Becoming singular: Musical identity construction and maintenance through the lens of identity process theory

Study design

This article is the second reporting on analysis of a dataset comprised of semi-structured interviews with 10 singing teachers. The first article used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith et al., 2022) to discover the meaning of music in identity for participants (see Forbes et al., 2024). Analysing the same dataset using different methods is a form of qualitative pluralism (Clarke et al., 2015; Frost et al., 2011). Coyle and Murtagh (2014) argue that qualitative pluralism is a helpful and justifiable approach when researching a complex phenomenon such as identity. As we were interested in gaining a rich, contextualised understanding of singing teachers’ identity experiences, we adopted a pluralist approach to analysing the dataset comprised of semi-structured interviews (Clarke et al., 2015; Frost et al., 2011). Pluralism acknowledges that the answers contained in the dataset depend on the questions being asked (Willig, 2013, 2016). Indeed, as Coyle and Murtagh (2014) note, Breakwell (1986, p. 44) has stated that within identity research, ‘methodological liberation [lies] in the acceptance that it is legitimate to use different approaches in unison’. Pluralism requires the analyst to approach the dataset with a fresh perspective for each analysis (Willig, 2012). Frost et al. (2011) argue that different analytic methods can be complementary and bring depth and breadth to our understanding of the data, enabling researchers to attend to experience from different angles.

In this article, adopting a critical realist perspective, we report on reflexive thematic analysis of the dataset to attend to the subjective experience of IPT’s identity principles. Read together with the original IPA study, which considered the meaning of music in participants’ identities (Forbes et al., 2024), these methods are complementary in that IPA attends to individual experience without guiding theory (apart from the theory inherent in the methodology itself), and critical realism allows for a theoretically driven approach to analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021; Willig, 2016). Thus, adopting analytical pluralism can produce a richer and more nuanced understanding of participants’ experiences than would be possible with a single analytic approach.

Recruitment and participants

Participants were recruited through an online survey that investigated the social and cultural factors influencing the construction of musical identity. The survey was promoted through the researchers’ professional networks, including via an email invitation from the Australian professional association for singing teachers. As part of the survey, participants volunteered to do a follow-up interview about their experiences of identity construction relating to music. Participants’ (N = 10) average age was 60 years (range: 43–79), with an average of 28.6 years’ experience as singing teachers (range: 17–43 years; see Table 1). Seven of the 10 participants have several decades of professional performing experience. This study received approval by the Human Research Ethics Committees at the University of Southern Queensland and James Cook University. All participants provided written consent to the interviews. Participants have been de-identified and given pseudonyms for the reporting of findings.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Participants.

Name	Age a	Interview (mins)	Choir or Church singing	Instru-mentallessons	Singing lessons	Amateur performance experience (years)	Professional performance experience (years)	Singing teaching experience (years)	Professional association membership	Currently teaching
Therese	53	22	b	Y	Y	0	20	30	Y	Y
Angela	58	47	Y	Y	Y	0	35	20	Y	Y
Bernadette	79	35	Y	Y	Y	5	40	25	Y	Y
Helen	43	33	Y	b	Y	5	21	17	Y	Y
Rosalind	63	46	Y	b	Y	50	0	19	Y	Y
Graham	58	15	Y	Y	Y	0	20	35	Y	Y
Trish	79	35	Y	Y	Y	0	35+	43	Y	Y
Mabel	60	33	Y	Y	b	50	0	36	Y	Y
Winnie	60	29	Y	Y	Y	8	2	30	Y	Y
Andrew	45	42	Y	Y	Y	5	25	25	Y	Y

a

Age at the time of interview.

b

Indicates the topic was not explicitly mentioned during the interview.

Data collection

One-to-one semi-structured interviews were conducted and recorded via Zoom with each participant using an interview protocol based on Hallam’s (2017) social and cultural influences on music and identity (see Supplementary Materials). Interviews were conducted by members of the research team, and the first author (a member of the national association for singing teachers) interviewed participants not personally known to her. Participants were asked to reflect on their experiences of various social and cultural factors as they related to music and the role it plays in their lives including family, cultural environment, educational environment, self-belief, friends, love of music, opportunities, and musical preferences. Within qualitative IPT research, such contextualising data are important ‘to identify and distinguish key aspects of the theory with credibility’ (Coyle & Murtagh, 2014, p. 42).

