Participants

The six participants, three novices and three relatively experienced instrumentalists, were chosen for discussion in this article because their ‘Rivers of Musical Experience’ clearly show contrasting positions possible in relation to lifelong engagement with music and motivation for learning a keyboard instrument formally as an adult for self-fulfilment. Three of them were retired, one was unable to work for health reasons, and two were working part-time.

Amongst the novices learning in college workshops run by the researcher, 63-year-old Jane (see Fig. 1) was someone who had not had the opportunity to learn the piano as a child. Once she left school there was no time for music until her late 50s, when after learning the electronic keyboard, she finally took up the piano which she had always wanted to learn. 73-year-old novice electronic keyboard player and pianist James (see Fig. 2) had learned the piano as a child, but found it boring. However, he became a keen jazz listener from his teens onwards, and returned to active musical participation in retirement. Whilst 58-year-old pianist and singer Carla (see Fig. 3) only played the piano intermittently once she had stopped taking lessons as a child, other musical participation had been important to her before she made a fresh start on the piano in her late 50s.

Amongst the experienced players who were taught by other tutors, 57-year-old pianist and singer Paula used music, though not the piano, to connect with her interests and personal beliefs and to create a work identity (see Fig. 5). 80-year-old pianist Tom used the piano from his teens onwards as an enjoyable means of making contact with others (see Fig. 4). In contrast, 60-year-old pianist Alan's musical life (see Fig. 6), though varied, gave him little musical satisfaction until he returned to the piano in early retirement, taking lessons for the first time in 40 years.

The following thematic categories emerged from analysis of the six ‘Rivers of Musical Experience’ and related discussion in the interviews: family associations; reconnecting with music in youth: a basis for music as an adult; music and the piano as social enrichment; music and disappointment; and music as empowerment. As befits the complexity of the participants’ musical experiences, these categories overlap, and references are made to other sections in the article where appropriate.

Family associations

Interest in music within the family contributed significantly to the respondents’ motivation to engage in active musical participation and learning, and to their identification with music at all stages in their lives. Whilst James and Tom's wives actively supported their musical involvement, all except James also had memories of parents or grandparents who enjoyed music. These memories varied. Carla and Jane recollected a lot of family music making, with ‘singing around the piano’, as did Tom whose father played a one-stringed fiddle for the family as well. However, in Paula's case, music was not shared with the rest of the family. Instead, her father listened to music on his own for many hours in the ‘no-go area’ of their living room. This made an indelible impression on her:

When she was nine she was sent to boarding school for six years. Unhappy there, she found solace in playing the piano on her own, and music later played an important part in her personal development as an adult (see Fig. 5 and discussion later in this article).

Reconnecting with music in youth: a basis for music as an adult

The rivers of all six participants show that they all had some musical experiences which they enjoyed when they were young. This enabled them to construct a positive youthful musical identity which predictably was the foundation of their musical interest as adults (also see Gembris, Reference GEMBRIS, Daubney, Longhi, Lamont and Hargreaves2008; Pitts Reference PITTS2009). Nevertheless, not all of them had positive experiences with a keyboard instrument. Unlike Tom and Paula, and Alan with his second teacher, Carla's piano lessons were always very difficult for her:

Her negative experiences with the piano, an instrument which she declared that she had wanted to have as something to play with, continued when her head teacher made sarcastic comments about how she presented herself to the school on ‘Musical Friday’. But her other musical participation and learning in India profoundly affected her sense of musical self to the good, as suggested by the ecstatic tone of the following:

Peak musical experiences like this could well have outweighed Carla's negative musical experiences on the piano and formed the basis of her lifelong interest in music shown in her river. She returned to the piano as an adult when her friend enrolled her without her knowledge. She had wanted to take up the piano again for years, explaining that, ‘I know there was a pianist there, I just know. I always knew, she just wasn't allowed to emerge’. Clearly, she still identified with the instrument despite her negative experiences with it in the past. Her fresh start with the piano in her 50s was ‘the polar opposite’ of what she had known as a child. Now she could ‘play it how you feel. Do your own thing . . . it's entirely up to you’. Through choosing what she learned and how to do so as an adult so she could rework her past negative experiences with the instrument.

