ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the educational situation of students in higher classical music education, how they move through the education, and what their ideas about the future are. It is based on interviews with students, teachers, and leaders at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, and the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, to shed light on how the students’ learning trajectories function as paths through education where they learn in instrument lessons, ensemble classes, courses, department activities, institutional meetings and contexts, and in the wider musical life outside of the institutions. The theoretical perspective taken from education research is complemented with a queer phenomenological approach to highlight what kind of musicians are being educated, by how they are oriented through education and how this orientation is shaped by nationalised and gendered embodiments affecting the available learning paths. Further, the chapter discusses what skills are constructed as important to develop during higher classical music education. While discourse about the declining status of classical music and the harsh job market for classically trained musicians is trans-institutional, students also expressed nationalised, and gendered, concerns about working as a musician. Compared to previous music education studies of classical music career paths, we show how a student's chosen instrument department could shape similarities across national borders, where the orientations of string and percussion students were different from voice and piano students and how both the most traditional and the most alternative learning paths invite young white men from the national context as the preferred student.
