‘Fun Music with My Friends’: ‘Musicking-as-Play’ in the West End Theatre

Abstract

Musicking-as-play is an ontological conceptualisation that equips us to look at music-making practices in new ways in order to reveal future potentials for music education. This article discusses a theory-testing case study which applies the ‘musicking-as-play’ lens to what is, from the outside, often viewed as the least creative and most restrictive professional music-making context: the highly repetitive environment of the musical theatre band. If ‘musicking-as-play’ is present there, the thinking goes, then the conception is sufficiently robust to be applied more generally and to influence how music performance is taught. Following detailed observations of their working practices, five band members of a long-running West End musical in London and an experienced musical director were interviewed about their professional experiences. Many of these musicians had performed the show well over 1000 times, up to eight times a week for many years. Questions were based on a theoretical framework which sets play in relief alongside ritual, work and communitas. Findings confirm that the musicians perceived their work as a form of play, and a number of context-specific characteristics of play are identified. Implications for conservatoire pedagogies are discussed.

1. Introduction

Musicking-as-play is an ontological conceptualisation that equips us to look at music-making practices in new ways in order to reveal future potentials for music education. This article discusses a theory-testing case study which applies the ‘musicking-as-play’ lens to what is, from the outside, often viewed as the least creative and most restrictive professional music-making context: the highly repetitive environment of the musical theatre band. If ‘musicking-as-play’ is present there, the thinking goes, then the conception is sufficiently robust to be applied more generally and to influence how music performance is taught. Following detailed observations of their working practices, five band members of a long-running West End musical in London and an experienced musical director were interviewed about their professional experiences. Many of these musicians had performed the show well over 1000 times, up to eight times a week for many years. Questions were based on a theoretical framework from Henricks’ (2006) Pathways of Experience, which sets play in relief alongside ritual, work and communitas.

As a freelance orchestral musician in London, I had appreciated engaging in repeated ballet or opera performances (although for no more than a few weeks at a time) but I had never worked in musical theatre. However, I knew a number of colleagues with regular West End positions who all seemed to enjoy their work. This made me curious to study the context in more depth in relation to theories about play, agency and repetition. I was also reminded of Sennett’s (2008) description of the craftsman as someone who revelled in the repetitive routines of rhythmic ritual in finely-tuned practices. It was clear to me that the insider perspective on theatre musicking had not been sufficiently interrogated and could contribute significantly to our understanding of agency, satisfaction and motivation in musician’s lives. Improved knowledge of these musicians’ experiences could allow this work context to be better understood and offer insight into how high levels of repetition is experienced by musicians. In turn, these implications could contribute to an enhanced understanding of musical development in the conservatoire sector. If musicking is play then music education serves as an induction into play, and pedagogies of play might foreground student agency and contribute to addressing longstanding discourses of hegemonic studio music teaching in higher education.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Musicking-as-Play

‘Musicking-as-play’ is a concept introduced by Palmer et al. (2025) in their exploration of how the practices of three music genres—jazz, heavy metal and Western art music (WAM)—map onto the core themes present in the play literature. It is described by them as an ontological conceptualisation which ‘recognizes, values and nurtures the particular play force that manifests with/in music genre performance practices’ (p. 7). ‘Musicking-as-play’ is reliant upon Small’s (1998) concept of ‘musicking’ as a practice which draws the cultural and aesthetic into a relational frame, and in which meaning is primarily made through physically and socially mediated acts of performance rather than through the ‘works’ performed. It uses the ‘ontological as’ (Burnard et al., 2026) to employ play as a lens through which to look at performance in order to identify ways in which play might feature in music education. Play itself is notoriously hard to define (Brown, 2009; Holst, 2017; Sutton-Smith, 1997; Trujillo, 2024), with ‘porous and disputed borders’ (Eberle, 2014, p. 218). However, Palmer (2026) argues for four core themes within the play literature: (i) its indefinability as a strength rather than a weakness; (ii) its presence felt as a force moving through the human and non-human alike; (iii) its evocation of a ‘metareality’ that draws on and speaks to greater themes than those locally present; and (iv) its enactment as a resonance between fixed and fluid, notated and performed, objective and subjunctive, real and imagined. ‘Musicking-as-play’ therefore speaks to the situated liveness in music performance that is beyond simple description (Reason & Lindelof, 2017), to the ‘force’ of music to interact with the body and its material environment, to the evocation of the ‘beyond-the-musical’, and to the practices of making alive and fluid the fixed structures and patterns of notation and form. It theorises the effervescent material interactions of fingers, lungs, eyes, strings, sticks, skins, moving air and resonant spaces, and the entanglement of knowledge, intention and emergence that make up the fabric of musicking practices.

Play is articulated in the literature as foundational to the development and performance of culture. Widely regarded as the founder of play studies, Huizinga (2016) makes such claims for music, maintaining that ‘it is quite natural that we should tend to conceive music as lying within the sphere of play… Making music bears all the formal characteristics of play proper’ (p. 42). Gadamer (1975) argues that the play-resonance between structure and performance is witnessed ‘‘most clearly in the case of music’ (p. 115). A convincing argument is given in Dissanayake’s (2017) study of the ‘artifying’ nature of infant-carer play, and the ways in which patterns of movement and music underpin the development of this dyadic relationship. This leads Dissanayake to the conclusion that cultural development in general is empowered by art as relational play, and that play threads through identity, society and culture (see also Henricks, 2006, p. 148; Schore, 2008, p. 120; Sutton-Smith, 1997, p. 92). The theme is taken up by Vandervert (2017) in his analysis of the neuroscience of play, in which he argues that play and culture develop from the same neurological processes, and that this includes fine motor learning (as with musical instruments) as a form of tactile, material and technical play. Outcomes are vital in play, but principally for how they drive the process orientation of the player: in play the journey is the purpose. When musicking-as-play is recognised in music’s performance practices then it offers a challenge to music educators to rethink aims and motivations of learning.

2.2. Play, Education and Music

There is debate about whether learning can ever be an aim of play, or if it is instead a requirement to ‘go on playing better’ (Sutton-Smith, 1997, p. 43). However, there is good evidence for play’s efficacy in formal education (Zosh et al., 2017). Play is described as ‘learning’s partner’ (Brown, 2009, p. 101) and a ‘medium for learning and development’ (Bergen, 2015, p. 111), and indeed some argue that play and learning are hard-wired in the brain: ‘children are born to learn through play’ (Zosh et al., 2017, p. 12) (see also Dissanayake, 2017; Schore, 2008; Vandervert, 2017). Whilst the literature base has limitations of size, depth and diversity (Sahlberg & Doyle, 2020, p. 38) there are arguments both for academic achievement and for more holistic forms of development. For example, play is described by Whitebread (2018) as encouraging symbolic thinking, mental strategies, self-regulation, memory, motivation for learning, better concentration, creativity, curiosity and sociality.

