Toward a Revised Understanding of Young Children’s Musical Activities: Reflections from the “Day in the Life” Project

Abstract

Introduction: Versions of Musical Childhoods The tradition of developmental psychology has been of fundamental importance in providing versions of childhoods, particularly for the earliest years of childhood. However, in its focus on the individual child and in its search for behaviors assumed to be common across all children, developmental psychology has tended to be insufficiently interested in wider cultural processes. At the same time, the disciplines of ethnomusicology, the sociology of music, and popular music and media studies, valuable as they are in describing and theorizing the nature of sociocultural practices in music, have almost nothing to contribute to our understanding of practices in young children's particularly before they attend school. What insights we do have into children's lives are drawn mainly from studies of play activity when are attending out-of-home care and education (Campbell 1998; K. Marsh 2005)--much less are they drawn from family life in the home. There is little indeed concerning children's everyday experiences of music once they are in elementary (or equivalent) schooling that is not simply pedagogic in purpose (Barrett 2003; Campbell 1998). We suggest, then, that the integration of interdisciplinary accounts of young children's experiences is essential if we are to acquire fuller understandings of their musicality, the diversity of their practices, and how they develop musically within heterogeneous contexts. In taking a perspective on children's practices or musical lives, we wish to signal that we are interested in both the music that is presented to or selected by the child and the nature of children's responses. As Barrett observes, such seemingly sharp distinctions are often blurred: Children's music has a double-edged meaning in the realm of music education, at times interpreted as music made by adults for children, at other times interpreted as music made by children (2003:200). Existing accounts of music for young and the versions of childhoods that they convey place emphasis on traditional repertoires of children's songs: lullabies, play songs, and ring games. These repertoires have been collected and collated, those with an interest in children's folk lore studies leading the way. How they are enacted has been documented, primarily with attention to the detail of performance and less to the use of these songs and their integration into the fabric of young children's lives in homes and families. Moreover, in earliest childhood, the performance of children's songs sits very comfortably within imagined traditions and somewhat idealized versions of childhoods and parenting. Taking a perspective informed by wider cultural processes gains extra urgency given the rapidly changing nature of contemporary young children's lives (Prout 2005), a generation that is everywhere touched by phenomena loosely grouped under the term globalization--although, with Lull (1995) and many other commentators we do not intend to imply a homogenization of material circumstance or experience. Nevertheless there can be few communities where the tremendous pace of technological innovation, the changing nature of family life, and the possibility at least of making claims as to the commodification of childhood do not have some resonance. For many children, their home is an increasingly media-rich, technologized environment (J. Marsh 2004) in which digitized and other sounds emanate in a sometimes constant, certainly varied, and copious aural landscape from TV, video, DVDs, music players of all kinds, ringtones, toys with digitized tunes incorporated, mobiles, and other sound-making domestic devices (Young, Street, and Davies 2007). In many societies such innovations often take place without any contemporary changes to living conditions (Lull 1995). …