Social psychology and musical development

Abstract

The interaction between people and their social and cultural environment is at the heart of contemporary theories of development, as we saw in Chapter 1. Changes in behaviour produce changes in the environment, which in turn feed back to affect behaviour: it is thus impossible to study one without the other. This implies that one must necessarily study the ‘musical environment’ as an integral part of musical development. Some of the investigations described in Chapters 3 and 4 accomplished this in a fairly directly Piagetian manner: the research on the development of early song is a good case in point. Whereas this research is primarily concerned with the production of music, studies of its perception have tended to ignore the social context, as we saw in Chapter 5. Konecni (1982) has argued very convincingly that many studies in experimental aesthetics, for example, seem to regard music listening as taking place in a kind of social vacuum, and other authors (e.g. Arnheim, 1952; Munro, 1963) have made the same complaint about the psychology of art in general. In this chapter I shall review the exceptions to this rule, and look at that research which deals specifically with social and cultural influences on musical behaviour.