Setting aside studies of music and play outside of mainstream schooling (e.g., in early years, digital play, playgrounds and improvisation) we find a good range of texts making this conceptual connection in relation to formal education. However, the literature is mostly philosophical rather than empirical, and writers tend to adhere to one theoretical conception of play rather than adopting a broad overview. Within this are texts substantially dependent on Piaget (Morin, 2001; Swanwick, 1988); Bruner (Addison, 1991); Huizinga (Stubley, 1993); Caillois (Maggart, 2021); Bateson (de Bruin, 2018) and Gadamer (Casari et al., 2018; Christensen, 2018; Green, 2011; Richter, 2024). Bates (2021) and Kanellopoulos (2021) both connect play, democracy and neoliberal social reproduction in music education, issues that are touched upon in the implications of this article.

Three music education texts stand out as offering similar conceptions of play to those adopted within this present study: Reichling (1997), Csepregi (2013) and Casari et al. (2018). Together they bring in the effervescent materiality of play in music and the resonant metaphoric relationship between music as both fixed and fluid, shifting in action between notation, movement and sound. Perhaps the best-known text drawing together music and play is Swanwick’s (1988) landmark Music, Mind and Education, although play here is conceived as a staging post toward expertise rather than an endpoint in its own right. Todd and King’s (2022) chapter stands out for its interviews of professional musicians, although they treat play more as an ‘X-Factor’ peak experience than an ontological consideration. Perhaps the richest in-depth text on the subject is Moseley’s (2016) Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo which focusses on the keyboard as a ‘digital’ instrument (i.e., with the fingers). Moseley makes a range of dynamic philosophical connections between music and play, the most notable of which relates playing Nintendo’s Mariokart computer game to performing Mozart’s ‘hazardous runs and leaps’ (p.10), although this book again lacks evidence from musicians themselves.

Overall, whilst there is a predominantly philosophical literature base on music and play in education, it generally lacks a broad engagement with the play literature, and is weak in relation to the phenomenological experiences of musicians as players. Play is not yet a consistent theme within music education, and we can agree with Moseley that ‘the substantial body of literature on play has made little impact on the study of Western Art Music’ (Moseley, 2016, p. 2).

2.3. Music in the West End Theatre

There is little written about music performance in the theatre, and the literature explored for this chapter comes from a disparate range of sources, many of which are trade magazines. The Journal of Music Theatre rarely discusses musicians’ working lives. Burston’s (1998) article about audio technology and the international megamusical is one of the richer sources, and he argues that such ’mega’ productions have an unprecedented level of standardisation with a ‘rationalising, industrial logic’ (p. 206) which ‘is understood by many industry insiders to replicate technical and artistic production details with such rigour as to delimit the interpretative agency of performers to a significant new degree.’ (p. 206).

Theatre music-making in general gets a bad press in the academic literature. Kenny et al. (2016) find that in relation to symphony orchestras, theatre musicians experience greater performance-associated health problems, more bullying and lower job satisfaction. They are more psychologically vulnerable, have more time off work, experience greater performance anxiety, are less happy with their fellow musicians, less satisfied with their work and feel a lack of artistic integrity, experiencing both stress and boredom. However, it should be noted that Kenny et al. researched ballet and opera musicians rather than musicals, and it is possible that these findings do not map onto the more commercial theatre. However, Cottrell maintains in his ethnographic exploration of London’s professional music scene that there is a spectrum of creativity in performance, with theatre pit work at the lowest end, and chamber music at the highest (Cottrell, 2004, p. 120): he finds that London shows have one of the lowest levels of ‘musical capital’ of all forms of musical employment (2002, p. 71). This view is supported more recently by Bull and Scharff’s (2021) interviews with freelance classical musicians, who maintain that theatre work has a low position on the ‘genre hierarchy’ of employment.

Theatre musicians writing about their experiences range from Campbell’s description of ‘anonymous toilers in a darkened, barely visible hole’ (1987, p. 22) suffering from poor self-esteem, anonymity and monotony to Morey’s arguments for a skill set that is ‘more about consistency than creativity’ (2019, p. 26). However, many positives of the context are also claimed: it demands skills across a range of musical styles (Serravalie, 2016) and so is a place where classical, jazz and rock musicians can all work together (Morey, 2019); it offers security, flexibility, the potential for good work–life balance and a relatively good income (Campbell, 1987; Morey, 2019; Teague & Dylan Smith, 2015). So, there are inconsistent reports about theatre musicking, many of which are written from outside the practice and few of which capture the voices of those whose music-making supports the global megamusical phenomenon. Much of this also suits uneasily with my previous personal experiences of very highly skilled colleagues electing to take theatre positions and recounting their narratives with evident enjoyment.

2.4. Henrick’s ‘Pathways of Experience’

The work of American sociologist of play Thomas S. Henricks has been employed as the core theoretical frame of this study. Henricks’ (2006) central contribution is his ‘Pathways of Experience’ model, in which he argues that whilst play manifests in intentions and experiences rather than specific actions, it comes into relief in relation to three other pathways of experience: work, ritual and communitas, or bonding behaviours. There are no binaries in this model: the other three behaviours are play’s ‘companion forms’ (Henricks, 2006, p. 201) and an activity can be fluid and multi-layered in how it is experienced. However, for Henricks play is identified as both transformative in its engagement with the world, and consummatory in its ‘all-consuming’ nature for the player (see Figure 1).

The ‘Pathways of Experience’ model permits us to interrogate an activity away from the definitional confines that have beset play studies—indeed, Eichberg argues that play is paradoxically both a singular and a multiple phenomenon (Eichberg, 2016, p. 158) and that seeking a definition demonstrates an academic ‘naivety’ (p. 139). When I first encountered the model, it encompassed well my experiences of professional orchestral musicking: turning up for a pattern of ‘work’ that offered highly ritualised experiences, rooted in dynamic relationships with colleagues, with the music and, to a lesser extent, with the audience. However, I also strongly experienced my work as a form of agentic and meaningful play, resulting in a complex entanglement of experiences and feelings. In the rich theorisation of play’s phenomenology developed across his writings, Henricks offers the researcher a complex set of tools to interrogate actions ‘as-play’ in order to identify the characteristics and qualities of the play within them.

Theories of play in general and in music education, ‘musicking-as-play’ and the varied views about theatre musicking in the literature therefore lead onto the research questions that this article seeks to answer:

• In what ways can repetitive theatre music performance practices be considered as ‘musicking-as-play’?
• What might the characteristics of ‘musicking-as-play’ be in the West End theatre?
• What might the implications of ‘musicking-as-play’ in the West End theatre be for music education?

3. Materials and Methods

This is a theory-testing case study, with the case defined as experienced professional musicians who predominantly make their living from West End theatre work and have played on a number of different long-running shows. Yin and Simons both state that it is normal to start a case study with an initial conjecture or conceptualisation (Simons, 2014, p. 464; Yin, 1994, p. 21), which in this case is that WAM performance practices are experienced as forms of play, and that this conceptualisation is useful in WAM pedagogies. This is also an ontological study which takes as its starting point the adoption and testing of one specific ontology. The aim here is to explore the possible benefits of better aligning epistemologies and pedagogies to ontologies (Thompson, 2011).

