Q&A: Sara Ascenso

How does it feel to be appointed and what does the role involve?

I'm delighted and extremely grateful! My decision to focus on the study of musicians’ wellbeing, and integrate my training in both psychology and music, happened with the hope of one day being able to contribute to evidence-based tailored provision in this area for music institutions. This post represents exactly that, in what I consider to be an extremely innovative and meaningful initiative for our sector.

The role's mission is to continue to develop the health and wellbeing provision across the RNCM, ensuring that it is holistic, tailored to musicians’ needs, research-based and embedded in the curriculum. Adding to lecturing and research, the vision also includes carefully monitoring the specific wellbeing needs of students and staff and looking at how the most recent findings in this area can shape our planning towards optimal delivery across a wide range of initiatives. We are aiming for much more than just increasing awareness or tackling problems when then arise. Rather, we would like to focus on developing mental and social skills for wellbeing and make sure that both physical health and psychological flourishing are at the core of the students’ experiences.

How important is this role to a student's education?

A few years ago, there was an interesting news piece about a high-profile conservatoire, where journalists tracked what students were doing ten years after graduating. They found that around one third were out of the profession and almost another third could not be traced, which most likely meant they had gone down a similar path. Many students mentioned they felt the conservatoire gave them technique but not psychological readiness, and several recounted challenges around sustaining mental health.

It is completely acceptable to choose not to continue in music after conservatoire training, but we would like to make sure that such a decision is not built on a sense of a lack of holistic preparation for the profession. We want students to learn how to make music with excellence but also how to live fulfilling lives as musicians and as human beings more generally. This means that what they are learning is not only about doing but also about being. We want to maximize our efforts to make sure they experience what being well as a musician means during their time at the RNCM.

When we promote wellbeing, we are not only helping students to be happier, we are also helping them to learn and perform better, and to experience developmental transitions better. Sometimes health and wellbeing is seen as a parallel effort that complements our academic goals. This is not a parallel agenda but the same one. Students will learn and perform optimally when they feel well and function well, both physically and psychologically.

How did you get into this work?

After training in clinical psychology and in piano performance for a few years, I was literally dividing my typical week in two: working as a clinical psychologist half of the time and in a conservatoire as an accompanist and teacher for the rest of it. On the first part of my week, I focussed on implementing interventions for all kinds of clinical scenarios within psychopathology, which required daily contact with recent literature and research. As a side effect, I began to know more about how music-based initiatives were being used in clinical contexts for promotion of wellbeing. On the second part, I started to notice how many professional musicians struggled to maintain a healthy and balanced life. It was intriguing to me how our profession had such potential for promoting positive change and wellbeing and how it also seemed to pose such a significant threat at the same time. This got me curious and I began to be very interested in both sides of this equation: how can music promote psychological wellbeing and how can psychology help musicians? That's what ultimately brought me to the Centre for Performance Science at the Royal College of Music, where I started my research in this field.

What are you looking forward to most?

I think the people we work with are the best part of any job so I'm looking forward to meeting the students and my colleagues and to learning with this community. The nature of the work I will be doing is also something I am anticipating with great expectation. The true challenge, when the topic is wellbeing, is not so much to share relevant information about it but to meaningfully trigger individual and collective change. Sustainable change in this area is very hard to achieve. I am looking forward to the process of learning more about how to enable it.

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