Tidsskriftet

Empirically based studies of music and identity are often carried out on the basis of interviews, questionnaires, clinical music therapy sessions, participant observation or briefly expressed accounts by music therapy students of music in their own lives. In contrast, this article is based on published autobiographies. It describes and discusses how the published autobiographies of three conductors can be understood as an expression of these musicians’ identity. What themes do they choose to highlight from memory in their autobiographies? How does telling about this in their autobiography add meaning to their lives? By combining a music-psychological and a hermeneutic-literary approach, the article concludes that it is possible to outline these three individual musician identities on the basis of the three autobiographies. In this context, the strength of the autobiography is that it is a narrative about the whole of life that makes life meaningful, formulated by the main character. It deserves attention as the main character’s self-presentation.