Through a personal contact I organised observation of and interviews with some members of the band of a long-standing London West End ‘megamusical’. I watched the show as an audience member and twice sat in the pit before interviewing five musicians; all these observations were undertaken with the full knowledge and permission of the band members. The band had two female members, but both were on leave during the fieldwork, meaning the observations were of an all-male band and I was unfortunately unable to organise a female interviewee. The difficulties accessing this rather closed world and of arranging observations meant that it was not possible to include female members of another production within the research. Whilst there is little hard information available, and noting that there is one well-known all-female production in London at time of writing, musical theatre bands were described to me as predominantly male environments. This is perhaps because of the antisocial hours, the use of personal contacts rather than auditions for employment, the dominance of historically ‘male’ instruments (bass, drums, guitar and brass), and the cycle of work from touring shows (in which musicians are away from home for weeks at a time) to West End contract. Gender and theatre bands, and gender and ‘musicking-as-play’ are important and likely fruitful research areas but ones which lie outside of the scope of this article. The limitations of the all-male sample for this research are acknowledged, however.

Some months later, and again connected through a personal contact, I interviewed an experienced musical director (MD), also male, who was working on a different West End show and who had conducted research on tempo in repeated theatre performance. The performer/MD distinction is fluid in theatre work and MDs also typically play piano/keyboard in the band. This meant that the MD fitted within the case description, and offered unique insight into matters of tempo and the relationship to the click track.

Table 1. Musical Theatre Band Participants.

Context	Instrumentalist	Abbreviation Used
Observed Show	Guitarist	Gtr
	Drummer	Dms
	Bass player	Bass
	Trombonist	Tbn
	Keyboard 2, Assistant Music Director	Keys2/AMD
Additional Show	Music Director	MD

summarises the participant list.

Even given my experience of working in opera house and ballet pits, this theatre pit was a remarkable space. Small and with tightly choreographed spaces, a band of nine musicians sat surrounded by sound isolation barriers either alone or in twos or threes. The violinist sat secluded in a small room at one end of the pit, with the drummer cocooned by screens at the other, minimising sound ‘bleed’ so that the audio engineers receive a clean signal from each microphone. Visual lines of communication were severely limited, and the MD was observed principally through small video screens. The pit was packed with audio technology, with musicians closely miked and wearing headphones, each with their own foldback mixer, meaning that they could balance exactly what they heard of their fellow musicians, actors and click track. I came away with a strong sense of the industrial nature of music-making in this context, with humanising elements of body language, communicative visual gaze and acoustic blend all subjugated to the principles of accurate rhythm, clean timbres and adherence to click, all of which make it easier for the audio engineers to mix the final result for the audience.

Semi-structured interviews with the musicians were undertaken either in a backstage room or in a local café; they typically lasted 45 min to a little over an hour. The observations were in May 2022, and the interviews between then and January 2023. Questions were based on Henricks’ (2006) ‘Pathways of Experience’ using the detailed phenomenological attributes he ascribes to each pathway (Henricks, 2015, p. 63). Given the arguments for play as an experience rather than an action, it benefits from phenomenological questioning (Eichberg, 2016, p. 174). Questions had sufficient openness for participants to reveal broader aspects of their lived experiences and to permit inductive as well as deductive analysis. However, language is challenging in such circumstances as there is a ‘resistance of experience to verbal explanation’ (Clarke & Clarke, 2011, p. 30) and phenomenology recognises that we know in bodies and relations as well as in words (Merleau-Ponty, 2005; Schiavio, 2017; van der Schyff, 2016), meaning that my observational journals were an important additional source of data. Cycles of analysis and question refinement took place between cases using a constant comparison method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). All interviews were recorded and then transcribed using Otter.ai software; transcripts were sent to interviewees for checking. The data was read multiple times before each text was coded on NVivo software using deductive codes from the theoretical framework and a developing set of inductive codes. Such qualitative analysis is both ‘systematic’ and ‘inherently interpretative in that the researcher must make sense of and draw meanings from the data’ (Williamon et al., 2021, pp. 231–232). Phenomenology recognises the researcher’s contribution to analysis (Forbes, 2021), and my experience as a professional orchestral musician inevitably shapes my findings and contributes to the first-person narratives included here. However, findings were returned to participants for respondent verification (Delamont, 2016) and no edits were suggested. Any quotes used in this article have been edited for ease of reading: following Flick’s suggestion that levels of accuracy in transcription need to match the requirements of the research question and methodology, here meaning was privileged more than exactness, along with ‘manageability (for the transcriber), readability, learnability and interpretability’ (Flick, 2014, p. 439).

This research adheres to the British Educational Research Association (BERA, 2024) guidelines including informed consent, transparency, the right to withdraw, anonymity, secure data storage and attention to participant wellbeing. No incentives were offered.

4. Results

4.1. Theatre Musicking Experienced as Play

Given the extraordinarily high level of repetition in theatre performance, it is worth dwelling on the question of whether these musicians experienced their musicking as a form of play. Noting the views expressed about the low status and perceived lack of creativity in theatre work, my initial expectations as a researcher from a WAM background were that this context would be challenging to describe as play, and indeed that was why I chose to study it: if play manifests here then it supports claims for musicking-as-play as a general rather than context-specific principal.

It became clear through talking to these musicians that my assumptions were wrong, and that they experienced their work as a vibrant form of play, manifested across a range of domains. In response to the specific question as to whether they experienced their musicking as a form of play the answers were very positive:

Gtr: Comparing it to serious work? Yeah. Yeah, it’s not a real job.

TP: Okay. It gets paid real money.

Gtr: Yeah, and that’s part of the joke, isn’t it?… It’s like being back in school, it’s a lot of fun, it’s good. It’s got to the point now where it’s like being… with people who have never grown up.

Is it play? Yeah, I would count it as that only because… it’s going to sound horribly idealistic, but I still love playing the instrument. I still love trying to make it work.

(Tbn)

Because it’s a bit of nonsense. We’re not saving lives. We’re just entertaining people.

(Dms)

The bass player eloquently offered a wider perspective that is worth quoting at length about the relationship between work and play, in keeping with Hendricks’ model of overlapping rather than delineated pathways:

It’s sort of like working in an office in some ways… I think I’d say that it’s work pretty much 100%… Saying, ‘it’s not the game we want to be playing’ doesn’t mean that we’re all sat there hating it every night, you know, it’s still good fun, but there… are still going to be nights where you don’t feel like doing that. And that’s kind of how it is on the show.

It’s all play in the sense that you’re playing an instrument, even if you’re playing the same notes, night after night, you’re still bringing your own interpretations… When you talk about work and play, I think it’s kind of a false dichotomy in music in some ways, insofar as we’re not working in a factory, we’re not working in finance, we’re not sitting in front of terminals, everything we do is play… It’s play, it’s enjoyable and fun, and not stressful… play is something where the cognitive obstacles that are coming out you can deal with, you can reach into your toolkit, and you can say, ‘yes, because of my experience, because of my personality and how I apply that to my instrument, I can get out of the thing, I can jump over that obstacle’.

