Drawing on a study of children’s musical games in urban South Africa, this article employs two theoretical frames: that of multimodality and the multiliteracies pedagogy. These are applied to a contextual analysis of the forms of musicality that musical games embody and to ways of incorporating children’s play into pedagogy. Based on ethnographic research in primary schools in Soweto, I first examine representative examples of musical games in order to demonstrate children’s musicianship in relation to the concept of multimodality. Analysis reveals the games’ sophistication in terms of children’s deployment of multiple modes and the inventiveness their methods imply. Furthermore, a multimodal theoretical frame and analytical approach enables an understanding of musicality as the capacity to “design.” Second, children’s multimodal musicality prompts questions about how such musicality may become a resource in formal learning. I propose that applying the multiliteracies pedagogy to music education offers a methodological solution for “recruiting” musical games so that the capacities children demonstrate in their games may be developed.
This article reports on research that investigated the rich tradition of South African urban township children's games. Based on ethnographic observations and documentation of Soweto children's playground games over a period of six months, this study examines musical games children at one primary school played on one day, highlighting the particularities of their musicking in an urban cultural context. The article demonstrates the way in which games interact with township musics, dance and communicative practices, and highlights features that Soweto musical games share with musical games globally, particularly children's mobilisation of a range of multimodal resources for the purposes of musical play. The innovative, generative nature of township children's musical games is emphasised, particularly in relation to multimodality, in order to recommend that music education take cognisance of children's musicking outside the classroom. I argue that children's active engagement with music deserves attention by music educators and researchers, and that musical games be recruited as resources for pedagogy to develop the design capacities and skills that children's musical play embodies. 1
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