Double Life: Music as Work and Serious Leisure

Abstract

Serious leisure (SL) is defined as an intensive, long-term free-time activity which has deep meaning for an individual and generates its own rewards without external incentives. SL has been studied intensively, yet studies on the mutual effects of an individual's work and SL are scanty, especially when music is either the work or the SL. Our research addressed the connection between work and SL with both musicians and non-musicians. The data consisted of nine interviews. Four of the participants were professional musicians with various SLs (acting, woodwork, handicrafts, and urban culture). The other five (an architect, a librarian, two directors, and a project manager), conversely, had music as their SL. Qualitative content analysis of the data was conducted, and we analysed the data in relation to psychological recovery experiences (psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery and control), using the concepts of segmentation, spillover and compensation. The data were classified into three thematic clusters 1) Participants' manner of talking about SL, 2) Aspects of SL, and 3) SL and work with further subdivisions into themes and categories. Our data did not show any difference between comments from the two participant groups. SL had positive effects on subjective well-being, notions of identity, and working abilities. It stimulated psychological recovery and gave meaning and content to the participants' lives. We suggest that in today's busy work life, employers should take advantage of SL and its positive effects. 1.Music as work and as serious leisure activity Journal of Arts & HumanitiesVolume 06 find a career there by acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge, and experience" (Stebbins, 2014b, 4). Our use of the term serious leisure (SL hereafter) follows that of Stebbins: an individual's free time activity which is meaningful, intensive and rewarding; which the individual has knowingly chosen; and to which he/she allocates time and other resources. In terms of skill level and amount of activity, SL falls somewhere between a typical hobby and a profession. In this article, we will use the term SL, except when referring to earlier literature concerning hobby activities: we use the term 'hobby' when that term is used in the original. BackgroundVarious hobbies have been shown to have positive effects on subjective well-being (See, e.g. Heo, Lee, McGormick, & Pedersen, 2010;Korpela & Kinnunen, 2010;Cuenca, Kleiber, Monteagudo, Linde, & Jaumot-Pascual, 2014;Liu, 2014;Pi, Lin, Chen, Chiu, & Chen, 2014;Liu & Yu, 2015;Stebbins, 2015). Additionally, hobbies positively affect an individual's experience of satisfaction (Murray & O'Neill, 2015). In research on hobbies and their effects on subjective well-being, one of the identified mechanisms has been recovery from work demands and work stress (e.g. Korpela & Kinnunen, 2010;Ivarsson & Larsson, 2012).By recovery we mean the psycho-physiological renewal process of unwinding and recuperating from work as well as the ability to co...

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