(Bass)

The Keys 2/AMD interviewee offered a glimpse of the different forms of play that dominate his two different roles. He spoke first about the technically complex keys 2 part:

I guess in my own little world with my blinkers on, there is that play with ‘I wonder if I’ll get it right tonight?’

(Keys 2/AMD)

He contrasted this with his role as conductor:

It’s a very different sort of play… where I feel like I’m actively in a dialogue with the other musicians and the cast… I can feel how the audience behind me is reacting to things so that I can feed off their energy… That feels much more in the moment, much more spontaneous.

(Keys 2/AMD)

Indeed, when asked if there were moments when the work specifically did not feel like play, the musicians’ responses were typically that when external circumstances were not positive it felt challenging to start performing. However, for them the music could take over and act positively on their mood through both the performance experience, and also through the meta-narrative of being able to perform for a living:

The worst thing I could say for it is sometimes I go in just thinking, ‘I really don’t feel like doing this right now’. But then there’ll still be moments that I enjoy.

(Bass)

I suppose I’m lucky. Very rarely do I have [moments the job feels arduous]. But they, of course they exist, they happen. There are moments where I’d rather be elsewhere… but most of the time I’m looking forward to going in to play.

(Gtr)

Some shows at the start of the show, or when you’re coming in, and something’s happened in your day and you’re not quite in the right frame of mind, but you’ve got to do it, then… its harder to kind of pick yourself up to get ready… and it’d be a lot easier to not be here. But the feeling of just being very lucky to have this job, this chair on a long running show that, touch wood, is fairly safe… the audiences are loving it. And yeah, being very lucky to be here.

(Dms)

There is an awareness of different types of play in these responses and of the conflicted relationship between work and play in the arts. Noting these positive responses by the musicians to the question of the presence of play as described in their own terms, we can move on to the specific themes about play and theatre musicking that have been drawn from the analysis of their interviews.

4.2. Introducing the Five Themes

Analysis identified a number of core inductive themes that help to illuminate the musicians’ experiences. The five most prominent themes are detailed in this article. In West End theatre musicking:

(1)

Play is dominated by social relations;

(2)

Play manifests in an undiminished enjoyment of musicking;

(3)

Play motivates a hyper-attention to the subtle microvariations within the ensemble;

(4)

Play drives a consistent focus on the materiality of sounds, instruments, bodies and click;

(5)

Play exists within the movement between automation and presence, consistency and variability.

4.3. Theme 1: Play Is Dominated by Social Relations

For these musicians, the experience of musicking is primarily a social phenomenon, bound up in their relationships with their fellow musicians and with the audience. Interviews started with an introductory question about what the musicians missed most during the hiatus to their work in the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst practical experiences of materially making music were much missed, four of the five initial participants responded primarily with discussion about the social aspects of their work being the main loss to them. The fifth, Keys2/AMD, was appointed to his role in Feb 2020 and so had had little time to establish a regular position in the band before the pandemic.

Playing music with my friends every day… I couldn’t practice or go and play fun music with my friends… it’s more about the people than the music… the social thing is really important.

(Gtr)

It was actually the social aspect of it that I missed the most. Because almost all of my friends are also musicians or work peripherally in music… it’s equally, if not more, about ‘that’s where all my friends are’.

(Bass)

Playing aside, sort of just the community that you build up with your colleagues.

(Dms)

A number of comments connected the social to the musical as interlinked domains:

You missed the people, you missed the community, you missed the experience of doing the thing that’s a very core part of your being…. It’s only proper playing when you’re playing with other people.

(Tbn)

You could be playing good music. If it’s with a bunch of knobheads1, and you don’t enjoy people’s company, then it’s going to be a miserable experience.

(Gtr)

It’s a nice social dynamism. And part of the ‘doing the right’ thing is the way that you play with other people… your playing is fundamentally an extension of who you are. So I think there’s the argument that when you are socially not rubbing up that well with somebody, you still do your job but there’s less of a sense of connectivity.

(Tbn)

Some of the musicians described a ritualised series of gestures and moments of eye contact that had developed in the pit to acknowledge the nightly contributions of their colleagues:

We’ve all got little bits in the show where we sort of do the same things or acknowledge each other… And that’s kind of equally as important as well to the routine thing for me.

(Dms)

There are like rehearsed moments of interaction with other members of the band that are the same every night… we gesture to each other congratulations, well done, we got we got through that bit. And that’s the same every time whether it was good or bad, it’s just ‘great job’.

(Keys 2/AMD)

On my first observation of the band there was a sudden moment when everyone’s faces lit up and smiling eye contact was made where possible. I was told afterward that the drummer had mishit a single cowbell note. The communal reactions to such minor variations served to indicate that despite the industrial and compartmentalised work environment there was a strong sociality ‘through sound’. The reactions were not meant to be critical, but rather a supportive sharing in the vibrant materiality and the potential mishaps of performance.

There was an acknowledgement by some musicians that the audience was also part of the social fabric of performance, although of less significance.

I can feel how the audience behind me is reacting to things so that I can feed off their energy.

(Keys 2/AMD)

If you know the audience are up for it, then that helps you be up for it as well. If the audience are a bit muted, and you’re not feeling… they go hand in hand… There’s seven out of eight shows a week it’ll be standing ovation and they’ll be loving it, which makes you feel good… I always like it when I can eyeball a few people or see them like laughing and joking.

(Dms)

If they’re having the best time of their lives, that’s very infectious, it’s difficult to be miserable while that’s going on.

(Bass)

At the same time there was some reservation about the idea that the musicians might be playing for the audience:

No. No. I don’t think any musician does. You’ve got to be very superficial to be playing for the audience…. I’m not trying to impress the audience.

(Bass)

You never allow your standards to drop, because you can’t… you’re playing for the people around you, you are playing for the people next to you. You know, when I clip a note, I’m awfully aware of the trumpet player and how good he is. And the fact that he’s heard it, even if no one else in the building hears it, I know he has. And that matters.

(Tbn)

This maps onto Campbell’s (1987, p. 24) view that theatre musicians play first for themselves, then their colleagues and only finally for the audience, noting that with the high-tech audio engineering that is standard in modern theatre the differences between the sounds the musicians make and the sounds the audience hears are significant (Burston, 1998).

