In the author's research, she studies the professional identities of music educators. Through her ethnographic studies of elementary school general music teachers, she has come to better understand the ways that elementary general music teachers express and enact their identities. It is often said that academics study themselves when they conduct their research. By studying the complex and multilayered identities of other people who are musicians and teachers, the author comes to better understand her own complex and multilayered identity, which includes being a musician and being an educator. This paper is an effort to broaden the academic conversation about music educators and identity, to make room for a wider range of perspectives on identity, and to help individuals in the field to think deeply about what it means to be a music educator and what it means to become a music educator. Coming to appreciate that experiences of music making are central to the way that the six musician-teachers in the author's study make meaning of themselves and their work pointed the way to literature in phenomenology and musical phenomenology. Bringing this literature to bear on what she has learned from the field (Bernard, 2002; 2004), she has developed a new framework for examining and understanding musician-teacher identity. In this article, the author presents this framework and demonstrates some of the ways that the framework can contribute to their thinking about the professional identities of music educators, as well as to the field of music teacher education. (Contains 7 notes.)