structuring lessons to allow improvisation and personal interpretation, and fostering discussions that explore the emotional and phenomenological dimensions of sound. Rather than being an optional add-on, such a framework positions aesthetic care as a core dimension of musical development, supporting students not just in their technical growth but in their evolving musical identity and capacity for meaningful experience.

Ten Principles for Enacting Aesthetic Care

1. Dialogic aesthetic engagement: Learning is not a one-way correction but a dynamic, two-way conversation where both teacher and student contribute to the artistic meaning.
2. Ethical-relational care: The pedagogical relationship prioritizes the student’s well-being and vulnerability over the mere clinical perfection of a musical performance.
3. Co-agency in aesthetic creation: Artistic outcomes are the result of a shared partnership where the student’s voice and choices are as valid as the teacher’s expertise.
4. Responsive aesthetic attunement: The teacher remains deeply sensitive to the student’s immediate emotional and technical needs, adjusting their guidance in real-time.
5. Culturally mediated experience: Aesthetic learning is understood as being deeply rooted in the diverse social, historical, and cultural backgrounds that each participant brings to the music.
6. Multi-voiced participation: The learning space encourages a variety of perspectives and interpretations, moving away from a single, authoritative “standard” of beauty.
7. Reflective aesthetic consciousness: Students are encouraged to think critically about their own artistic choices, fostering a deeper self-awareness of why they create the way they do.
8. Developmental differentiation: Instruction is tailored to the unique stage of each student’s growth, acknowledging that every individual’s path to mastery is different.
9. Integrative musicianship: Technical skill, theoretical knowledge, and emotional expression are woven together into a unified, holistic practice rather than taught as isolated parts.
10. Transformative aesthetic encounters: Music education aims to be a life-changing experience that reshapes the student’s identity and their understanding of the world.

About this blog post

This blog post has been written to recognize Gifted Awareness Week, an initiative encouraged by numerous international organizations that support gifted and talented individuals. It is celebrated on March 14, which coincides with the birth of Albert Einstein and highlights exceptional creativity in any field. #GiftedAwarenessWeek

Writer

Doctoral Researcher Chun Li

Read more about Chun Li’s doctoral project at the Sibelius Academy: https://blogit.uniarts.fi/en/post/promoting-music-teachers-aesthetic-care-and-support-of-gifted-childrens-aesthetic-existence-in-specialist-music-education/ 

References

• Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Minton, Balch & Company.
• Eisner, E. W. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. Yale University Press.
• Heye, A. (2025). Young talented musicians under pressure? Findings of chronic stress among highly musically gifted adolescents in Germany. In M.-A. Camp, X. Bouvier, S. Petersen, & A. Kull (Eds.), Musical talent and its promotion in Chinese and Western worlds (pp. 49–62). Chronos.
• Kant, I. (1790/2000). Critique of the power of judgment (P. Guyer, trans.). Cambridge University Press.
• Li, C., & López-Íñiguez, G. (2026). Rethinking gifted music education through aesthetic care: A critical-theoretical perspective (opens in new window). Online First Publication. Gifted Education International.
• Papageorgi, I., Creech, A., & Welch, G. (2013). Perceived performance anxiety in advanced musicians specializing in different musical genres. Psychology of Music, 41(1), 18–41.
• Reimer, B. (1989). A philosophy of music education (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall.