Introduction
Transition has been described as a process rather than a specific event (Hallam and
Rogers, in press). For musicians, negotiating the emergence from higher education to
professional life presents many challenges. This rite of passage involves an
„emotional reorganization’ that can entail loss, risk and anxiety, as well as excitement
and anticipation of future possibilities (Lucey and Reay, 2000). Factors influencing
successful transition into professional performing careers include support and
encouragement from parents, peers, teachers and institutions, strong self-concept as a
musician and coping strategies that underpin perseverance and self-discipline within a
highly competitive domain (MacNamara et al., 2006, Burland et al., 2004).
The aim of this paper is to explore the process of transition from music undergraduate
to professional status and to explore ways in which higher education experiences
might facilitate this process. The research reported here formed part of a larger
project, Investigating Musical Performance: Comparative Studies in Advanced
Musical Learning (IMP) (Welch et al., 2006), a two-year comparative study of
advanced musical performance. The IMP project was devised to investigate how
classical, popular, jazz and Scottish traditional musicians deepen and develop their
learning about performance in undergraduate, postgraduate and wider music
community contexts. For the purposes of this paper, thematic analyses were carried
out on interview data from twenty-seven undergraduate and portfolio career musicians
representing all four of the focus genres. Differences and commonalities between
transition experiences of musicians from the four genres were noted and the potential
for higher education music institutions to support successful transitions was explored.