Seasoned Musicians Playing Beyond the 5th Decade: A Case Study on Symphony Orchestra Lifestyle and Ageing

This book reports an interview study exploring the attitudes, perceptions, and experiences of 52 professional full-time contract Symphony Orchestra musicians. The report details the narrative discourse conversation, content-analyses of interviews, and written materials; each player also completed a questionnaire booklet, Finger-Tapping exercises, a Think Aloud Protocol during Deliberate Practice, and a Music Performance Analysis employing a double-blind music adjudication procedure. An additional sample of six retired Symphony Orchestra players participated in a telephone interview looking back at their 35-year career. The book is divided into four parts. Part I delineates the background and foreground of the Orchestra musician. Part II outlines various considerations of ageing in a music-performance career. Part III targets performance abilities employing empirical tasks specifically undertaken and reported in this book; a fundamental element of the book is that the data and results of these explorations have never before been published in the scientific journal literature. Part IV is about finding meaning in the study of Seasoned Musicians. The book presents a case study among professional full-time contract players of Symphony Orchestras; half have played beyond the 5th Decade. The investigation package attempts to explore the resilience of Seasoned Musicians to the vicissitudes of ageing, suggesting a more positive successful process of ageing than previously conceived.