As an interdisciplinary field integrating psychology, medicine, and musicology, music therapy employs systematic interventions to improve individuals’ psychological states and enhance emotional expression and social adaptability. Its core mechanism is to leverage music’s nonverbal communicative nature to stimulate individuals’ internal emotional resources within a safe, accepting environment, thereby achieving therapeutic goals such as emotion regulation, cognitive reconstruction, and behavioral improvement. These disciplinary characteristics give music therapy inherent potential to intervene in educational settings. Against the backdrop of deepening basic education curriculum reform, cultivating students’ core competencies has become a central proposition of educational transformation, and primary and secondary school music education has been entrusted with richer educational expectations that transcend mere aesthetic experience. When the concepts and methodologies of music therapy are organically integrated into school music teaching, its inherent psychological support functions can precisely address the increasingly prominent demands for emotion management and the interpersonal dilemmas arising from adolescents’ growth. It also provides a new practical path for implementing the core competencies of the music discipline. Based on this understanding, this paper elaborates on the connotation of music therapy, systematically demonstrates its educational value from three dimensions: students’ psychological development, expansion of disciplinary functions, and cultivation of socially competent talents, analyzes the contemporary challenges confronting primary and secondary school music education, and finally puts forward four implementation countermeasures covering concept renewal, space construction, method integration, and faculty development. It aims to offer theoretical support and practical references for the in-depth integration of music education and psychological nurturing.