Musical narratives: A study of a young child’s identity work in and through music-making

Abstract

The investigation of infants’ and young children’s early musical engagement as singers, song-makers, and music-makers has provided some insight into children’s early vocal and musical development. Recent research has highlighted the vital role of interactive vocalization or ‘communicative musicality’ in infants’ general development, including their health and well-being, and early identity work. Little research has investigated how these early vocalizations and musical interactions are taken up and used by young children as they construct an emergent identity as a musical and sociocultured being. This article draws on a three-year longitudinal project that has investigated the role of invented song-making and music engagement in 18 young children’s (aged approximately 18–48 months) identity work and self-making. Data sources employed within a narrative inquiry design included parent-maintained video and paper diaries of song-making and music engagement, interviews with parents and other care-givers, and researcher observations of children in musical activity. Processes of narrative analysis and analysis of narrative were employed to analyse these data and provide a narrative account of the ways in which one 2-year-old child fashions a self through her engagement with known and invented song and music-making over a 12-month period. Findings suggest that invented song and music-making build on young children’s experiences of ‘communicative musicality’ and provide narrative structures in which young children perform and enact multiple ways of being through musical storying and story-telling.

Associations between early shared music activities in the home and later child outcomes: Findings from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children

“…Parent-child music activities in the early years include joint and supported singing (including action songs, counting songs, nursery rhymes, and children's songs), generating original songs to accompany routine activities, dancing, playing basic instruments, and listening to music on CD, DVD, and MTV (Barrett, 2009, Barrett, 2011and Barrett, 2012. In these contexts shared music activities may function as ‗signs' or ‗cultural tools' (Vygotsky, 1986(Vygotsky, /1934 as parents use the conventions of songs and nursery rhymes to build their child's understandings of cultural conventions.…”

Music in the early years: Pathways into the social world

“…This is important because music and musical performances are socially and culturally situated, and therefore, "ethically saturated" (Trehub, Becker, & Morley, 2015, p. 2). Musical engagement bears implications not only for social interactions and social cognition, but further extends into the development of personal and group identities (see Barrett, 2010;North & Hargreaves, 2008).…”

Attending to “culture in the small”: A narrative analysis of the role of play, thought and music in young children’s world-making

“…Papoušek, 1996;Campbell, 2010); and trialling different ways of being in the world and undertaking identity work (Barrett, 2006(Barrett, , 2009(Barrett, , 2011(Barrett, , 2012a(Barrett, , 2012c. To these instrumental purposes might be added the role of songmaking and vocalization in underpinning early music and language development.…”

“…The larger study 2 from which this case is drawn explored the meaning and function of singing and music-making in young children's (aged 18-48 months) identity work (Barrett, 2009(Barrett, , 2011(Barrett, , 2012a. Eighteen child-parent dyads 3 were recruited from two settings, a Kindermusik programme (12 dyads) and a day-long childcare centre (6 dyads).…”