The aim of this article is to explore how immigrant students experience and enact musical agency inside and outside the music lessons in three Nordic lower secondary schools. The research was designed as a multi-sited ethnographic study and the data were collected in Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo through classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students. The 19 interviews made with a total of 30 students are especially focused in this article. The findings show that the student interviewees possessed multiple repertoires of ways of being and acting in music, and also that the forms and aspects of musical agency exercised and emphasised inside and outside music lessons were quite different ones. Furthermore, much of the students' musical competence was not recognised within the school setting. These findings are discussed with respect to what special needs immigrant students may have in a music education situation, and the students' multiple repertoires are viewed in relation to their potential for constituting an imperative resource for building of future, democratic educational practices. (Contains 4 notes.)