James had found his piano lessons boring as an eight-year-old, but, like Carla, he experienced music extremely positively in other ways as a youngster. A strong initial source of musical inspiration was a series of lessons on the instruments of the orchestra given by a teacher who ‘could make a telephone directory interesting’. When he was about 13 or 14 he further developed his interest in music when ‘a little crowd of us at school had this craze of playing harmonicas, and getting quite serious, playing at playtimes and things’ (omitted by mistake from his ‘River of Musical Experience', see Fig. 2). A couple of years later he discovered jazz which became a life-long musical interest, ‘a significant part of all of my life’.

The attraction of jazz for James, as in the recording of Blues in Thirds by pianist Earl Hines (see Fig. 2), was ‘being able to hear things clearly . . . it's very much about sound . . . what one person makes one instrument sound like’. He valued clarity, individuality and agency in performance which coloured his expectations of a keyboard instrument when he returned to one as a mature adult. He found his workshop class ‘incredibly open-ended, no preconceived ideas about what sort of music it's going to be or anything else’. He felt able to treat his electronic keyboard there like a piano, producing every sound himself rather than using the automatic sound production available on the instrument to help him. When the keyboard workshop closed, James, unlike his peers, joined a new piano workshop at the same college.

Joining a keyboard workshop to learn the instrument that he had found boring as a child marked the beginning of James' adult musical identity shift from music listener to performer. During the next few years he also taught himself the Appalachian Dulcimer (a single-stringed guitar-like instrument played horizontally across the knees) and played it for fun with his friends in the local folk club, as he had once played the harmonica with his friends in the school playground. It appears that by reconnecting with the schoolboy who found his school lessons about musical instruments interesting, who enjoyed playing the harmonica with his friends, and who loved to listen to jazz, rather than with the musical child who had found his piano lessons boring, James was able to realise a possible musical self as performer in public and reconstruct himself as a mature adult musician. This musical transition seemed to mirror the life shift which he experienced after his ‘fall down on the floor job’ heart attack when he realised that ‘tomorrow isn't there forever’. Six years after completing his ‘River of Musical Experience’, he was still using his piano skills to work out tunes to play on the dulcimer which he practised every day for his regular public performances in the folk group.

Music and the piano as social enrichment

James used music during his adult life to connect with others through a shared interest in listening to jazz before returning to active participation with others in the workshop and in the folk group. Carla and Paula (discussed later in this article in connection with music and empowerment) sang and played and went to concerts with other people. Tom, however, stood out as someone who used the piano itself, usually a solo instrument, for social cohesion throughout his life (see Fig. 4). During his teens, a strong musical self-concept emerging, he played the piano at family parties:

When he was enlisted in the army in his late teens, he joined the unit dance band as a keen amateur musician, was promoted to Corporal, and learned to play jazz piano from a trumpeter. This ‘stuck with me ever since. I've never forgotten it’. Tom marked this period as a ‘high’ on his river. This was counterbalanced by a ‘low’ when he returned to civilian life and failed to get a grant for musical study. He described this as being ‘a slap in the face’. Nevertheless, Tom's musical self-esteem remained high with ‘music dominant all the time’ during his working life and retirement. He was strongly encouraged by his wife in his musical activities. ‘We are as one’ he said of her. As well as singing in the local Gilbert and Sullivan society, taking piano lessons intermittently, and participating in piano master classes (see Taylor, Reference TAYLOR2010), he also accompanied ‘a group of lady singers’ regularly at the local hospice, and attended the piano accompanists’ course at summer school. Here his tutor Brian,

Musically reconstructed as ‘the new Tom’, he found himself willing and able to take on new challenges. Music appeared to be a source of personal growth, self-confidence, joy and optimism for him, strongly associated as it was with the individuals and groups with whom he shared it.

Music and disappointment

Tom retained his musical optimism despite failing to achieve his ambition of studying music at college. Carla regarded her musical life as one of opportunity (see next section) despite failing to get into a choir counter to expectations as well as having experienced the piano negatively as a child. However, experienced pianist Alan regarded his musical life differently. The bareness of his river, recounting things he ‘wanted to get away from’, depicts a musical life he described as having ‘a lack of overall understanding or satisfaction that I might have wished for’ (see Fig. 6).

