From music student to professional: the process of transition

terms of communicating musical ideas. Perseverance and dedication to high musical
standards, underpinned by a deep enjoyment and love of music, helped to provide
motivation for practice in particular, as well as the incentive to strive for musical
goals.

A range of musical and organisational skills were identified as factors which ease the
transition into professional music, creating the impression that an aspiring musician
needs to be a „jack of all trades’ in order to succeed. This was difficult for some
musicians who would have preferred to specialize or others who resented time spent
away from their instruments. However, those who were versatile musicians fared
well, creating varied portfolio careers. Furthermore, musicians from all genres
concurred with the notion that an ideal musician is musically broad-minded and able
to engage with music from multi-genres. These qualitative findings concurred with
quantitative findings reported by Creech et al. (2007) relating to the overall sample of
244 musicians from which the cases reported here were drawn, whereby the majority
of musicians representing all four of the focus genres considered musical expertise to
involve the possession of global musical skills that could be transferred to other
musical genres.

Successful transitions into the music world were found to be very much dependent on
relationships with other musicians. It was important for musicians to be able to
identify with and integrate within a community of practice. This was possibly
particularly important for freelance musicians with few performance opportunities or
others who could not typically rely on the structure of regular ensemble work to
provide this sense of a musical community. A community of practice was found to be

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