In the last two decades, the humanitarian sector and its donors have increasingly sponsored music programs in Jordan. Through their work with humanitarian organizations, music teachers and administrators come to engage with the discourses, programming, and infrastructures of a broader, global humanitarian industry. This paper asks: how do humanitarian music programs participate in knowledge production in Arab music, and to what extent do humanitarian discourses and ideologies come to inform this knowledge production (Fassin 2011)? I argue that humanitarian music programs engage with Arab musical practices through curriculum development, public-facing concerts and mapping projects, and also in their management of material resources. In so doing, music teachers and administrators balance donors’ and institutions’ expectations with their own interests in diversifying Arab music pedagogy and increasing the accessibility of Arab music education. Humanitarian norms, I suggest, come to shape both program design and the daily practices of Arab music pedagogy, particularly considering the humanitarian logics of vulnerability (Turner 2021), efficiency and urgency (Ndaliko and Anderson 2020), compassion and non-compassion (Bornstein 2012, Mittermaier 2019), malleability to humanitarian power as a “precondition of care” (Espiritu et al. 2022), and the privileging of quantifiable metrics (e.g., rankings) and cost-benefit analysis. While such norms may govern contemporary “humanitarian” music programs, humanitarian organizations also provide relatively flexible spaces for pedagogical experimentation in comparison to the conservatory-style environments of numerous established music institutions in Arab-majority countries. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research in Jordan, the discussion analyzes interviews with music teachers, music therapists, and administrators who work in music programs for Syrian and Palestinian refugees in Amman. Other materials under consideration include ethnographic sketches of concerts, as well as public-facing media projects, such as the NGO Action for Hope’s project “Syria Music Map” and their pedagogical materials that propose “A Guide to an Alternative Music Education.” Everyday musical practices, and musicians’ goals (Beckles-Willson 2013), reveal how the material contexts and constraints of a global humanitarian industry come to shape contemporary pedagogy, performance, and knowledge production in Arab music. More broadly, this work repositions humanitarian organizations and local NGOs as a new vanguard of arts patrons, with significant power and responsibility (Ndaliko and Anderson 2020).