The play literature is rich in description of the sociality of play, which promotes the formation of social groupings (Brown, 2009) and is considered a ‘distinctive mode of human relationship’ (Henricks, 2006, p. 182). Henricks’ model of ‘pathways of experience’ likewise connects communitas as a companion behaviour to play. Whilst autonomy is prized in play (King & Howard, 2016) it is often set in a resonant relationship with community: ‘ludic performances are arranged to persuade ourselves (and others) to adopt the communal view of ourselves that we prefer’ (Sutton-Smith, 1997, p. 92). De Koven maintains that ‘when we are playing together, despite our differences, we celebrate a transcendent sameness, a unity that underlines the illusion of our separateness.’ (De Koven, 2014, p. 163). Play offers a form of right-brain-to-right-brain interpersonal neurobiological connection that binds us (Schore, 2008, p. 120) and we can here return to Dissanayake’s (2017) claim for play as the foundation of infant-carer bonding and the ‘artifying’ of relationship.

In thinking through relationality in sound as a form of play it is helpful to explore wider issues of musical identities. These musicians sustain their working lives through their social contacts, and some spoke about cultivating and using relationships with fellow musicians to find work and stable positions in a show. Indeed, when discussing why the band got on so well, one argued:

I think there’s an evolutionary process, I think people who are less agreeable just get filtered out of the market, especially in theatre, touring, in long running gigs. I think there’s a natural selection.

(Gtr)

Cottrell backs up this view by looking at the freelance world in London through an ethnographic lens, arguing that ‘any individual musician can be seen as one part of a web of socio-musical connections, often constructed over many years’ (Cottrell, 2002, p. 66). So, the social relations that dominate play in the theatre pit are part of a wider construction of social identities that freelance musicians develop to support careers. Whilst not questioning the authenticity of the personal relationships, for the interviewees it is possible to consider the social dimensions of ‘musicking-as-play’ as an element of a broader identity play for which ‘connections to other people often are vital’ (Henricks, 2015, p. 211). For Sutton-Smith, cultural ‘group play’ that moves across relational and professional boundaries has a ‘transcendent and integrative’ character that forms an ‘”enactive rhetoric” that persuades us of the worth of belonging together’ (Sutton-Smith, 1997, p. 92).

4.4. Theme 2: Play Manifests in an Undiminished Enjoyment of Musicking

Repetition is central to the experience of theatre work in the West End: it is ‘an unavoidable part of being a pit musician’ (Ringering, 2014, p. 21), and some of my interviewees had repeated the show well over 1000 times. My instinct before the research was that I would find a community of musicians for whom the repetition had removed much of the enjoyment. In her detailed study of musical repetition and the human mind, Margulis argues that there can be strong levels of discomfort in having to repeat scripted behaviours again and again (Margulis, 2014, p. 84).

However, it became apparent that these assumptions were wrong, and that the insider experience of repeated performance is very different to the outsider perspective. The musicians spoke about and exhibited a significant sense of enjoyment of their music-making in the theatre pit.

I think initially, it’s the playing, it’s getting the adrenaline hit of playing… I guess just feeling very lucky to kind of turn a sort of hobby into a career, you know… I’m certainly having fun when I’m when I’m doing it.

(Dms)

When it’s executed, by everyone, to a standard where it is really enjoyable you do get that “yeah, this is working. This is grooving, like, everyone is just in the same place here and it feels good”. That’s a fantastic feeling. I never ever get bored of that.

(Bass)

It is fun and it’s challenging. It’s good. It’s good for my playing… it’s got loads of different stuff in it that works different muscles…. and I get to play a lot of rock guitar for money… so, I get to do the shred guitar thing a little bit.

(Gtr)

I still love playing the instrument. I still love trying to make it work… It’s fun, I think, because I’ve done it so often.

(Tbn)

Some musicians were very clear about what aspects of the experience were most enjoyable for them. Here it was the quality of the fellow musicians and their ‘groove’, the flow state, the community, the laughter from the show’s storyline, and the occasional moments when the ensemble felt especially together. The ‘flow state’ mentioned here is from Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996) concept of ‘flow’, meaning a highly enjoyable experience of focussed absorption.

But I’d be very specific about what, where the enjoyment lies for me. And it’s with a very good rhythm section. I think the principal satisfaction for me I suppose, is reaching…. a flow state where I just feel very, very focused.

(Gtr)

In the rhythm section you really have to have a sort of a mutual trust established for it to be enjoyable… to get that real sense of ‘Yeah, this is why I do this’ it really needs to be a sort of a good day for everyone.

(Bass)

It’s fun… but that’s more down to the show and the people than the regularity of doing it…. the people are lovely, it’s a fun show… being in a room full of laughing people does keep you buoyed.

(Tbn)

Interviewees also mentioned the enjoyment they experienced from being part of a larger ensemble, producing a high-quality live experience as a team:

‘It’s… to do with the sense of being involved in something, we’re all doing our thing ‘together’. It’s the sense of performing something together and making something happen and that if stuff goes wrong on stage or… in the band, that becomes a moment that we all share, that we get some joy from.’

(Bass)

Being part of something and to know that you’re contributing a piece into a big puzzle.

(Dms)

This experience of enjoyment exhibits a central relationship between musicking and play, that of experiences of joy and pleasure. The insights revealed by these theatre musicians give life to Cook’s argument that ‘creativity is constantly made and remade in the act of performance’ (Cook, 2018, pp. 17–18) and that rather than repeated performances serving to inhibit enjoyment, ‘repetition is a source of pleasure in its own right’ (Cook, 2018, p. 192). Margulis concurs: the embodiment of repetitive actions ‘contributes to musical pleasure’ (Margulis, 2014, p. 12). Kivy points out that WAM is infused with repetition, not just in the architecture of musical ‘works’ (Kivy, 1993, p. 328) but also in its practices: personal practice and rehearsal can be celebrations of the repetitive (see also Payne, 2016, p. 329). In his exploration of the subject Cook offers the example of Javanese Court Dancing to argue that highly scripted repetitions can offer a form of liberation, creativity and ‘immanence’ (Cook, 2018, p. 201). Using Burnard’s (2012) concept of multiple creativities, this might be called a ‘creativity of repetition’ in its focus on emergence and the minutiae of detail. Children’s play is firmly bound up in repetitive actions and patterns (‘Again! Again again!’ (Harmer, 2024, p. 8)) and so it is likely that our cultural down-playing of the creative value of theatre bands, as described at the start of this sub-chapter, fails to recognise both the cultures of repetition that are woven through WAM, and the play that is at the foundation of repeated performance.

4.5. Theme 3: Play Motivates a Hyper-Attention to the Subtle Microvariations Within the Ensemble

Margulis’s substantial study of the musical mind finds that repetition tends to push attention both up the scale toward larger units of time, and down the scale to smaller details and ‘levels of nuance, microstructure, and expressive timing’ (Margulis, 2014, p. 59) (see also Høffding, 2018, p. 149). The theatre musicians participating in this study gave lucid descriptions of the ways in which their attention was consistently drawn to highly refined and granular levels of detail in the ensemble.

With the repetition of just like night after night after night. If you’re not going to go insane you need to find things in the music that you can listen to, to… try and hone what you’re doing. Even just microscopic levels of detail.

