There was a piano in the corner of my grandmother’s living room that nobody played. It was an old upright, its keys yellowed and slightly chipped, its lid permanently closed. As a child, I would lift the lid sometimes and press a single note, just to hear the sound bloom in the silence. My grandmother would look up from her knitting and smile, but she never played. Years later, I learned that she had been a gifted pianist as a young woman, taught by her mother in a village outside Kraków. When the war came, she was separated from her family, and the piano was left behind. She never touched the keys again. She told me this story when I was seventeen, sitting beside that silent instrument, and she said, “Music is not just sound. It is memory, grief, joy, and the parts of ourselves we cannot put into words.” I decided, in that moment, that I wanted to study music — not just as performance or theory, but as a way of understanding what it means to be human. That silent piano became the starting point for everything that followed.
When I began my music degree, I was drawn to questions that sat at the intersection of music, psychology, and culture. But choosing a dissertation topic felt overwhelming. I could write about the cognitive effects of music education, the politics of folk music revival, the role of streaming algorithms in shaping listening habits, the representation of gender in music production, or the therapeutic uses of music in dementia care. I needed a specific, researchable question that felt connected to the silence in my grandmother’s living room. I started by exploring what other students had already investigated, and I came across a collection of music dissertation topics (you can browse them here: https://premierdissertations.com/music-dissertation-topics/) that helped me see the landscape. Some projects examined how music functions as a carrier of cultural memory in diaspora communities, others analysed the psychological impact of learning an instrument in later life, and a few explored the relationship between music and identity among second-generation immigrants. That breadth gave me the confidence to settle on a question that felt deeply personal: how do second-generation Polish immigrants in the UK use music — both traditional and contemporary — to negotiate their dual cultural identities, and what role does music play in maintaining or transforming connections to their heritage?
Once I had my direction, I designed a qualitative study that felt more like a series of intimate conversations than traditional research. I interviewed eighteen second-generation Polish immigrants, asking them about the music they grew up with, the songs they still listened to, and the emotions that surfaced when they heard certain melodies. The stories were rich and often moving. One participant told me she couldn’t listen to Chopin without crying, because it reminded her of her grandfather, who had played those pieces on the same piano her grandmother had left behind. Another described the joy of discovering a Polish hip-hop scene that spoke to her experience of being caught between two cultures. My dissertation argued that music is not simply a cultural artefact; it is an active, living practice through which people negotiate belonging, loss, and identity. I recommended that cultural policy support community music initiatives that allow immigrant communities to preserve and adapt their musical traditions.
Writing that dissertation felt like finally lifting the lid on my grandmother’s piano — not to play, perhaps, but to understand the silence. If you’re considering a music dissertation, I’d encourage you to start with a sound that means something to you — a song, a piece of music, a memory carried by a melody. The best research questions don’t begin in the library; they begin in the moments when music makes you feel something you cannot explain. Then explore what other students have already done, and let their work help you shape your own inquiry into something that could give voice to what the music in your life has been trying to say.