Data analysis

The first author used reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) to interpret shared patterns of meaning in the semi-structured interviews with singing teacher participants. Thematic analysis is considered the preferred method for qualitative research using IPT, because it allows for flexible and active use of theory (Coyle & Murtagh, 2014). Critical realism is one of the most frequently adopted theoretical positions for reflexive thematic analysis and combines ontological realism with epistemological relativism (Braun & Clarke, 2021; see also Willig, 2016). We adopted a view of critical realism, which acknowledges that there is a truth ‘out there’ that is ‘mediated by language and culture’ (Braun & Clarke, 2021, p. 170, emphasis in original; see also Willig, 2013). Such an approach allows for existing theory and literature to drive the inquiry, with coding proceeding via a ‘flexible deductive approach’ (Fletcher, 2017, p. 182).

Analysis was conducted flexibly and organically (Braun & Clarke, 2021) as follows: (1) data familiarisation (reading and re-reading transcripts, initial noting, listening to interviews); (2) initial coding (placing extracts from transcripts into Microsoft Excel, first, according to deductive codes derived from IPT and then developing inductive codes); (3) developing candidate themes (combining codes with shared meaning bearing in mind meaningfulness and relevance to the research questions); (4) reviewing, refining, and naming themes; (5) arriving at final themes by writing a narrative account in which final themes are supported by researcher interpretation and evidence from participants’ accounts. The second and third authors provided feedback on theme development and the narrative account.

‘It has just been music’: living a musical life is my destiny

This theme presents evidence from participants’ accounts as satisfying the identity principles of distinctiveness and continuity. Bernadette’s quote (aged 79), ‘it has just been music’, was chosen to represent this theme. This phrase and the theme, ‘Living a musical life is my destiny’, capture the sense of totality and inevitability participants expressed about their musical engagement from an early age and throughout life (see also Forbes et al., 2024 for the meaning this foregrounding of music had for participants). For example, Rosalind (aged 63) ‘lives’ in a ‘musical soup’ and, by implication, sees herself immersed in music, and as one of its vital and unique ingredients. This musical soup is comprised of rich, varied ingredients drawn from social and cultural contexts. For all participants, musical engagement was encouraged and supported variously by family members and peers, and in church and school.

In IPT terms, the social influence, or the operation of the identity processes at the interpersonal level, are commonly evidenced by participants’ long-term engagement in musical activities involving others. Beginning in their younger years, participants participated in choral or church singing (n = 9), played an instrument/s (n = 8), and took singing lessons (n = 9), all activities strongly dependent on the input of others (note, not all participants necessarily engaged in these activities at the same time and duration of participation was not tracked in interviews). At the time of interviews, all participants were engaged in various musical activities, most notably singing teaching (n = 10), and either amateur (n = 2), professional performing (n = 4) or both (n = 4). Andrew (aged 45), for example, reported having over 30 years of singing lessons. Mabel (aged 60) recalls extensive musical activity as a younger person:

I would be in the string group, I’d be in the orchestra, I’d be in the folk group, I’d be in the recorder consort. I would sing solo, sing duets, play piano, play piano duets, play the violin. You’d just do everything.

Participants’ long-term engagement evidences the assimilation of music-making (at the intrapsychic level) into the identity structure as represented by various roles within music which form components of that structure (e.g., ‘singer’, ‘choral singer’, ‘pianist’, ‘violinist’, ‘performer’).

