Identity of the adult musician

This week, one of my adult students entered a local music festival. I was really proud of him and how far he’s come with his playing, the feedback was really great, but actually I don’t think the feedback was his main achievement and this is what I wanted to dedicate this post to. I’m not going to reveal any of his details, suffice to say, he is an adult so obviously comes to lessons with everything that adult life throws his way, and THIS is what I wanted to talk about.

Part of my PhD is going to be looking at identity within young people aged 13 - 18 and how this equates to their musical self constructed framework. Again, my PhD is much bigger than this and I’ll do some posts on that at a later date, but for now, let’s look at identity.

We all have an identity which is a complex synthesis of all our components. We have our acquired identity - cultural, sexual, gender, whether we have blue eyes or brown etc, but we also have our attributed identity. This latter part of our identity is interchangeable and, as adults, built up of the things we have experienced or choose to be a part of. We can also transition between different things, making this part of our identity fluid.

I’d like to divide that further still, to suggest that within our attributed identity there are the things that we choose to do; hobbies, skills, travel and then the things that perhaps life puts upon us; births, marriage, divorce, death, things that happen that are less under our control.

You can then begin to appreciate that the older we get, the greater our circle of identity gets. The more we do, the more things we experience, the more things become a part of us, and perhaps our ‘out of control’ attributed identity gets larger than our chosen attributed identity. I’m not going to even begin to get into the psychology of this as this isn’t my field of expertise.

So, as an adult to choose to take up or even return to instrumental learning is not as straightforward as it is when you are a child. Yes, of course, there is the added bonus as a child of soaking things up like a sponge and us older generation of adults feel like we’re losing a brain cell each birthday (don’t be shy, I know I’m not alone there!). As an adult there is a hugely acquired identity that whilst is beneficial: you know more, you can understand things better as you can put it in context as you’ve had experience of life and abstract, this can be a barrier to learning too.

Your ability to become skilled in an instrument or any craft come to think of it, at any age is heavily ensconced in how much practice you devote outside your half hour lesson time, to that skill. Now I am not going to belittle the extra curricular lives of young people as many of them are extremely busy. The particular age range of young people I will be focussing on for my research will be caught up with their social identities, puberty, GCSE and A levels, relationships, learning to drive, applying for higher education, not to mention any extra curricular activities they do outside their school days. Furthermore, many of them will have to cope with a lot of attributed identity that is out of their control such as being a young carer, death, poverty etc. However, as an adult, there are generally far more responsibilities, more curve balls, more things that take up hours of the day, dependents, bills… the list is quite endless. Finding an hour a day (or thereabouts) to practice, is a primary problem for many of the adults I have taught over the years. Even if you do find that time, it doesn’t necessarily go uninterupted or with guilt free focus.

So, the fact my student entered himself into this competition, put himself in the spotlight in a category where I can safely say that I expect he was the oldest entrant (or thereabouts and he’s not old!), where he put himself under scrutiny not just by the adjudicator, but by the judgement of the other competitors and spectators, I say ‘bravo’. He found the time to practice, he opened himself up to criticism to improve his practice, he made time to get to the festival and he did it, and…he did incredibly well too! I know how hard this is and I hope he can be an inspiration to others who may be thinking about returning to their learning or starting a new hobby.