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Children's Home Musical Experiences Across the World

Indiana University Press

Musical Childhoods

Theoretical Background and New Directions

Susan Young

In undertaking this project we aimed not only to increase our knowledge of children's everyday and home-based musical experiences but also to contribute to a shift in the theoretical paradigm within which children are being conceptualized musically. In recent years there has been a noticeable change in the way that children's musical activities and experiences are being viewed and understood. A number of texts have focussed on children's musical cultures in a range of locations (e.g., Boynton and Kok, 2006; Campbell and Wiggins, 2014; Whiteman and Lum, 2012). These recent texts were motivated by a new recognition that children have their own musical cultures and have mastery over them. They were also motivated by a recognition that hitherto the scope and force of children's musical cultures had been unappreciated. The approach is primarily ethnomusicological with a focus on the music made by children in relation to cultural context. So, broadly speaking, our project joins a body of recent work that is moving in similar directions. Here, however, we propose a theoretical position for framing our work that draws on the field of Childhood Studies as it has been developed in the UK and Scandinavia. In this respect our theoretical position is distinctive in some aspects. Sometimes known as the "new" (although now not so "new") social studies of childhood (see, e.g., James, Jenks, and Prout, 1998), Childhood Studies (the UK/Scandinavian version) is a generic term for a theoretical approach that is cross-disciplinary but firmly rooted in contemporary sociology and anthropology of childhood (Kehily, 2008). Having originated in the later 1990s, this field is now "coming of age" and many of the theoretical positions are well worked and debated. Development of a notion of musical childhoods from a Childhood Studies perspective offers, we propose, a theoretical framework that can provide useful and illuminating viewpoints from which to explore and discuss children's musical experiences and activities.

Because a notion of musical childhoods rooted in Childhood Studies represents a departure from the usual ways that music in childhood has been theorized, I start this chapter by explaining conventional approaches and some of their potential shortcomings. Psychology is the primary lens through which children's experiences in music have been, and continue to be, researched and interpreted. Approaches rooted in developmental psychology have been concerned with identifying pathways of musical progress through ages and stages. Psychology as a frame for understanding childhood has been criticized from a number of perspectives. One major criticism is that it purports to arrive at homogeneous versions of children's (musical) activity that are assumed to apply to all children, universally. In its focus on finding the commonalities in children's musical activity, psychology has been less interested in identifying variations and differences. This focus results in neglect of the social and cultural contexts and how these might be intrinsically bound up with children's musical experience and learning. Psychology has been a powerful voice in music education theory and practice, defining what musical childhood is and how it can be understood.

In contrast to psychology, sociology has sought to understand how children are socialized into society and learn to become members of the social groups in which they live. Sociologically oriented work in the field of children's music that explores processes of enculturation and socialization into traditions of music may be less prominent than psychologically oriented work (and certainly less influential on education theory and practice), but there are some examples of work in which socialization is assumed. Many of these examples overlap with anthropology and ethnomusicology, and also with popular music studies, where research into children's music is mainly interested in how children and young people are apprenticed into cultural traditions. The process of socialization in these accounts generally assumes that children are fairly passive and that they simply absorb the music around them, rather than actively appropriating and in the process, transforming. A set of chapters edited by Boynton and Kok (2006), for example, describe and discuss how children are socialized into the musical worlds of their communities: historical, traditional, and present-day.

Conceptions of children as musical in theories concerned with "development" and "socialization" are interested in children's music making for how it can be related to adult music making as the final achievement. And all too often the adult "endpoints" are assumed and these, in turn, are drawn selectively from conventional adult practices of Western art music. For example, children's instrumental improvisations have been analyzed for evidence of rhythmic and melodic structures that conform to formal conventions and not analyzed with a view to understanding children's own, more intuitive ways of thinking musically. Similarly, singing development has been assumed to proceed through a set of stages before children reach the full capacity to sing as adults, and researchers have debated, as many still do, the details of sequential steps. Researchers have been less interested in children's songs and how singing is a personally and socially meaningful activity for children in their own worlds of peers and family. As many have succinctly put it, the focus has been on children's "becoming" and not on their "being." Models of socialization, although less prevalent in music, were also criticized for assuming that children were passively shaped by processes and practices in the family and wider community.

