It is only mid-January, and I am feeling slightly overwhelmed with music research. According to statistics, I am in the norm: ‘almost ¼ of people quit within the first week of setting their New Year’s resolution, most people quit before the end of January, and only 9% see their resolutions through until succession.’[i] Motivation plays an important part: how do we stay motivated in music academic practices when the journey just seems endless, when time is never enough, when we cannot fed ourselves with research, and when there are too many missing pieces of evidence (or vice versa, too few new discoveries to be made)? This blog is a continuation from my blog last week on motivation, and will explore more the ‘extrinsic’ factors of motivation that plays on the academic practices.[ii]

Regardless of which stage of an ‘academuisician’ (a new word I made based on academic+musician) we are currently in, the questions above comes to haunt us. The problem begins with our choosing of career paths. In the article ‘Arts students are motivated more by love of subject than money or future careers’, 69% of prospective engineering students rated career options as an important reason for their choice of degree, whilst 35% rated enjoyment.[iii] For arts and humanities students, the trend is the opposite: 34% rated career option as an important factor, and 71% rated enjoyment. I would have expected the percentage for rating career options to be lower for arts & humanities!

From these statistics, we can conclude that academusicians are by nature intrinsically motivated to pursue music as a degree, and engineering students extrinsically motivated.[iv] This might start off well for as a newbie full-fledged adult, but as we come to confront the realities of life, accumulate responsibilities and divert our time to other attentions, one begins to realise that it could be easier if the next logical step in career was more transparent and guaranteed. The ‘what-to-do’ verdicts continues to sieve into our minds until it brings destruction to our values: money, prestige, friendship, purpose. I remember having a melt-down in my undergraduate third year just before my piano lesson, and started to rant; my professor stopped me after what seems like 5 seconds: ‘leave that trash outside please, we need to start playing the piano’. On one hand he is right: we focus on what we need to in the time we have allocated to the task. On the other hand, it isn’t the most helpful advice to me now: a PhD graduate, no fixed permanent academic post, with friends in other fields that have 10 years of career experience.

The solution is not to swing to the opposite direction and choose something solely for the sake of career. After all, ‘career’ is a shaken word: in my grandparent’s generation, a career is for a lifetime. In my parent’s generation, career is divided into quarters: mid-life, quarter-life… None of my family members were musicians, so I cannot quite compare my freelancing career to theirs, but for my friends who are in the 9-5 jobs, they would say that 5 years at a company is already considered quite long. The effect of covid pandemic has also disrupted working patterns in the past 3 years: who knows whether we will all become freelancers.

Instead, the solution is to confront the career options as an academusician pursues their passion in music. For a musician there’s a safety net: there is a demand for instrument and vocal teachers, as well as performance gigs. What are the career options for those doing music academia? How are they rewarded? And realistically, how do they feed ourselves?

As yet, I do not have the answer to these questions. Two years ago, I asked a music university lecturer (who, a few months ago, was given the title Professor! wohoo!) how his career trajectory mapped out after his PhD (he started as being a Mozart Scholar). He said that initially he did not get a permanent post until 3 years after his PhD; in that interim, he had a 2-hour per week teaching post at a German university – which did not pay to feed him and his family! I have heard similar stories from other lecturers I spoke to. But then, there are also the more successful stories: one contract leading to the next. And, the changing of discourse stories: those that just had enough, and moved to do an entirely different subject. Sometimes I don’t really get it – they are all academically capable!

In a heartfelt conversation I have had with Professor Kenneth Hamilton from Cardiff University, he asked what I see myself achieving in the next 10 years. He then said the most profound piece of wisdom:

“Don’t strive to be academically capable, but academically hireable”.

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[i] 19 Mind-Blowing New Year’s Resolution Statistics (2023), https://insideoutmastery.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/#:~:text=How%20long%20do%20New%20Year’s,their%20resolutions%20through%20until%20succession, accessed 15/01/23.

[ii] https://joycetang.blog/2023/01/08/staying-motivated-part-1-on-music-practices/.

[iii] https://theconversation.com/arts-students-are-motivated-more-by-love-of-subject-than-money-or-future-careers-34330, accessed 15/01/23.

[iv] See my blog last week on the differences between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, [ii].