The purpose of this study was to explore the identity work of adult instrumental students negotiating their entry to a prestigious music academy and the professional field of music. Ten classical solo-piano students’ accounts of their musical histories and experiences were collected through research interviews. The thematic analyses presented suggest that comparative dynamics between self and other(s) are key mediators of students’ musical identity work. The analyses explore how students’ identity work was resourced both by the discursive (re)contextualization and harnessing of entrance test results and their accounts of their early experiences of being in the academy. The salience of key musical practices and the significance of listening, as well as being overheard practising, are also considered. In addition, the analyses reveal how constructions of practice ‘norms’, ‘exceptionality’ and ‘typical’ life-courses and trajectories enter into students’ identity work.

The classical music academy is a site dominated by traditional meanings of creative practice and an image of professional creative careers as solo performers only fully available to a very few students after graduating. The purpose of the study reported in this paper is to explore career-young professional pianists' talk about the transition from study within a music academy to working life. The focus is on the ways in which they characterize the nature and significance of this transition from very traditional practice, and how they (re)negotiate their professional identities as working musicians and pianists in contemporary working lives. Four classical pianists were interviewed in-depth about their musicianship, including their transition from studies to working life. The qualitative analyses presented here suggest that, as they talked about their transitions and developing musicianship, the speakers constructed, reconstructed and oriented to notions of professional trajectories. Such trajectories are emergent and relational, and are contextually constituted (Sawyer 2003;Miell and MacDonald 2002;Moran and John-Steiner 2004). Crucially, the transition from study to working life is implicated in the process of assuming agency in respect of one's own musicianship and career. Agency in terms of one's identity as a professional musician involves (re)negotiating one's own pathways, narrations and trajectories. We suggest that such trajectories are not 'canonical' -being fixed or dependent on communal expectations, but reflect creative freedom and independence, encompassing multiple influences.Keywords Identity work, musicians, research interviews, transition 3 Musicians and transitionsThe characterization of musicians' development as a process involving progression through a fixed sequence of developmental stages (see for example Sosniak 1985;Manturzewska 1990;MacNamara et al. 2006) has emerged from a long tradition of music research concerned with theorizing musicians' development and identity construction. However, the process of becoming a musician is not simply about sequentially passing through particular developmental stages. Rather, the process of becoming a musician entails the negotiation of significant, complex transitions involving changing contexts. Some of the most notable macro transitions that occur during many musicians' early adulthood are those associated with gaining admission to an institution, such as a music academy or conservatoire, with the intention of studying to become a professional musician and those associated with negotiating the passage from such study to working life (see MacNamara et al. 2008MacNamara et al. , 2006. With respect to the transition into study Burt and Mills (2006), have argued that, in order to help students manage this transition smoothly, we need to understand the multiple tensions and conflicts that music students encounter and struggle with. 5We explore how professional pianists discuss their transition from their study context, within the Sibelius Academ...