The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Musical Cultures ed. by Patricia Shehan Campbell and Trevor Wiggins (review)

Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Musical Cultures. Edited by Patricia Shehan Campbell and Trevor Wiggins. (Oxford Handbooks.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xvii, 636 p. ISBN 9780199737635 (hardcover), $160; ISBN 9780190206413 (paperback), $50; ISBN 9780199971442 (ebook), various.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, index. Since the groundbreaking (first) publication of John Blacking (Venda Children's Songs [Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1967]), great silence has covered the area of childhood in the field of ethnomusicology. In contrast, the concept of education had its place, since a number of books and articles were devoted to the processes of learning music in different cultures, a subject that also highlighted the different approaches of the field to pedagogy. The shift started to happen gradually, mainly in the last two decades, with innovative research and publications offering great insight into children's music-learning processes and their contexts. This change is a particular result of the nature of the field: its combination of different disciplines and subfields, its ethnographical and reflexive character, and its focus on culture as an educational nest rather than on examining abstracted pedagogical methodologies and systems. In 1989, Ruth Finnegan wrote the first mature work on mapping and interpreting the way people learn music through community (The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]), which influenced many later works. Her focus on the musical worlds of Milton Keynes, after Howard S. Becker's Art Worlds and Erving Goffman's frame theory, has affected, even unconsciously, every publication that in one way or another is related to these concepts. The first seminal collection of studies in childhood, play, and education came in 2006 with a special issue on music and childhood with Amanda Minks as a guest editor (Music and Childhood: Creativity, Socialization, and Representation, The World of Music 48, no. 1 [2006]) and then a book by Susan Boynton and Roe-Min Kok (Musical Childhoods & the Cultures of Youth [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006]). Another important publication came in 2008, with the challenging abolishment of the separation of playground and classroom (Kathryn Marsh, The Musical Playground: Global Tradition and Change in Children's Songs and Games [New York: Oxford University Press, 2008]), along with the first important Ph.D. dissertations in the field, such as Andrea Emberly's ('Mandela Went to China ... and India Too': Musical Cultures of Childhood in South Africa [Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 2009]). The aforementioned works, through their collective and edited nature, have already functioned as small handbooks covering geographically and thematically different areas of the world and shedding light on newly-introduced issues in musical childhood. After these publications, the arrival of a handbook like the Oxford Handbook of Children's Musical Cultures creates expectations, firstly regarding the geographical areas covered. Following its title page, a handbook usually collects presentations from around the world. The Oxford Handbook stresses this role by presenting the countries covered in the publication on a map featured in its preface. But this depiction quickly reveals an important gap regarding Europe. Except for two countries, Germany and the U.K., the rest of Europe has no reference texts. We are missing the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and many other European regions for which research and publications in the field are quite limited; there is an urgent need for work on these areas. Subsequently, the editors give us a prologue that functions as a thick description of the beginnings and evolution of the field of ethnomusicology of children. This common practice of commenting on the field of ethnomusicology and childhood (found in many publications) also serves here as an introduction to the organizing concepts for the book. …