When he was 16, he won the 5th form (Year 11) school music prize, Tovey's ‘Essays in Musical Analysis’, to his amazement, and kept it all his life. But he subsequently failed to get into university to study music, and his disappointment was a clear threat to his musical self esteem. Later, when he was at music college, he was expected to rethink his piano technique and catch up with his peers. However, he did not meet that challenge. Instead, he decided to leave, having been unable to construct a satisfactory musical performer identity as a student. He rationalised that he had been very shy as a student and that he could not develop musically with the piano because it was too solitary an instrument: ‘I didn't have an outlet for it . . . a network in which I could play’. He did not want to teach, and he chose not to pursue music as a career.

Instead, he experimented with temporary musical identities associated with different music worlds at times of transition and change in his life. When he moved house, he joined a local Gilbert and Sullivan society for a few months. Some time later, when his first marriage broke up, he joined a Morris dancing group at a friend's suggestion, in which he also played the accordion (this instrument was not marked on his river, Fig. 6). But he did not identify strongly with those groups. It was not until he retired and returned to piano tuition with others in a piano workshop and also joined a local music club where he could perform and take part in master-classes (see Taylor, Reference TAYLOR2010) that he was able to fulfil himself musically in the company of his new musical friends. At the age of 60, he felt that,

His impassioned tone seems to illustrate the intensity of his musical need. Indeed, Alan also said of his musical life that, ‘I keep bouncing back and wanting to persevere with it’. This suggests that he saw himself as someone musically strong who was determined and able to keep his musical life going despite his setbacks. It is surprising, though, that whilst Alan had collected a vast number of classical music records over the years, some of which he talked about as being a reference point for his own playing, his river diagram shows no indication of this important source of musical engagement for him.

Music as empowerment

Whilst Alan appeared to have found personal fulfilment and musical empowerment, arguably significant factors in adult musical identity construction, by re-establishing the intense relationship with the piano which had been interrupted since his schooldays, Paula described music as being ‘a love affair . . . on and off throughout my life’. She used it as a source of empowerment by merging it with her other interests as well as meeting new people and discovering new things. In her 30s she was to ‘rediscover [her] delight in the voice’ through her interest in yoga by chanting mantras and singing Bhajans, sacred songs, in the company of others. It was,

Paula also used music significantly at turning points in her life. When she gave up school teaching and had time on her hands, she bought a second-hand saxophone after catching sight of one in a shop window. And ‘something new started in my life, and oh, gosh you know, it was a wonderful thing to do’. Later, when she was 45, she became interested in Dances of Universal Peace, which involved singing as well as dancing. Eventually, she trained and began to teach it to people with special needs. She used what had been her leisure pursuit to develop a new work identity with music.

Yet music was also painfully associated with Paula's husband with whom she had played the clarinet and shared her music listening. When she left him at the age of 49, she lost her voice and developed ME (chronic fatigue syndrome). For several years she found it difficult to sing which was very depressing for her (see Fig. 5). However, in her early 50s, Paula returned to the piano, attending two college workshops in succession. With her music learner identity strengthened, she bought her own piano and began private lessons, started music theory study and also joined a singing group. Her intention was to develop her music skills further in her sixties by doing a part-time music degree. It appears that despite having painful associations, music could provide Paula with a framework for personal development, give her a sense of purpose, and enrich her life.

Carla, who had also experienced painful associations with music, similarly used music for her personal empowerment at major turning points in her life. When she was 39, and living back in the UK, she left ‘the prison I'd been in for 40 years’, which also included her husband, marriage and small children. She discovered African music at WOMAD (World of Music Arts and Dance). It proved to be:

Later, she set up and ran a night club and disco with nine others who became her friends. Life seemed full of possibility:

When Carla summed up what her musical life meant to her, it was apparent that music had not functioned solely as a means of occupying her spare time:

The richness of Carla's musical experiences established musical continuity in her life. Her river clearly shows how music came to be an important part of her self concept as a mature adult. About a year after data collection, there being changes in her personal life, Carla left the piano workshop with another new plan for music. This was to update and expand the collection of LP records her father had given her with the help of one of her two DJ sons.