(Bass)

A lot of this attention was focussed on the variation that deputy musicians brought:

When deps come in, even if they’ve done it 100,000 times before, they still play it in a completely different way to the regular guy. And that’s play, I think… when you can bring something to it… We have some fantastic deps in the band so you’re never really performing with the same group of people every night.

(Keys2/AMD)

Because I did a tour for two years, and we were the same 10 guys for the whole time. So musically, we were tight, because we knew exactly, we could guess exactly whatever everyone else is going to do. Whereas, whereas in here, you’re kind of in real time working it out as you go along, even though we all know the show.

(Dms)

So, I can tell with my eyes closed who is in, pretty much, because there are certain little idiosyncrasies of sound, of phrasing, of placement, of all those little bits.

(Tbn)

The idea that even after performing the show many times the band are still ‘working it out as you go along’ indicates that these micro-variations play a significant role in the cognitive processes of the regular band members, and that they demand a response, particularly if they begin to transgress a collegiate understanding of the expected consistency. Such reactions can be playfully responsive, or, for a rhythm section player, can involve ‘policing’, but either way the intensity of the experience is enhanced:

I’ve got to the stage where I know which deps hold which notes for how long so that I can always make sure that I’m matching them, trying to follow, trying to blend, and that’s the game that I play with myself.

(Keys 2/AMD)

I might have a bit of policing to do, it might be starting to fluctuate, and it becomes an effort. And then the resolution is so narrow that it feels like time is passing really slow. Like, when you’re actually playing, this bar and this bar and this bar, you’re focusing on everything, those moments feel like they last forever.

(Bass)

It appears that the musicians were occupied not just with attention to the micro-variations present within the ensemble, but were making choices about how to respond to them, varying their attention on the smallest of details in order to maintain interest:

I would make the show different for myself every night like ‘this evening, I’ll turn up the viola.’ And I’ll just, I’ll see how I play with the viola. Oh, and this evening, I’ll let’s see what reed 4 is doing. And I’ve got all these bassoon bits, she’s got all of those bass clarinet bits, let’s see how we interweave.

(Keys2/AMD)

Micro-variations are in this way not considered problematic, but rather as part of the fabric of human musicking: as long as they fall within accepted ‘norms’ of performance then they were accepted and celebrated as indicators of personality and individual contribution. There is some evidence that performers are very good at repeating material with high levels of consistency (Margulis, 2014, pp. 119–120), and the musicians in this study argued that consistency was very important to their roles (see also Morey, 2019, p. 26). Keil (1987) created the terminology of ‘participatory discrepancies’ in the context of groove studies to showcase the ways in which repeated collective performances permit minor variation: ‘PDs exist. Between players. Between the beginnings of their notes. In the moments when each of us chooses to snap fingers, or nod a head’ (Keil, 1995, p. 2). Margulis discusses how such discrepancies are more often ‘felt’ than understood (Margulis, 2014, p. 155) in repetitive musicking, but that repetition ‘tends to drive attention toward consciousness about elements that were previously transparent’ (p. 175). It is this hyper-attentive consciousness towards the emergent highly detailed nuances within every live performance that forms a deliberate domain of play for these musicians.

4.6. Theme 4: Play Drives a Consistent Focus on the Materiality of Sounds, Instruments, Bodies and Click

Participants articulated high levels of attentiveness to the body in performance and to the material environment, particularly in relation to the click track that underpinned much of the music. The click was revealed as a powerful material agent within the musicking:

It’s more like I’m playing a game with the click. I’m seeing how I grid to that, how… when I’m playing a really strict grooving electric guitar with one hand, and then in another voice I’m triggering flute samples, and then trying to be as expressive as I can with a string line at the top of my right… there’s a lot going on.

(Keys2/AMD)

The principal satisfaction for me, I suppose, is reaching… a flow state where I just feel very, very focused on one little element, and it’s usually about the relationship with bass, drums and guitar to click.

(Gtr)

WAM musicians often discuss negatively the restrictions of a click, but in this environment, it offers affordances for creative thinking and even personalization. Discussing his own research on tempi in the musical, MD said:

People go ‘well, clicks are entirely restrictive and are a terrible thing’. I know many musicians who love clicks and find they’re more creative with a click than they are without it… when the click is running [there] is one less thing for me to think about and then I can focus on other things… And you can absolutely phrase around the click… Different drummers feel different playing with a click track… they’ve got forwards energy or backwards energy… even with a click you can play behind or ahead.

(MD)

The embodied materiality of performance was also an important phenomenon to these players. The drummer had to start and stop the click for much for the show using a preset pad and described how this gave the part a very specific physical feel and set of requirements.

This show more than any other show I’ve done…. muscle memory is the winner… If you were to sight read it, it’s not a natural thing, because you would then… be like, ‘Oh, but my arm needs to be over there to start the click’, which is more important… [you have to] simplify the fill, or make sure you can do the end of the fill with one hand, because then you’ve got to be over there [indicates left to the trigger pad].

(Dms)

Other players described how the physicality of performing and ‘muscle memory’, whether for technical or musical reasons, helped to drive their engagement and indeed underpinned performance as a ‘dance’:

The playing of the majority of the show now is just completely subconscious, completely muscle memory, I’ve got my ears open and I’m listening.

(Bass)

So for keys two it’s a combination of muscle memory and looking. And you cannot trust your ears. Because the keys that you are playing bear no relation to what’s coming [out]. You could be doing an F major arpeggio and the sound is coming out with a triangle groove… When I’m conducting, I’m not reading the score at all. And that’s muscle memory…I need to be making eye contact either with the camera or with the people on the stage.

(Keys2/AMD)

I know I move my body. And I think that’s, I think that’s a good thing. I used to think it isn’t. But I’ve changed my mind to think it’s all, it’s all a dance, isn’t it?

(Gtr)

A number of the musicians articulated a loss of familiarity in relation to their instruments as a result of high levels of repetition, in common with the findings of Margulis (2014), who argues for a ‘non-linear relationship’ between repetition and familiarity (p. 174). Margulis claims that repetition ‘tends to drive attention toward consciousness about elements that were previously transparent’ (p. 175), meaning that the performers started to think again about processes which had been automated for many years. Sennett, in exploring the experiences of the craftsman, also argues that thinking about repeated practices can result in losing control and fluency (Sennett, 2008, p. 113).

I’ll quite often get halfway through the show, and I’ll even be thinking, “Oh, this is going well, I wonder why it’s going well”, at which point my kind of my phenomenological experience of what it’s like to play fundamentally changes. And then I start asking questions about how…“how’s your face working like this?” “How’s your embouchure doing this”?… It’s a little bit like running down an escalator and you’re fine until you look at your feet, and go, “Well, that’s clever, I wonder what they’re doing?” That’s the point when you fall over.

(Tbn)

I aim for as close as I can every show. But human error and sweat and the stick will fly out your hand or something or deps have come in and slightly moved things and it feels a bit strange.

