This thesis concerns music educators' pathways from early-life musical-training contexts, through a Graduate Diploma course at a College of Advanced Education, and into practice as music educators; these three key periods also shaped the data analysis. The methodology employed was life-story research, and methods of data collection comprised interviews of nineteen informants and document study. The conceptual framework combined the notion of contextualising music education pathways as social-learning experiences with Bourdieuian perspective on practices to explore the fields traversed. From analysis of the accounts of the informant's life stories it was found that multiple social-learning experiences across musician and teaching settings provided the practices from which they could reify and construct their professional identity as classroom teachers or instrumental music teachers.