Musicians as Researchers - Insight or Insanity?

Many highly-proficient musicians enrol in postgraduate research degrees, moving from being expert musicians to novice researchers. This paper investigates the reasons and motivations for this professional transition. It reports on an empirical study carried out with the members of an advanced research methods seminar class in a Conservatorium that is a faculty of an Australian university. The members of the class took on multiple roles as researchers and subjects, interviewers and interviewees, investigators and authors. The results obtained from thematic analysis of interview transcripts highlight the importance of the intrinsic aspects of personal development as a musician and the altruism of passing knowledge and experience to others, supported to a lesser extent by extrinsic motivations concerning finance and employment. In this, the results are broadly in line with those from other such studies, but further investigation with a larger and more diverse group of music researchers would be needed to confirm these indications.