Music in Our Lives: Rethinking Musical Ability, Development and Identity

Music in Our Lives: Rethinking Musical Ability, Development and Identity

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It is drawn from a research project that spanned fourteen years, and closely followed the lives of over children learning music — from their seventh to their twenty second birthdays. This longitudinal approach allows for the probing of a number of important issues. For example, how do you define musical skill and ability? Is it true, as many assume, that continuous engagement in performance is the sole way in which those skills can be developed?

What are the consequences of trends and behaviours observed amongst the general public, and their listening consumption? After presenting an overview and detailed case study explorations of musical lives, the book provides frameworks and theory for further investigation and discussion.

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It tries to present a holistic interpretation of these studies, and looks at their implications for musical development and education. Don't have an account? Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use for details see www. University Press Scholarship Online. Publications Pages Publications Pages.

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Search my Subject Specializations: Classical, Early, and Medieval Plays and Playwrights: Classical, Early, and Medieval Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval Prose and Writers: Classical, Early, and Medieval World History: Civil War American History: Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. Music In Our Lives: Davidson, and Robert Faulkner Abstract Why do some children take up music, while others don't? More Why do some children take up music, while others don't? For this reason, topics covered in this section provide a framework for understanding the content and context of all subsequent chapters in the two volumes of this handbook: To expand on this conception, and to frame the views expressed in part I within the totality of the entire OHME, this chapter is organized around four broad issues dealing with musical development, musical identity, musical development, and the desire to engage with music across the lifespan.

An individual's musical capabilities deepen and develop over time when they are exposed to an appropriate nurturing environment e. Musical behavior embraces many different brain functions, such as perception, action, cognition, emotion, learning, and memory Pantev, Although the brain's underlying neural architecture is conceived as being modular—in the sense that different parts of the brain have relatively specialized functions—musical behaviors as in musical performance customarily involve many different areas modules of the brain networked together e.

Thus the enculturated accumulation of sonic experience and our ability to detect patterns in this experience combine over time to allow us to fulfill our musical birthright; that is, to be musical and to be able to communicate and interact musically with others.

This is vividly portrayed in the following example of the musical enculturation of a child in her first year of life:. Having been brought up in a home where both parents are musicians, Nelli had a fair exposure to different kinds of music, even before she was born….

At that time, Nelli could not even sit without being supported by pillows, but as soon as the opening cow-bell and bass line p. Was it TV's Lopez family's happy faces and colorful clothes? It is impossible to know. Nelli's example reminds us that musical experience and development are socially located and shaped by the world around us because music is experienced in different social, cultural, and environmental settings, as in the following illustration that is drawn from a qualitative study involving a group of nine musicians who were providing a sustained program of 45 hours of music each week in an Italian pediatric hospital.

Most of the nurses got to know some of the refrains very well, as Antonio used to play the songs endlessly on CD. I remember these moments as extremely enjoyable and liberating for children, parents and myself. We were all singing together, sometimes changing the words to make the lyrics sound ridiculous; Antonio played along with us, always smiling and giving space to other children's musical choices as well.

Music in Our Lives

I have often left his room with a feeling that the mood in the ward had changed and that something positive had happened. Preti, , p. Although being musical is integral to human design—believed to be because of our evolutionary past in which communication in sound was critical to survival and reproduction Mithen, —what counts as salient in our experience of music is framed and shaped by sonic interactions within particular sociocultural contexts, as well as being flavored by individual subjectivity, maturation, and biography.

The following extended example offers an illustration of how diverse experiences came together to shape one professional musician's early biography in a particular direction. I went to a State primary school from the age of 7. We had a music teacher there called Miss Last, who we all called Miss First, because we liked her so much. She was just a class teacher, but she happened to be very into music, very keen on music, so she ran the school choir, and a sort of recorder group, so I got involved in that.

Very quickly she decided I was very musical, and I had never had any encounter with music, except that my dad played mandolin, hence the mandolin [for me] eventually…but he didn't read music, he didn't play structured music—he played along to records, and he was a businessman so sometimes he wouldn't touch it for two weeks on end, and he'd pick it up one evening…so I did have the experience of music in my house.