As people who are continuously and consistently involved in musical activities, participants ‘are motivated by a desire to establish the continuity of their identity’ (Breakwell, 2023, p. 46). This engagement is positively evaluated by participants as a rewarding lifelong endeavour. For example, Angela (aged 58) carries with her treasured formative musical experiences. There is a strong sense of temporal continuity and even inevitability to participants’ musical experiences. Much like Bernadette, for Angela, ‘[music] was just always there’. Rosalind says her connection to music has remained ‘uninterrupted’ and is ‘what I had always done as a source of pleasure and identity’. For Trish (aged 79), music has been there ever since she can remember and has remained ‘front and centre’. The presence of music for Bernadette has been absolute (‘It has just been music’) and Andrew says, ‘there has been a soundtrack to my life for 45 years’. Breakwell (2023) notes that the identity principle of continuity is established by a person’s subjective perception of what constitutes continuity. For these participants, there is subjective perception of ‘seamless connection’ (Breakwell, 2023, p. 46) between past identity (from earliest memories) through to current identity. Six participants expressed the reason for this seamless connection as nature, fate, or pre-destiny. For Bernadette, ‘everything slotted in along the way as though it were meant to’; Mabel was ‘identified probably at the age of five that [she] could sing well, so from then on’. Others express musical ability as a natural component of their biology – ‘like my blood’ (Helen, aged 43), ‘innate’ (Winnie, aged 60), or as Trish describes herself, as having a natural ear for music: ‘I was the age of four and could hear music on the radio and go and play it on the piano . . . I’ve got such a strong innate ear’. Rosalind describes herself as a ‘natural singer’. These appeals to nature or fate strengthen participants’ subjective experiences of the stability and permanence of music as a component within the identity structure. They also evidence the intensity of motivation to maintain continuity because to do otherwise would be going against the natural or pre-destined order.

Within these accounts, the principles of continuity and positive distinctiveness interact and mutually reinforce each other; the identity component that supports the distinctiveness claim (Breakwell, 2023) is the association (or indeed, the natural connection) with music and singing. Seeing oneself as a ‘natural singer’ or having an ‘innate ear’ are ways in which participants consider themselves as positively distinct from others. Distinctiveness is fundamentally a result of social comparison where comparison positively marks an individual (Breakwell, 2023). Trish draws on others’ perceptions of her as positively distinctive through her music: ‘People see me as someone who is associated with, and interested in, music . . . My identity is strongly connected by people who don’t even know me terribly well, as someone who deals in and knows their way around music’. Because ‘people who don’t even know [her] terribly well’ associate Trish with music, she feels she strongly exhibits a distinctiveness that is obvious and undeniable. Distinctiveness can also result from internal comparison (Breakwell, 2023). For example, Angela feels that for her ‘music is a way to be heard’ and that through singing she was allowed to ‘say things’, which were prohibited for other children. Therese (aged 53) compares what she does as a singer to instrumentalists as being distinctive because singing is ‘more complex and layered’. Helen recalls how during high school, her knowledge of Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire set her apart from her peers. She claims this knowledge very proudly – ‘Nobody else knew it!’ – and, because of her familiarity, was cast in a lead role. Angela recalls she was ‘the only one in my class . . . [who] went to choir practice’. Mabel’s strong internal sense that she could ‘just do everything’ musically, and the depth of her musical skills, fuels her uniqueness. In all these examples, participants experience their musicality and singing ability as licences to be unique.

There was a somewhat paradoxical finding regarding distinctiveness. Although active musical engagement is positioned front and centre throughout participants’ lives, seven participants expressed a need to experience silence or a break from music listening in recreational time. Trish and Angela explained that they felt full of music, and therefore had no need to seek out more music when not working. For example, Trish says she has ‘a headful [of music]’ and that music is ‘going all the time’. Angela explained that her limited recreational listening was because ‘I always hear music’ and therefore ‘silence is often what I need and want, and I don’t listen then too much to music’. Helen links the need for silence to long days of teaching or listening to opera: ‘I actually find, to be honest, if after a day of teaching or being at the opera or what have you and I’m driving home, I tend to also sit in silence [laughs]’. Helen’s laugh hints that she understands at some level the irony of someone who is immersed in music not wanting to listen to it. Graham links his singing teaching job to a lack of urge to listen to music because his ‘brain’s too tired from analysing sound all day’: ‘I don’t actually listen to much music myself for enjoyment because I’m teaching seven and eight hours a day and by the end of day I crave silence’. Although Helen and Graham are clear that their exposure to music during the working day leaves them ‘craving silence’, Winnie struggles to understand why she listens to very little music: ‘This sounds really strange. I listen to very little music unless it’s for teaching purposes’. On a more subtle level, Bernadette notes the absence of music playing at home: ‘I can’t imagine my life without music and yet I can go around the house with no music on at all. Just in silence’. Rosalind also enjoys peace at home: ‘It’s generally a fairly quiet house’. In each of these cases, whether expressly or implicitly, participant singing teachers revealed the need for a break from music during downtime. The lack of desire to listen to music in non-work time (perhaps paradoxically) strengthens the positive distinctiveness of being professional musicians and music educators.

