Chapter 7: Changing-and-Returning to a Musical Instrument: Exploring Dilemmatic Experiences in the Trajectory of a Brazilian Percussionist

Choice of instrument is among the most important factors in determining the course of a student’s music education and all along the musician’s professional career. This chapter reports some of the findings of a previous study concerning the choice of musical instruments as a developmental process (Valério et al., 2017) and explores dilemmatic situations negotiated along the unfolding trajectory of Paulo, a music student. Departing from Cultural Psychology, it aims to discuss a musician’s psychological dynamics of abandoning his instrument, choosing a new one, exploring his dilemmatic situations, returning to his first choice of musical instrument and imagining his future as a musician. We highlight the ambivalences he experienced while trying to become a recognized percussionist. Meaning-making process insists upon resolution, and sometimes tensions are overcome. Other times, however, tensions cannot be surmounted and remain in tensegrity - tensional integrity (Tateo, 2018). The dynamics of integration of tensions in self-regulation and the influence of imagination in this process allow us to see the dilemmatic situations faced by Paulo and to glimpse how the emergence of imagination facilitates a projection of the person onto an alternative future.