But he mainly played folk and Greek and that sort of thing…. Neither of my parents listened to Classical music at home, I didn't really even know what it was.

And then at school, we just did kind of Primary school recorder group type stuff…. And at a similar period my mom had enrolled me in the Church choir, because I drove her totally bananas walking around the house singing out-of-tune. But constantly singing; I wouldn't stop, constantly singing. But she could never work out what the tune was I was singing! So it drove her bananas, so she decided to try and enroll me in the choir, the Church choir, to see if they might be able to actually train me to sing intune.

Which they did, and so at almost the same time that Miss Last said I was actually very musical, which was quite astonishing to Mom I think, but anyway, that I should learn an instrument. So, she asked me what instrument I'd like to play—I was about seven or eight—and I said mandolin. So she ignored me, because it's not really a very practical instrument. So I carried on with recorder at school, and I carried on singing in Church choir, and every time she asked me, I answered the same thing—mandolin.

And, in the meantime, I'd got hold of a record of the person who was to become my teacher, although obviously I didn't know it then, and I used to play it in my bedroom, like times round and round and round, and I used to—my dad's old mandolin by this time had no strings on it, and I used to sit there pretending to play, and I did that for three or four years before my mom finally decided that perhaps I was quite serious about the mandolin!

And my dad died when I was very young, so I suppose—well, around the same time everyone said I was musical. I suppose my instinct was to try and re-create something that had been lost. The power of episodic memories of childhood musical experience in the formation of musical identity is also evidenced in an interview with a professional jazz saxophonist who described why he chose his particular instrument.

In fact, it wasn't the radio, it was an eight-track tape in my grandfather's Rolls Royce…Silver Shadow 2! See, I wasn't exposed to music when I was younger—you know my parents didn't play instruments and didn't really listen at all. I'm sure its after this one…. So I wasn't really listening to music, but I just thought somehow that I wanted to play that music, because it made me feel so good.

Owen, personal communication, June 30, Yet childhood experiences can also be powerfully negative. In a survey p. The author's own mother provided a poignant illustration of the longevity of a negative experience. This journey began for me when I asked my dying mother one afternoon if she had any regrets in life….

She did, and the answer that she gave was a disclosure on her part and a revelation on mine. Mommy was 78, and quite weak, as she was in the final stages of terminal cancer. When I posed this query about regrets, she replied that she had led a charmed life, and had precious few regrets. Mom revealed that she had been silenced by a music teacher at school when she was seven and, ever since, she felt that she could not sing.

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Newfoundland—Mom's home from birth and her family's for several generations prior—has enjoyed a long, strong singing tradition amongst its general population. From this common and expected cultural practice, she had felt excluded and ashamed, virtually her whole life. The outcome of this disclosure was that the daughter an accomplished choral director and her mother agreed that the mother should be taught to sing.

This was received with much hilarity, but as I persisted with gentle humour, she actually acceded. Within several days, my mother did learn to sing in-tune, to her amazement and joy. Knight, , p. Such richness is unlikely to be sufficient, however, to ensure that the culture encourages singing inclusively if a particular characteristic of the culture is a persistent belief that some people are intrinsically musical and some are not. As you know, all the Catholic schools in particular had big choirs.

And every second class went to the [music] festival. We [certain fellow students] were told we couldn't sing, so at least the last row, if not the last two rows—because after I got to junior high and they said you couldn't sing, that was the end of it, then I didn't have to go to these classes [after that].

I stayed back and did other things. Unfortunately, such examples remind us that, because of an inappropriate human agency, not all music education is as positive and enabling as it should be see further, chapters 1. An example is provided by a longitudinal study of children's singing from birth to age six years in Italy.

The benefits of participation in an extended program of musical activities for pregnant mothers and, subsequently, the same mothers with their new babies, were evidenced in musical behaviors appearing earlier than reported elsewhere in the literature, in terms of both the children's learning of song repertoire and their inventing of their own songs Tafuri, , plus chapter 2.

Similarly, but on a larger scale, the potential for education to nurture development is demonstrated in analyses of the individual singing behaviors of approximately 10, children drawn from schools as part of an ongoing evaluation of the UK government's National Singing Programme, Sing Up, for primary-school-aged children in England.

