Quantifying first-year student musicians’ ‘calling’: Initial implications for professional preparation curriculum design

Over the last decade, vocation preparation formal and informal education has been included in higher music education programs with the purpose to responsibly supplement students’ technical performance skills and graduate sustainable musicians. Such curriculum reform is continually met with mixed responses by students and faculty despite the increased precarity of the music profession within the current global context. This study evolved from one music vocational preparation educator’s observation that student resistance is potentially based in one’s passion for music, capacity for resilience and self-discipline, and perceived calling to pursue a music profession. From 2018 to 2022, first-year music students of an Australian metropolitan conservatoire enrolled in a vocation preparation unit were invited to participate in an online survey answering open and closed questions related to their professional activity and outlook, and personal perceptions of calling, passion, resilience, and discipline. Statistical and thematic analysis of the results were compared with a similarly designed prior study of professional Australian musicians and found that more than two-thirds of first-year student musicians were professionally active. All yearly cohorts consistently strongly agreed they were passionate about music, and agreed they possessed high and calling resilience. The year 2020 demonstrated insight to pandemic impact with more students viewing their professional future with trepidation, yet demonstrated the highest results for passion and resilience. Calling, passion, and resilience literature further served to interpret the data and subsequently suggested higher music education reform their curriculum and pedagogies by adopting a whole-of-program approach enabled by the contagion effect of calling, and alignment with students’ passion, values, and music identities.