Self and desire: A preliminary exploration of why students start and continue with music learning

This paper investigates theories concerned with why students start and continue with their music learning. In particular, rather than focusing on the conventional nature versus nurture debate which has heavily dominated much of the writing on music learning in recent years, the current paper explores the social constructionist approach to consider the role of the student’s sense of self in building a musical identity. Working within this framework, it becomes evident that data which has previously been regarded as only demonstrating the role of others in the development of musical skills has been interpreted too simplistically. The data collected for this study demonstrates that what many young learners do in their social relationships with others, and with their engagement in music-making itself, is to develop the self in such a manner that music becomes an essential construct for their personal identities: they are musicians, and as such they see the ’self ’ in relation to music. Thus, it is believed that the current paper presents an important departure, and lays down a challenge to music educators, psychologists and other researchers to explore how self and personal desire interact in the development of musical skills. Musical Skills Research sychologists have long been interested in why and how children learn new skills, and in particular how these skills can be sustained over long periods of time so that expertise can be achieved. In music research, a number of approaches to investigating these questions have been undertaken. A wide range of personal factors have been studied including: the learner’s personality (Kemp, 1996); the age of the learner when starting (Sergeant, 1969); the sex of the learner (Shuter-Dyson & Gabriel, 1981); how and why the musical instrument learned was selected (Fortney, Boyle, DeCarbo, 1993); the gender association between learner and musical instrument (O’Neill & Boulton, 1995); internal versus external motivation for beginning lessons (Sloboda & Howe, 1991); the learner’s self-efficacy (Dweck, 1986); relationship with teacher, parents and key other