Making music work: Sustainable portfolio careers for Australian musicians

[NOTE: An Open Access version of this manuscript will be available shortly.] Research in higher music education acknowledges a persistent divide between performance studies and the realities of musicians’ work. Alongside this is global pressure for curriculum that is more supportive of students’ metacognitive engagement, experiential learning and career preparation. However, the provision of these curricular elements is insufficient unless students recognise their value and engage in them at a deep level; this is because career-long employability in precarious industries such as music is underpinned by life-long and self-regulated learning. This study featured a scaffolded employability intervention with seven student musicians at a European institution. The study had three aims: to understand the students’ career-related thinking and confidence; to determine whether the intervention might be scalable; and to gauge the intervention’s potential efficacy in helping students to become conscious of their learner identity. Results indicate that student musicians are aware of the need to extend their professional capabilities but unaware of how to address these deficits. Participants realised that “learning how to learn” would help them achieve personal-professional goals. The findings suggest that similar in-curricular interventions have the potential to foster a more holistic vision of performance education such that aspiring musicians might graduate as both skilled professionals and agentic learners.

A breadth of literature on music education and careers illustrates that the working lives of musicians are diverse and complex, and yet music graduates appear to struggle to create and sustain their careers. With a focus on career, curriculum and pedagogical approaches, this chapter considers how and in what contexts musicians develop the multiple musical identities under which the complex work of a musician might be negotiated. The chapter’s empirical component explores the narratives of 24 students enrolled at an Australian conservatorium. The students reported a range of experience in both music and non-music work, and the capacity to shift their musician identity in line with specific work and learning situations. The data revealed complex relationships between participants’ experiences of concurrent formal learning and work. Gendered differences in the types and reporting of work emerged. Of note, most male musicians self-assessed as more confident than their female peers in each of five quantitative measures ranging from academic self-efficacy to ethical and responsible behaviour. Rather than providing a core curriculum for practice and critical thinking for potential music workers, we argue that tertiary education should contribute to the musician identity that is already developing on the basis of students’ early music and non-music work.

COVID-19 has had a profound impact on how music is taught and practised, not least because the reliance of so many musical activities on physical proximity has been turned on its head. With virtual lessons and ensembles becoming the norm, the move to online has challenged music educators to consider how we might do things differently in the future. This includes what we want to teach, who we want to have access to education, and for which careers we might be preparing students. The three-year Making Music Work (MMW) study examined the life and work experiences of over 600 Australian musicians (Bartleet, et. al., 2020). The report shares how musicians make their portfolio careers "work"-that is, how they build and sustain their careers. We also asked about their education and work histories, their motivations and feelings about music and work, and their experiences of being a musician in Australia.

Whilst recent research has begun to expose the early career experiences of graduate musicians, few studies have looked at musicians’ work across the career lifespan. This short article reports from a study that analysed the work of musicians in early, mid and late-career. The study used lifespan perspective theory to understand how musicians select and optimise their opportunities, the strategies they employ to maintain their desired level and type of work, and the impact of career decision making on their musician identities. The findings suggest that when higher music education fails to develop the practice of student musicians — to educate the whole musician — musicians’ financial, emotional and physical well-being are negatively impacted not just in early career but across the career lifespan. Opportunities for changing higher music education programs include engaging students in work integrated learning (WIL) experiences; recognising and fostering the existing and previous practice of student musicians; and modelling the “protean” musician career as the career norm throughout history rather than as a new phenomenon.

This article discusses a range of significant issues for consideration by music higher education institutions when preparing their students for a portfolio career in music. Drawing on insights from a review of literature undertaken as part of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project, Making Music Work: Sustainable portfolio careers for Australian musicians, the article explores the dynamic structure of the music sector and the ways in which musicians are undertaking a portfolio of roles in order to ensure financial and creative sustainability. In particular, the article focuses on five career and educational issues of importance: enterprise and entrepreneurship, mobility, digitisation, gender parity, and health and wellbeing – when preparing graduates for a portfolio career reality.

