Thriving in an equilibrium of disorder: mid-career professional classical musicians’ diverse artistic activities in music
Creators: name: GODWIN, Louise
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 360304
subject: Music performance
classificationCode: 390101
subject: Creative arts, media and communication curriculum and pedagogy

description: The study documented in this thesis examined what transpires when musicians educated in Western classical music, a sociocultural system associated with strict compliance with hierarchies of aesthetic value and musical standards, enter other spaces of music-making. Presenting a scholarly interpretation of the musicians' narratives of their subjective experiences of music-making, I explored the beliefs and values at play, and the complexities and paradoxes confronted. In the process, the study provided evidence that entering liminal borderland spaces of music-making enabled the interpellation of the musicians' broader socio-political values and beliefs as social action. This process created both tension and relief from the socially coded rules and regulatory concepts associated with Western classical music, constituting a force that propelled and shaped the musicians' constantly evolving identities and working lives. 
 
The research was designed as a qualitative study investigating the experiences of five professional conservatoire-trained musicians as individual cases. The data was generated through in-depth dialogic conversations. The participating musicians, aged between 35-42 at the time of the research conversations, were members of a cohort that had been under-researched. Having completed their tertiary and post-tertiary qualifications in the past 10-15 years, these musicians were the beneficiaries of the progressive changes to the higher music education model resulting from the concerted efforts of scholars to advocate for curricula changes since the start of the 21st century. In this way, the study contributes knowledge that helps to close the gap between higher music education curricula and portfolio career realities. 
 
The research argument was constructed upon four claims. First, by engaging in diverse artistic activities in music and embracing experiences of a wider social collectivity, conservatoire-trained musicians were opening up to interrelational encounters that traversed traditional musical and social boundaries. Through such experiences, the musicians were rewriting practices, beliefs and values associated with Western classical music. The experience of communal beingness within a nested network of musical communities provided the holding environment enabling the musicians to navigate career instability and precarity. This constituted the empirical contribution, capturing the lived experiences of mid-career musicians' precarious working lives and multifarious identities. Second, reframing these activities as social action, revealed musicians satisfying the desire to demonstrate a purpose that reflected their belief in music and the hope that their actions would offer modest contributions to society. This represented the substantive contribution of this thesis to higher music education, challenging the dominant assumptions about Western classical musician social status, cultural relevance and social contribution. Third, participatory music-making activities within the community were identified as a locus of change and transformation. Complexities and tensions associated with this work pointed toward silent and disclosed interests and intentions as critical determinants influencing both experience and outcome. 
 
Fourth, as a theoretical contribution, I argued that the development of socially responsive dispositions provided a meta-identity enabling the musicians to navigate disjuncts between expectations associated with professional musician identity and socio-political beliefs and values. Finally, I offered a conceptual contribution in the complex and multi-faceted regulative concept-in-action of the musician ideal. Recognising that the musicians simultaneously subscribed to two ontological perspectives on the ideal, represented by the objective normative and the pragmatic, the musician ideal offered a mechanism to sustain a reciprocal dialogue between both, thereby creating a form of functional harmony. This activity supported the musicians to ensure legitimacy and a sense of personal congruence across diverse socio-cultural contexts.