Review: McPherson, G.E. (Ed.) The Child as Musician: A Handbook

Abstract

(paperback) £34.95. -A review and dialogue with 30 authorsHow we develop musically, and the role of education in this development is a topic of interest to every music educator. Our pedagogies and curricular choices are guided by our beliefs, our observations, our experience, and our values according to how we understand what it means to be musical, and to develop, musically. We are also guided by research, whose claims for truth are expected to be based on evidence rather than belief. Therefore, it is our responsibility to familiarize ourselves with the available body of scholarly knowledge, and to examine it critically so that our discourse and classroom applications are based on twin pillars of experience and research. The Child as Musician: A Handbook of Musical Development, offers a distillation of knowledge of musical development from a wide range of perspectives including cognitive, psychological, physiological, philosophical, historical, social and cultural. Thirty authors report on studies of the musical development of children. The twenty-four chapters are grouped loosely into five sections: Development, Engagement, Differences, Skills, and Contexts. For the most part, the scholarship is situated in mainstream UK, North American, Western European, and Australian musical experience. Two chapters are devoted to ethnographic studies. Issues addressed here are of interest to researchers, scholars, teacher educators and music education professionals. Readers will note that the book's editor, Gary McPherson, is listed as co-author in five of the 24 chapters.In the first section, labeled Development, five authors report on prenatal development, infants as musical connoisseurs, the musical brain, methodological issues in cognitive musical development, and musicality. The first three chapters review research on the development of the musical brain. Richard Parncutt points out possible dangers of research on the unborn child and the potential for harm once the child is born. Sandra Trehub addresses a methodological issue that dogs researchers in the field of infant musical perception, namely how to obtain valid information that is useful. Don Hodges reviews current knowledge about the development of the 'musical' brain from before birth through the teenage years. His claims that formal music training develops different brains, and enables the detection of pitch variation in music and language warrant closer examination: it would carry more weight if the socio-cultural complexities of the development of musical perception received greater acknowledgement. The concept of the student as recipient of training implies a unidirectionality that can't be rationally supported. Readers may well ask how these perceptual abilities develop among the multitude of accomplished musicians in our midst and around the world who have had no formal training. How may their superior expertise in pitch and rhythmic detection, differentiation, manipulation and re-creation be explained? Readers might also want to ask about the role of in...