Musical Self-Concept - Presentation of a Multi-Dimensional Model and Its Empirical Analyses

Research on the specific domain of musical self-concept was so far exclusively concerned with musically active subjects (such as performers, music teachers, students, or singing children). In contrast, the starting base of the presented research is that music is a distinct aspect in everyone’s life and personality and that therefore musical self-concept is general and includes a number of domain besides achievement. The presented multi-dimensional model includes (i) non-academic and (ii) dimensions of musical ability. The first section entails representations with regards to “who I am” in music, such as emotional, social, physical, cognitive and spiritual notions, while section two addresses self-representations with regard to “what I can do” in music, such as singing, rhythmic, listening, playing instruments, arranging, composing abilities. The model itself and a number of related hypotheses are evaluated within a qualitative study. Semi-structured interviews have been conducted on a sample of n= 63, divided into subgroups of five levels of musical expertise which range from “music listeners” to “professional musicians”, and five age groups. As a quantitative factor, “nearness-to-self” estimates on the various dimensions of the model are assessed. These latter results are presented in the following paper.