‘I know my value’: achieving goals in music and teaching is motivating

This theme presents evidence from participants’ accounts as satisfying the identity principles of self-efficacy (subjective evaluations of goal-attainment derived from observational learning) and self-esteem (subjective evaluations of an individual’s own worth).

Social interactions helped participants appreciate their own abilities and effectiveness. This was evident within participants’ teaching practice, and through peer influence and support. Bernadette recalls: ‘I always had people lining up to come and have lessons because it worked. It [my teaching] worked in a way that many other people didn’t want to try’. She says that ‘I’m able to help them [students] quite significantly improve what they’re doing in a very short time’. Through teaching, Bernadette experiences the goal-attainment of her students as attaining goals of her own; there is a synergy between what her students need and what Bernadette can offer them as a teacher. Trish describes the reciprocal nature of teaching and learning: ‘[my students] affect me and educate me and broaden . . . my terms of reference as a teacher, as a performer, as an artist’. Through interacting with her students, Trish becomes more efficacious in her various roles within music. For Helen, the observation of successful peer performers plays a ‘huge influence’ on her development as a singer and teacher: ‘there’s nothing like watching someone that you respect get up and do it to inspire you to do it as well’. Both Graham and Winnie discuss the strong influence of teachers and other musicians on their ability to attain goals and craft successful careers as singing teachers. As someone beset by performance anxiety throughout her career, Winnie repeatedly identifies people who ‘believed in her’ as being fundamental to rebuilding her confidence as a singing teacher and music educator. This belief of others in her abilities helped Winnie to understand her strengths as a teacher, enabling her to then relish her impact on her own students: ‘being able to see not just the results, which were great, but the enjoyment that came through the students and their striving to be better and better’. In Winnie’s words, we can see the vital role positive social interactions (and her ability to draw positive learning from them) play in creating the self-belief that her goals are within reach.

This self-efficacy derived from observing peers and students’ successes, or experiencing peer encouragement and support, interacts with participants’ sense of self-esteem – seven participants derive a strong sense of self-worth and social value from their work as teachers. For Angela who had a long career as a performer, ‘It is only through my teaching that I realised that I really had a talent and how musical I was’. She now considers herself ‘very musical’ – ‘I know my value’ (Angela). Like Winnie, Angela ‘was plagued with performance anxiety, crippling performance anxiety well into my 40s’ and discovers her true value as a singer and as a musician through teaching. Andrew expresses similar sentiments, positively evaluating himself as a teacher:

Teaching’s interesting. Teaching is the first time that I can actually say I am really good at something. I’m actually a very, very good teacher. I can say that with complete belief in myself. I have never, ever been able to say that about myself as a performer. (Andrew)

Graham and Winnie derive value from enjoying students’ success: it is ‘very satisfying when you get to see [your students] become good performers but also decent humans’ (Graham); Winnie says that she is ‘highly immersed’ in working in educational settings, and this gives her ‘great joy’. She also believes that she is ‘far better as a teaching musician than a performing musician’. Therese seems proud of the fact that she earns her income from teaching singing. Rosalind understands that she is ‘helping people realise their own goals and get in touch with music and . . . giving them a sense of joy and identity and wholeness. That’s got to be good’. Rosalind’s reflection on her teaching reveals aspects of both self-efficacy (in terms of facilitating students’ goal-attainment, which, as an educator, is your goal) and in terms of self-esteem (she finds self-worth in giving to others).