Letting it go: An autoethnographic account of a musician’s loss

Abstract

This personal narrative traces the impact of performance-related injury on the author. Contextualising my own experiences alongside the testimonies of other musicians, I explore the non-clinical impact of injury: the social, the emotional, and psychological, including issues connecting music-making to identity and esteem. In chronicling my own subjective experiences as a layered account (Ronai, 1992), I hope to illuminate the complex and intimate relationship between musician and the act of music-making, thereby also revealing the multiplicity of factors involved in coping with a performance-related injury. A long-standing taboo has likely contributed to a dearth of autoethnographic stories among research on musicians' health. Here, I move away "from the gaze of the distanced and detached observer, toward the embrace of intimate involvement, engagement, and embodied participation" (Ellis & Bochner, 2006, pp. 433-434) and attempt to demonstrate the legitimacy and value of introducing the first-person voice into the growing body of work on health in the performing arts.