Music education advocates often appeal to the idea that music is a universal language. This metaphor, popularized in the nineteenth century (Longfellow, 1835), supports several related beliefs: that communicating through this universal language requires a fixed set of skills; that some students possess a greater capacity to acquire these skills; and further, that learning this common language is intrinsically beneficial, especially for students deemed more gifted for music. Scholars in various fields, however, have long complicated such claims. Ethnomusicologists (e.g., Herzog, 1939, Merriam, 1964, Nettl, 1983) have shown how definitions of music and the skills associated with musicking vary radically across the world’s cultures. Music education researchers (e.g., Bowman, 1983; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Schwadron, 1965) have outlined how investments in music’s universality and autonomy naturalize and reinforce the values of the dominant culture.Building upon these ongoing conversations, we argue that teaching approaches premissed upon music as a universally legible and beneficial learning pursuit can reproduce the very inequities and exclusions they seek to redress-with potentially harmful consequences (Bradley, 2009). In addition to privileging the cultural status-quo, conceptions of musicality as a measurable set of skills to be evaluated promotes perfectionism, unrealistic or misguided expectations, competitive systems that privilege certain learners, a “grinding” culture, and practices that invalidate students’ identities and personhood, all of which can cause emotional and physical distress (Hess, 2024). This conceptual-historical and philosophical project proposes an alternative to universalizing, competitive models of musical ability development. Rethinking the ubiquitous metaphor of musical gifts, we consider the conceptual history of “giftedness” and examine the mechanics of literal gift economies, which are premissed upon relationality, reciprocity, and a diversity of gifts. Next, we show how this metaphor reinforces care ethics scholars’ assertion that humans are relational beings with unique needs and strengths who develop through community.Ultimately, we show how and why the care-based approach inherent to a music-educational gift economy has the potential to promote genuine inclusivity, healing, and equity. We draw upon Noddings’s (2013) relational ethics as well as Hendricks’s (2025) concepts of caring “for, about, and with,” to imagine ways that teachers and learners might explore a more pluralist conception of musicking. Through this lens, we envision ways in which teachers and learners might bring “their own set of strengths, weaknesses, and aspirations to their collaborative music-making” (Hendricks, 2025, p. 9) and set aside hierarchical, achievement-oriented approaches to validate multifarious musical identities and expressions.