(Dms)

In his exploration of musical materiality, Wilson argues that embodied knowledge interfaces with music and its production: “we sound bodies such that we might know them’ (Wilson, 2021, p. 21). Burnard & Köbli concur: ‘Music materialises as the materiality of bodies… is transformed.’ (Burnard & Köbli, 2024, p. 2). Wilson goes on to claim that bodies are extended through musical performance and through the technologies used in performance (here, for example, the click, the theatre sound system and the instruments). This intense intra-relationship between sonic materials, physical materials, human bodies and technologies of performance is rhizomatically connected through the technologically mediated pit set-up, countering the industrial levels of separation and sound isolation. Here the click, together with the headphone monitoring system that facilitates it, acts not just as a tool for timekeeping and hearing but as an entanglement of human and non-human elements, a unifying social device that coordinates the disparate and unseen into a whole, reducing the need for eye-contact or coordinated body language. Thus, the materials of performing bodies and the physical and technological resources of music-making become “tools for play” (Sicart, 2014, p. 43), consummatory in the absorption they offer the performers, and transformatory in their potentials for agentic and coordinated music-making in the pit. For Sicart, play is ‘deeply rooted in physical and material instantiations, in objects that carry part of the meanings of the activity, that help it exist and take place, be shared and be communicated’ (Sicart, 2014, p. 47).

4.7. Theme 5: Play Exists Within the Movement Between Automation and Presence, Consistency and Variability

The interviews revealed a conflicted duality of experience, often articulated by the same individuals. The first was the desire for consistency of performance and the potential for automation through this. This experience of automation and ‘flow’ was highly valued by the musicians:

I think the principal satisfaction for me, I suppose, is reaching…. a flow state where I just feel very, very focused on one little element… and what I find is I lose sense of the passage of time. And that’s special… that’s the thing I look for…. that’s deeply satisfying… I zone out a fair amount, a couple of pages will go by and I will question whether I’ve actually played something. You know, ‘have we done that bit?’ ‘I don’t remember playing that’

(Gtr)

When I’ve got my head in the right place, and the show’s going well, I think what’s coming out is, what the muscles are doing to just be a completely automated process, the music comes into my ear and then the right notes come out. And there’s just no conscious effort involved at all… I’ll turn up, plug in the instrument and warm up, and the show will just happen.

(Bass)

When I first experienced it, it was quite disconcerting, that I sort of “came to” in the middle of a page and was like, “have I been playing for the last minute and a half?” I assume so—no one is staring at me… it’s not that I’ve been daydreaming or thinking about other things, it’s that I’ve been so focused on doing.

(Keys 2/AMD)

McCaleb describes this level of ensemble automation as feeling ‘to the performers as if the music is ‘playing itself’’ (McCaleb, 2014, p. 124). Henricks articulates ritual in similar terms, as an acquiescent commitment to ‘externally based forms and forces’ (Henricks, 2015, p. 54). This state was coupled with the principal of consistency, which was considered both a professional obligation and a focus of enjoyment in the ensemble, and suited these particular personalities:

Our job is to produce the same thing at a high standard night after night after night, without it getting tired.

(Tbn)

This style of show is very just ‘deliver the product’… the degree of variability is quite small.

(Keys2/AMD)

I aim for as close as I can every show…. I’m the sort of player who, you tell me what to play. And I’ll replicate that eight times a week as long as I need to do it…. I’m booked for, I would like to think consistency… they have not employed me for my ideas and my interpretation of what they’ve created. They want what they’ve created executed night after night.

(Dms)

I feel like on the keyboard side of things, it’s just consistency

(Keys2/AMD)

I pride myself on being able to just replicate things… I like repetition… I’m quite happy to hammer out iterations of something… that’s a challenge that I’ll happily accept and enjoy.

(Gtr)

I like the predictability of it. I guess that’s, for me as a person, structure and knowing what I’m doing when I’m doing it… I like that routine that makes me kind of feel calm and I don’t get bored easily, I’m very content with what I’ve got.

(Dms)

Alongside this, however, was a desire to experience ‘presence’, focussing on the variable and unique in every moment, paying deliberate attention to the emergent details, partly to avoid the experience of ‘phoning it in’, or playing without commitment. Peters describes this particularly well: ‘the liveness and the event-ness of a performance are directly related to the sense in which… the fixity of creative practise and practice is unfixed as a moment of repetition.’ (Peters, 2017, p. 170).

You’ve got to do your part in turning up and not just physically but musically and being a presence and an energy. And especially with the drums because if you start playing a bit softer, or you start sort of phoning it in, then people know straightaway.

(Dms)

You’re playing for the people around you. And part of the job of that is to make a performance out of it.

(Tbn)

I think it’s Liza Minnelli that said, acting is doing it for the first time, every time. And there’s something really lovely that I feel when I’m conducting… If I’m really engaged in the drama of the music, it can be this wonderful collaborative self-discovery, dramatic experience with the actors… you would hope to hit that a couple of times a week.

(Keys2/AMD)

This idea of ‘presence’ was often coupled with moments of variation in the ensemble that proved significant:

Sometimes when deps come in, or when there’s understudies on and something doesn’t [seem] quite right, you get that warm hit of adrenaline, which brings you out of ‘where are we, what’s happened?’… but I always try and be ‘in the moment’ and be present.

(Dms)

The experience of ‘presence’ was partly enacted through deliberate small variations:

One of the things that I’ve used on a lot of shows to help get me through is to have a particular point in a show where the challenge is to do something different every time, just a tiny little variation, could just be one thing in one bar.

(Gtr)

The MD interviewee articulated the consistency-presence duality as working deliberately with a zone of ‘just noticeable difference’, in that he did not consciously set a different speed every night for unclicked sections, but permitted it to naturally vary fractionally without adjustment, as long as it met the requirements of the performance. In his interview he first of all explored the human experience of variation:

We like a little bit of variation but we don’t like much. As humans… people returning to the same restaurants time after time, they watch the same film every Christmas… And they love it… And they know the bits and they get enjoyment out of the whole expectation and you get… enjoyment when you get what you expect. So a little bit of novelty is good, but too much is really annoying.

(MD)

The drummer of the show described well the split between automation and consistency on the one hand, and variation and ‘presence’ on the other, explaining the relationship between the professional requirement to service those ‘outside of the pit’ and the humanising requirements within the pit in order to keep the musicians ‘on their toes’:

I think people, everybody outside of the pit needs consistency. Yeah, the dancers need the tempos and… but I think [variation] within the pit and deps, it keeps it fresh, and keeps you on your toes.

(Dms)

This split is also manifested in the experience of time: both passing quickly within a ‘flow’ state and passing slowly in ‘presence’. Repetition therefore serves to push temporal experiences both up and down the scale, in common with Margulis’s observations about the scale of focus. Both directions of temporal engagement help the musicians in dealing with the challenges of the cyclical nature of time in the theatre.

