Inquiry Project Introduction

Music is an enormous social, cultural, and personal force in people’s lives. Often, the music people listen to is tied to who they are and how they see themselves. In other words, music becomes a part of a person’s identity. The main purpose of this paper is to look specifically at how music shapes urban high school students’ identities, and how those musical identities are affected by their experiences within an instrumental music education program. We defined musical identity as being composed of several factors. The largest factor is the level of importance music has in a person’s life. Within the notion of importance is how a person views music in relation to their life. If a person sees music as related to many aspects of their life, they will have a strengthened musical identity. This means that musical identity can range from being a minimal, near nonexistent part of a person’s identity to being almost synonymous with personal identity. Also contributing to musical identity are factors such as listening preferences, the amount of time one spends listening to music, and the degree of enthusiasm a person has for listening to and seeking out music.
We approached this question from the point of view of music educators and as such were interested not just in the cultural and societal implications of the question, but more specifically how musical identities play out within the framework of students learning to play instruments. We were looking to see if an understanding of students’ musical identities can help music educators teach more effectively or if it changes the way an instructor teaches. We were curious about this because we have found a relative lack of discussion or research about this question within the music education community and literature.
We interviewed four students in the instrumental music program and the instrumental music teacher at East Side High School in Newark, New Jersey. The instrumental music program at East Side High and at most other high schools in Newark are unique within New Jersey in that most students entering the program have not had instrumental music instruction before coming to high school because of a lack of feeder music programs in the elementary and middle schools. This unique situation gave us an opportunity to see how beginning music education at the high school age was affected by students’ musical identities. This was particularly interesting because high school students tend to show stronger opinions about music than students in elementary or middle school (LeBlanc, Sims, Siivola, Obert, 1996), which led us to believe that music tends to be a larger part of their identity than it would be at an earlier age (although this is a question beyond the reach of this project and one which we did not explore).