Women composers are an under-studied population within the creative workforce. This study reports on 225 surveys with women composers internationally. Using a human capital lens, we aim to shed more light on the nature of women composers' careers and their career trajectories, focusing more specifically on the way they work, how they enter the industry, how they build a reputation, and how they support and sustain their careers. The survey consisted of mostly open-ended questions alongside selected closed questions; data were analyzed using content analysis. Findings highlight the composers' relationships with performers, the importance of networks and social capital, the role of social media and online presence, family support and external funding, and the prevalence of multiple roles due to changing career aspirations. Implications of these findings indicate a need to better prepare women for a career in music composition, the need for more grant and funding options, the need for composers to effectively use the online space to enhance visibility and find support and the need for a collaborative effort to reduce gender inequity in the industry.

This is a short article on what musicians do for a living, using data reported in scholarly articles and presented in a form that is appropriate for the lay reader.

Career decision-making is arguably at its most complex within professions where work is precarious and career calling is strong. This article reports from a study that examined the career decision-making of creative industries workers, for whom career decisions can impact psychological well-being and identity just as much as they impact individuals’ work and career. The respondents were 693 creative industries workers who used a largely open-ended survey to create in-depth reflections on formative moments and career decision-making. Analysis involved the theoretical model of self-authorship, which provides a way of understanding how people employ their sense of self to make meaning of their experiences. The self-authorship process emerged as a complex, non-linear and consistent feature of career decision-making. Theoretical contributions include a non-linear view of self-authorship that exposes the authorship of visible and covert multiple selves prompted by both proactive and reactive identity work.

Recent decades have seen gender and feminist research emerge as major fields of enquiry in musicology and to a far lesser extent, music education. While these fields have increased awareness of the issues confronting women and other marginalised groups, the pedagogical practices and curricular design that might support aspiring women composers are in urgent need of attention. This article reports from an international survey of women composers (n=225), who in western art music continue to experience a masculine bias that has its roots in the past. The findings in the survey were focused on income, work and learning, relationships and networks, and gender. Numerous composers surveyed noted the under-representation of music composed by women in their higher education curricula. They also described their unpreparedness for a career in music. The article explores the issue of gender in music composition and makes practical recommendations for a more gender balanced music curriculum in higher education.

Traditional pedagogies in the arts in higher education focus largely on the studio experience in which a novice artist studies under one or more master teachers (e.g., Don, Garvey & Sadeghpour, 2009). In more recent times, however, a shift in higher education curriculum and pedagogy in the arts has expanded this traditional conservatory model of training to include, amongst other components, career self-management and enterprise creation -- in a word, entrepreneurship. This chapter examines the developing field of arts enterprise and arts entrepreneurship in higher education in a multinational context, with a particular emphasis on programs at the university level. The field is contextualized within the broader landscape of the creative industries and the consequent development of knowledge, skills, and the habits of mind necessary for artistic venture creation, sustainability, and success. While the discourse about learning and teaching for business entrepreneurship is well established (e.g., Fiet, 2001), equivalent conversations about arts enterprise and entrepreneurship have only recently begun to occur (Beckman, 2007, 2011; Essig, 2009). This chapter will address the contested definitions of key terms and concepts and also the question of how arts educators, while mindful of the pedagogic traditions of the arts school, are also drawing on the pedagogies of business entrepreneurship and cognitive theories of entrepreneurship to create innovative new trans-disciplinary signature pedagogies for creative enterprise and entrepreneurship education in the arts. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/47942/

Musicians are acknowledged to lead complex working lives, often characterised as portfolio careers. The higher music education research literature has tended to focus on preparing students for rich working lives and multiple identity realisations across potential roles. Extant literature does not address the area of work-life balance, which this paper begins to explore, as the authors seek to better understand potential challenges around combining music graduates' multivariate ambitions, commitments and identities as musicians in the world. Rich data are presented, following interviews with professional musicians in London, UK, discussing health, portfolio careers and family. The authors conclude that more research is required to gain a deeper understanding of work-life balance for musicians, and that pedagogical approaches in higher music education could more effectively help students to prepare for their futures in a more holistic way.

In this article, the author considers how music can expand the creative possibilities of autoethnography. Likewise, the author explores how autoethnography can offer musicians a means to reflect on their creative work in culturally insightful ways. To “play out” these disciplinary considerations,the author crafts an autoethnographic narrative that centers on her own creative practice as a conductor. Moving between description and action, dialogue and introspection, the narrative reveals some of the complexities of reflecting and writing about music in this way. While this narrative is grounded in the author's lived experiences, it reveals significant broader issues about the process of doing autoethnography, the conducting profession, and the culture and practice of music-making at large. Yes Yes