The core argument offered here is that this duality between consistency and variability is a form of play resonance, a dyadic manifestation of two intentions empowering the same moment and experience. The play here inhabits not just both forms but also the relationship between them. In his study of what he labels ‘performative passivity’, Høffding describes an ‘intertwinement of passivity and activity’ ‘not to be understood as two bounded, non-coinciding processes meeting each other at a certain point. Rather, they must be construed as interpenetrating and continuous’ (Høffding, 2019, p. 134). Formulating this as a hybrid experience between ‘top-down’ (predictive, planning, perspective-taking) and ‘bottom-up’ (pre-reflective entrained embodiment), Høffding and Satne propose an integrated conceptualisation of interactive expertise in ensemble performance: musicians do not switch between the two processes but engage in ‘regulated employment’ of both (Høffding & Satne, 2021, p. 439). This duality itself is both a consummatory experience and transformatory in driving long-term engagement with the role of pit musician. For these individuals both the repetition and emergent meaningfulness are bound up in their daily professional performing lives, and given that the directions of engagement between automation and presence cannot be planned or anticipated, every show indeed feels different.

5. Summary and Implications

This article has distilled the voices of six experienced theatre musicians into five core themes, applying an ontological conception of ‘musicking-as-play’ in order to investigate whether repetitive theatre performance can be considered as play, and what the characteristics of such play might be. The study is limited to male participants only, and it might be that female respondents would have had different views about play in performance. The study is also London-centric and involved just six interviewees, and so does not claim generalisable findings, but rather a depth of insight that offers valuable implications for conservatoire pedagogies.

If musicking is a form of play then music education is an induction into play: ontologies need reflecting in epistemologies (Thompson, 2011). Daubney argues that instrumental teachers need to ‘model the values, behaviours, traits and attitudes into our teaching that we strive to instil in others.’ (Daubney, 2024, p. 86), and she associates this particularly with playfulness. Play is strongly associated with agency (Henricks, 2018; Nguyen, 2020) and so we look in our teaching for ways to centre student voice, the reflective self-directed student experience and teacher-learner dialogue. Play’s consummatory nature means that play-filled teaching has teacher and student caught up together in boundaried moments of experiment and exploration of sound, materials and bodies. The transformatory identity of play requires teaching that seeks to seed holistic growth, teaching the person as well as the subject. This is set against the more limited conception of teaching as ‘transfer’ of knowledge (Carey et al., 2013). Staying with Henricks’ theorisation of play, his ‘pathways of experience’ model permits us to celebrate the aspects of studio teaching that resemble work, ritual and communitas without losing the centrality and foreground of play.

The five themes identified here as characteristic of musicking-as-play in the West End theatre point us to various helpful strategies in higher music performance education. The dominance of social motivations raises awareness of the importance of relationality within music’s pedagogies—both teacher-learner and peer-peer—as a motivator for personal development, as inspirer of a communicative and expressive musicality and as the ‘oil’ that facilitates ensemble performance. That musicking is joyful is a commonly expressed aphorism, but joy in higher education thrives when students understand and can influence their learning processes, and are part of a community within a supportive and stimulating learning environment (Cronqvist, 2024) (see also Blignaut et al., 2023), meaning that both student voice and effective support systems are vital in higher music education. The third theme discusses ensemble skills and the importance of attending to microvariations, demanding an observational alertness of mind and for teacher and learner to constantly move down the scale of focus in search of technical excellence. This means repetition should be celebrated rather than endured (Harnum, 2014; Margulis, 2014): the more elements that are fixed in repetition, the finer the levels of detail that can be refined. Learning musical performance in WAM is a material process in which the vibrant entanglement of bodies, instruments and the tools of performance occurs as a form of play (Burnard et al., 2026). This demands a deliberate attention to the phenomenology of the body in performance: learning to perform is a learning to listen to the body. This alertness extends through the materials used (Leman & Maes, 2015; van der Schyff et al., 2022), and students need to learn how to effectively incorporate technology and the ‘click’ into this extended cognition. The fifth theme reveals the ability of the musicians to move between passive and active cognitive engagement and speaks to the importance of learners developing psychological awareness and control in performance. Høffding describes this as an intense training ‘that masters the music and has learned to be mastered by the music, in a gradual way, repeatedly going in and out of different kinds of absorption and slowly getting to know these states’ (Høffding, 2018, p. 170).

It might be that the process orientation of play helps us to address the more damaging elements of neo-liberal and alienating product-centred practices in higher music education and the ‘reproduction of the dominant musical order’ (Wistreich & Perkins, 2025, p. 141) (see also Bates, 2021; Burwell et al., 2017; Perkins, 2013). Certainly, play can promote democratic approaches in which the systemic processes of democracy themselves are played with, in a challenge to authoritative structures (Kanellopoulos, 2021). However, the original thinking demanded in higher education should make it a natural home for play (Fisher & Gaydon, 2019; James, 2019), an argument that can be applied to the imbrication of theory, practice and performance, ‘mastery learning’ and creative contribution at the heart of the conservatoire.

There are good arguments, then, that conservatoire education might benefit from ‘pedagogies of play’, or what Forbes and Thomas (2022) term a ‘playvolution’. This concept rejects play in pedagogy, the employment of play as one strategy among many, in favour of play as pedagogy, the ontological reconceptualisation of music teaching and learning (Wood, 2014). de Bruin maintains that in instrumental teaching ‘play renders the materials of music facile, fluid and malleable. It makes apparent a commonsense knowledge that imbues a creative cognition and sophistication, rather [than] merely dealing with context-dependent residual artefacts’ (de Bruin, 2018, p. 255). Like play, education resonates between fluidity and frameworks, and a pedagogy of play ‘exemplifies the two fundamental principles at the heart of education… unstructured exploration and intentional, purposeful action’ (Bunt, 2023, p. 17), two principles that instrumental education traditionally finds challenging to balance. ‘Pedagogies of play’ may also help address the restricted expectations and narrow definitions of success that some conservatoire students reportedly experience (Caizley, 2024; Camlin et al., 2025; Guillaumier et al., 2025), and better prepare students for the requirements of a professional career (Corkhill, 2005). Indeed, Johns and Kelly (2025) remind us that it is important that students experience professional conditions within the conservatoire. Introducing the concept of play into studio pedagogies has the potential to shift damaging historic discourses and traditions that have proven remarkably resilient to change.

6. Conclusions

These theatre musicians demonstrate that the very act of making music in an ensemble, no matter how repetitive or functional, is a source of joy and communitas. If musicians in the highly industrialised environment of the commercial theatre find that their daily working lives are filled with multiple types of play, then this can inform those preparing musicians for professional lives about the ways in which play manifests in performance practices. Play is only one possible ontological lens on music amongst many. However, this article reinforces the humanity of all musicking as an effervescent entanglement of relations, materials and enactments, rooted in the force of play, regardless of where or how it occurs. Not only does it reset the historic and damaging hierarchies of professional contexts in Western art music, it also reveals that that there is little that can stop the play breaking through in diverse ways in live performance. Play is therefore an ontological lens that those of us working in higher music performance education should take note of as we seek to enhance pedagogies and understandings of how professional musicking interacts with selves and communities.