International Journal of Music in Early Childhood - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2020

This article provides a broad overview of the theoretical approaches underpinning our understanding of early musical development, and considers how this sets the foundation for later development across the lifespan. Through a review of research evidence and theory, I argue for the importance of interaction in thinking about musical development: movement is at the heart of theories of development; interaction and synchrony form the foundation for music learning; and motivation, agency and identity shape patterns of early engagement with music. The importance of setting these activities in context is also emphasized: for parents, teachers and researchers to fully understand young children’s musical experiences, it is vital to consider the cultural contexts and histories of the musical materials, the listener and the situation, as well as how these interact.

Drawing on the phenomenology of embodied learning, this article presents suggestions for ways that embodied learning can be enhanced in Dalcroze-inspired music education. Here, embodied learning refers to learning from interactional experiences of the self with the physical and social environment through senses, perceptions and mind–body action and reaction. It is suggested that embodied learning can be efficiently facilitated through teaching that promotes multisensory perceptions, images, integration and experiences, while also motivating physical, social, emotional and intellectual participation. Furthermore, promoting social interaction as well as interaction between perceptions, thoughts, emotions and actions could be regarded essential. Embodied learning can be reinforced by pedagogical actions, such as advancing awareness and a sense of self, triggering mental images, integrating different functions, building a balance between mental and physical activities, and fostering positive emotions and experiences in learning situations. By reflecting on experience, embodied learning becomes more explicit and shareable.

In this article I take a new materialist and posthuman approach to ask: how can improvisation in the temporal arts reconceptualize and broaden our adult understandings of young children’s communication and knowledge? I draw on two filmed events from the recent SALTmusic project. This filmed event data has been returned to many times to illustrate unique and particular events that took place in the past, but – when re-viewed and retold – constitute a new and particular happening or entanglements between the original event, the video technology that brings the past into the present, and the philosophical thinking that the events inspire. In the first part of this article, I critique the fixation on young children being made to talk as early as possible, and call for improvised music and arts practices as decolonizing pedagogies where children’s own knowledges are able to inform and shape their education. By revisiting Trevarthen and Malloch’s Communicative Musicality and Stern’s ideas on vitality affect and the present moment to see how they entangle and transform within new materialist and posthuman philosophy, I question and critique the developmental discourses that conceptualize young children’s musical behaviours as proto-music and, instead, frame the temporal arts, within a posthumanism, as having the potential to cut through the subject/object binary. I explore children’s porous and entangled subjectivities, through the posthuman idea that human identity and human thought connect and are made and remade beyond the individual, bounded human subject, and that children’s relationship with the present moment is a vital capability or knowledge at the heart of what it means to improvise and much more than a developmental stage.

Listening to recorded music is ubiquitous both for adults and young children. In early educational settings, it is mainly used as background music to set up a certain atmosphere, and to design specific festivity environments and celebrations. Recorded musical pieces – specifically instrumental ones, as the focus of the educational activities, because of their musical characteristics – are seldom used. When they are used, musical pieces are considered isolated musical objects that children have to be taught to contemplate, understand and appreciate. This study presents a less-documented and reported type of young children’s engagement with music: self-initiated and self-directed movement representations of recorded musical pieces documented by Sarit, a preschool teacher, for her educational purposes. The documents include videos of children’s choreographies, Sarit’s accounts, children’s drawings and their explanations of them. These engagements give us opportunities to study agency in listening experiences and children’s multimodal exploring, and ultimately embodied and visual representation of their musical understanding of the pieces. Children exercise agency in their engagement with the music, as they choose the music and what to do, with whom, with what and when, and in these doings, they change their preschool. In their choreographies, they embody their understanding of the music; and in their drawings, they share with us the whole process. Educators are invited to open their eyes and their ears, discovering children’s multimodal engagements with recorded music.

Children’s songs are a great source for linguistic learning. Here we explore whether children can acquire novel words in a second language by playing a game featuring children’s songs in a playhouse. The playhouse is designed by the Noplica foundation (www.noplica.nl) to advance language learning through unsupervised play. We present data from three experiments that serve to scientifically prove the functionality of one game of the playhouse: the Energy Center. For this game, children move three hand-bikes mounted on a panel within the playhouse. Once the children cycle, a song starts playing that is accompanied by musical instruments. In our experiments, children executed a picture selection task to evaluate whether they acquired new vocabulary from the songs presented during cycling. Two of our experiments were run in the field, one at a Dutch and one at an Indian preschool. The third experiment features data from a more controlled laboratory setting. Our results partly confirm that the Energy Center is a successful means to support vocabulary acquisition in a second language. More research with larger sample sizes and longer access to the Energy Center is needed to evaluate the overall functionality of the game. Based on informal observations at our test sites, however, we are certain that children do pick up linguistic content from the songs during play, as many of the children repeat words and phrases from the songs they heard. We will pick up upon these promising observations in future studies.