Childhood Studies staked out its ground by critiquing these dominant approaches to conceptualizing children and by opposing the tendencies to view children as passive rather than active, irrational rather than rational, and incompetent versus competent — in other words, as in some ways incomplete and lacking. Instead, early childhood studies scholars such as James, Jenks, and Prout (1998) called for theoretical premises and research methods that could reveal the ways in which children demonstrate competence — and on their own terms, not those predetermined by theories that assumed adult competences (and as Burman [1994], has pointed out not just adult, but Western, white, and male) to be the final destination of development or socialization. As childhood studies has become more established, the initial, strongly opposing stance adopted in the early days has itself been recognized as problematic, as somewhat rigid and uncompromising, and containing some inherent weaknesses (e.g., Woodhead, 1999). More recently scholars have looked for more reconciliatory positions that can incorporate "both/and" positions.

Meanwhile social anthropology and sociology also woke up to the fact that both fields had marginalized children in much the same way that they had marginalized women and other subordinate social groups. Just as women's studies sought to give voice, agency, and identity to women, so the "new" social studies of childhood, influenced by feminist arguments and methods, sought to give voice, agency, and identity to children. Anthropology's important contribution was to explore childhoods in varying locations and contexts, and thereby to draw attention to the diversity of children's lives and the diversity of ideas about childhood (Tudge, 2008). Although anthropology had traditionally studied the cultures of "others" living in far-off places, in recent years, it has moved closer to home (although "home" continues to be the developed world for most anthropologists) and has adapted its methods of ethnography, participant observation, and thick description to study everyday life among social groups in the developed world, including children. An excellent example is the work of Lareau (2011), which is based on ethnographies of children living in varying social circumstances in the United States. Importantly, social anthropology seeks to arrive at understandings based on the perspectives of those it studies rather than study responses to predetermined categories of behavior. Researchers working in the field have sought to introduce methodological innovations that enable children to be the subjects rather than the objects of research and to work with children in more participatory ways that enable them to voice their views. From these methodological innovations, versions of childhood experience emerged that started to give a very different picture of children's daily lives and experiences. In music fields we see these changes filtering through into ethnomusicology and historical musicology, resulting in the upsurge of activity in studying children's musical cultures in recent years.

Thus from a number of disciplinary directions, the ways in which childhood was viewed and researched began to change fundamentally and these changes began to coalesce within the field of Childhood Studies (see Young, 2009, 2012a). A key theoretical contribution of Childhood Studies, using poststructuralist theoretical arguments, has been to demonstrate how circulating discourses create common meanings or "constructions" of childhood (Fleer, Hedegard, and Tudge, 2008; James and Prout, 1997). From this standpoint it becomes evident that there are many different constructions of childhood (and here we consider musical childhoods), and that these different versions are a product of social and cultural processes that vary across time and place. Children are seen not as formed by natural, biological, or psychological processes or by social forces, but as inhabiting a world of meaning created through their interactions with the material and social properties available within their surrounding milieu, or worlds. In this chapter we identify and then discuss these worlds as corporate/consumer, peer, parent and family, education, and community. These are five dominant areas that emerge from our work. Adopting this viewpoint, psychological accounts of childhood are seen as just one form of sociocultural construction alongside many others and not the neutral, natural, scientifically validated, and universal model they are assumed to be. Likewise one can go on to discern and formulate the kinds of musical childhoods held, for example, in the ideologies of parents who negotiate their aspirations for their children with a number of competing pressures. Or one can identify the constructions of musical childhoods held in the marketing strategies of large corporations seeking to maximize profits from the sale of commodity musical items for children.

