Abstract:
The popularity of guitar has ensured that it has become a significant aspect of music in leisure. This chapter explores and reflects on the author’s personal leisure guitar experiences through six autoethnographic meditations. Themes from the meditations include tacit experiences, closeness, community, curiosity, and ethical dimensions associated with leisure guitar culture. These themes suggest an embodied view of music and a social connectedness with a living music culture. Using a Foucaultian lens, these themes are critically positioned alongside the experience of the neoliberal, schooled musical subject, who encounters expressions of power and subjectification in narrow, limiting terms. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the reflective process of autoethnography, an awareness and sensitivity of the body, and explorations of emergent subject positions are critical for a reconstituted music education and that leisure and music education can be envisaged together as synchronic forms of musical action.
