Understanding Wellbeing Among College Music Students and Amateur Musicians in Western Switzerland

Abstract

Musical performance requires the ability to master a complex integration of highly specialized motor, cognitive, and perceptual skills developed over years of practice. It often means also being able to deal with considerable pressure within dynamic environments. Consequently, many musicians suffer from health-related problems and report a large number of physical and psychological complaints. Our research aimed to evaluate and analyze the wellbeing of two distinct groups of musicians, college music students and amateur performers in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. A total sample of 126 musicians was recruited for the study (mean age ± SD = 22.4 ± 4.5 years, 71 male). Wellbeing was assessed through the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF questionnaire evaluating two general measures, quality of life (QoL) and general health, and four specific dimensions: physical health, psychological health, social relationships, and environment. For both groups, respondents’ QoL was high on each measure: median scores were higher than 4 for the two general measures and higher than 70 for the four specific dimensions. Among the dimensions, respondents had the highest mean score for environment (75.0), then social relationships and physical health (74.0 and 73.8, respectively), and finally, psychological health (70.3). Differences between groups of musicians emerged in terms of overall QoL and general health, as well as the physical health dimension, where college music students scored lower than the amateur musicians; conversely, college music students scored higher than the amateurs on social relationships. Our overview of musicians’ wellbeing in Western Switzerland demonstrates that, while music making can offer some health protective effects, there is a need for greater health awareness and promotion among advanced music students. This research offers insight into musicians’ wellbeing and points to the importance of involving different actors (teachers, administrators, support staff) in facilitating healthy music making.

Health and Wellbeing in Higher Education: A Comparison of Music and Sport Students Through the Framework of Self Determination Theory

“…The Cronbach's alpha coefficient reported for the WHO-5 is >0.80 (e.g., Garland et al, 2018;Ismail et al, 2018). Whilst the WHOQOL-BREF (1998) has previously been used in studies of music students (Philippe et al, 2019) and sport (Verkooijen et al, 2012;Yazicioglu et al, 2012), to the best of our knowledge, this very short version has not.…”

“…In the present study, we focus on the health and wellbeing of students in 'performance-orientated' vocation-based subjects, such as sport and music students, in which there is an embodied element of expertise in comparison to general university courses (i.e., other students). This is because research has suggested that the nature of demands involved in 'performance-orientated' and embodied areas of study, like music and sport, may paradoxically enhance wellbeing (e.g., Malebo et al, 2007;Ascenso et al, 2018a,b;Philippe et al, 2019), and/or be detrimental to physical and mental health (e.g., Bartholomew et al, 2011;Hildebrandt et al, 2012;Spahn et al, 2017;Kouali et al, 2020).…”

“…Studies on student wellbeing commonly utilized a variety of wellbeing or health measures both singularly and in combination. Wellbeing measures have included various World Health Organization (WHO) measures (Helou et al, 2019;Philippe et al, 2019), the Warwick and Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS; Harding et al, 2019;Kidger et al, 2019), the Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationship, Meaning and Accomplishment (PERMA) profiler (Ascenso et al, 2017;Smith et al, 2020), the Satisfaction with Life scale (Samaranayake and Fernando, 2011;Moate et al, 2019) and various versions of Ryff 's Psychological Wellbeing Scale (PWB;Chraif and Dumitru, 2015;De Clercq et al, 2019). Unidimensional mental health measures have included the Beck depression and anxiety inventories (Yazici et al, 2016;Yüksel and Bahadir-Yilmaz, 2019), the Depression Anxiety Stress scale (Koops and Kuebel, 2019), and the Kessler scale of psychological distress (K10; Brewer et al, 2019).…”

Conservatory Musicians’ Temporal Organization and Self-Regulation Processes in Preparing for a Music Exam

“…Such efforts to develop greater engagement have been found by McPherson et al (2012) to increase practice efficiency. In addition, accompanying music students in the development of self-regulated skills to prepare for exams or recitals could help them experience these events in a more serene way and thus improve their general well-being and health (Williamon and Thompson, 2006;Kreutz et al, 2009;Antonini Philippe et al, 2019).…”

Wellbeing in and Through Performance: Perspectives From Sports and Music

“…Recently, studies have focused on a more positive psychological approach to performance in order to encourage and reinforce health-promoting behaviors in conservatoires and schools of music (see Ascenso et al, 2017Ascenso et al, , 2018Perkins et al, 2017). One study (Antonini Philippe et al, 2019) revealed that, for those students who commit to music professionally, more action is needed to support their health directly and to bolster the value placed on health, both by the musicians themselves as well as their teachers, administrators, and support staff. The results also highlight exciting new possibilities for intervention programs aimed at assisting musicians in drawing closer ties between improving health and enhancing performance, many of which have already been piloted and applied in sporting contexts (see Williamon et al, 2017).…”