Importantly, a view that understands childhood as socially constructed provides not only a framework for identifying different modes of musical childhood but also a technique for considering how and why childhood is constructed in these ways. It then becomes apparent that the different musical childhoods blend with, compete with, or reinforce one another, and that children negotiate their own way through them. We asked the children, for example, to choose their favorite song to sing to us. The children knew that their selection of a song was not a neutral process. The song they chose would signal certain allegiances, associations, and values and would signal these within that momentary situation of a researcher's asking — with or without parents present — for "your favorite song." If they chose a school song this might signal conformity that would bring approval from parents, but maybe not the pleasures of allegiance to a peer group that singing a popular song might bring. Thus childhood studies also provides a critical framework that can highlight how musical childhoods operate within competing demands and reveal the subtle pressures for conformity and rewards for compliance.

One of the potential problems with a view of childhood as culturally constructed, however, is that it can suggest that different forms of childhood are imposed on children. It can imply a passive process of inculcation and molding by social forces rather than an active process of appropriation. Musical childhoods, accordingly, are not a predetermined set of categories, but something that children engage in and are actively involved in shaping. In this sense children are understood to engage in processes of co-construction, to be actively choosing the favorite song they sing with awareness of its wider meanings. This is a sociocultural conception of development that differs markedly from the conceptions of development held in psychology and sociology. Childhood Studies theory focuses on agency and seeks to describe the agentive and co-constructed nature of experiences for children. However, it has to be recognized that agency operates within the constraints and possibilities offered by sociocultural contexts. This means that children are always in some way constrained by the historical and culturally defined discourses that invest them, their bodies, and actions, with certain meanings. Children may be agentive, but in some accounts of children as musical, particularly in a progressive educational vein, there is a strong desire to see them as highly agentive in an idealized way that tends to overlook the realities, the constraints, and limitations on their agency. The idealistically competent child, the savvy so-called digital native, for example, is a sociocultural construction born of a particular viewpoint. One only needs to bring into the picture children living in disadvantaged circumstances — take the extreme example of street children living in developing world cities — and it becomes clear that the capacity to exercise agency for the majority of the world's children is limited by poverty, ill-health, disability, conflict, inadequate housing, work and care commitments, lack of support structures, and so on. Therefore, agency as a theoretical concept for understanding children's musical childhoods is useful only if it is accompanied by a full and etailed consideration of the possibilities for agency offered by the surrounding sociocultural context. Without this situational detail, agency can easily fall back into essentialist notions of children and elide with romantic ideas of children as occupying special worlds that are separate from those of adults. Children's worlds are never separate. On the contrary, the surrounding society offers certain niches within which children can exert their agency, and gaining an understanding of the affordances offered by those niches becomes a key task — hence our interest in understanding the home as a "niche" for children's musical activity.

So there is also a need to consider carefully how the context, the niche, or culture, whatever terminological slant is adopted, is defined. Accounts of musical experiences for children in diverse social and historical contexts can tend to assume self-contained cultural contexts and traditions of music that are static and unchanging (see, for example, some chapters in Boynton and Kok, 2006). This assumption often goes hand in hand with a musicological standpoint that starts by foregrounding the musical genre or musical performance occasion representative of certain musical cultures. The participants then become secondary. For example, take the interest in children's playground and singing games in which the initial focus has been on documenting the songs and games as musical objects, and then the children's forms of participation are integrated into that primary focus (e.g., Opie and Opie, 1988). Likewise in some recent accounts of children's musical cultures, describing the "culture" comes first. In our project we start in reverse, with individual children, and we are interested in how they are shaping their own musical lives. This means that our focus is their everyday activities and the breadth of that activity networked across their lives and the lives of others. We are interested in what to some other researchers may appear to be trivial and commonplace, and therefore unworthy of serious attention: their toys, their musical items, their bedroom play activities, music equipment in the communal family living spaces, what music they hear day-to-day at home, and so on. We are also interested in how their musical activities intersect with their social relationships, both with family and with peers and other adults beyond the home (although in this study our focus was the family and any information about peers or other adults was secondary) and how they use the people and things in their daily lives to create these musical experiences. We also, notably, start with asking the children about their everyday musical experiences and then inquire outward, leading on to questions about community and school music.

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Excerpted from Children's Home Musical Experiences Across the World by Beatriz Ilari, Susan Young. Copyright © 2016 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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