When children's assessed singing development ratings were plotted against their chronological age, a clear difference emerged between children with experience of Sing Up and those without figure 1. Sing Up—experienced children tended to be on average two years in advance in their singing development upper trend line in comparison to their non—Sing p.

Assessed developmental differences between these two groups range from approximately three years for the youngest children to one year for the oldest, suggesting that early educational experience may be even more beneficial. Furthermore, longitudinal data for children confirmed these group differences. Although all these children tended to become more skilled at singing with age, Sing Up—experienced children tended to progress significantly more quickly than those without such experience across the month period between assessments.

Subsequently, visits to twenty primary schools were undertaken to observe and extrapolate the characteristics of high-quality teaching of singing with children. Analyses of the observational data revealed that learning was most likely where. As another key message embedded in all sections of this handbook, such research data reminds us that, notwithstanding our individual idiosyncrasies as educators, common features are evidenced when we are at our most effective in promoting musical learning in others.

As is detailed in volume 2, chapter 1. These so-called congenital amusics are often observed to have great difficulty with specially designed tests of musical ability, currently because their difficulties are believed to be related p. Nevertheless, a recent small-scale study with a group of formally assessed amusic adults Anderson, revealed that 1 the musical ability profile of so-called amusics is not homogeneous, and 2 a short intervention study can have a beneficial impact on selected components of the profile.

Participants five attended a series of seven weekly workshops designed to explore their singing voices with a professional singing teacher. The program included the use of visual feedback software, Sing and See, to experience visual metaphors of their attempts at vocal pitch matching in singing http: Overall, this study confirmed other recent findings e.

In terms of perception, amusics were more affected by the length of the gaps between pairs of notes to be judged, being more accurate when there were one-second gaps between notes, compared to no gap or much longer gaps. One inference from both studies is that the underlying development of musical pitch memory is of prime importance in this kind of musical behavior. In terms of production, each participant in Anderson's study improved in their assessed song-singing accuracy, some much more than others. They sing as accurately as controls on shorter stimuli, especially when accompanied.

Whatever the etiology, intervention studies with both p. Where children experience an appropriately nurturing development as with Sing Up , then development accelerates. If experience is not supportive, then progress may be slower or even disrupted entirely as suggested by the Newfoundland study of Knight, Another group that we might expect to be located at the least developed part of a musical ability spectrum are those with complex needs, that is, those with severe learning difficulties SLD or profound and multiple learning difficulties PMLD.

These equate to approximately 41, children in special schools in England 0. Never-theless, notwithstanding the significant general degree of disability, more than a decade of linked studies have revealed that it is possible to apply the concept of musical development to this group. Children and young people with complex needs are able to exhibit musical behaviors and to have these extended in an appropriately nurturing environment. Indeed, in some cases—such as musical savants—the degree of musical expertise that is exhibited is highly skilled and at an expert professional level for example, see http: As detailed in parts V chapter 5.

Such experiences are thought to provide the foundation from which a learner can progress through more demanding levels that distinguish deliberate practice. The same basic developmental process has been found also to hold true in learning traditional Western instruments.

Edited by Gary E. McPherson and Graham F. Welch

For example, McPherson, Davidson, and Faulkner have shown in their year longitudinal study of children who learned an instrument in eight different school programs in Sydney that learners who went on to have the most interesting and rich musical outcomes were often those for whom loosely structured activities, such as improvisation and free activity, played a key role in their early development. In this study, enjoyment and having fun were found to be key predictors of ongoing engagement, particularly in contexts where the learners developed an intrapersonal relationship with music that allowed them to unlock music's expressive, communicative, and affective powers.

It is self-evident also that growth and musical development will depend on many negotiated interactions between the learner and others. Some of these transactions can help promote musical engagement, while others can leave a lasting negative effect, as we have seen in the case of the year-old mother cited earlier. While music educators may not be able to exert much or any impact on the extraordinary range of hobbies and interests including musical interests that children experience in their daily lives in and outside schools, they can have a powerful influence on the musical engagement of learners.

In their study of children learning to play an instrument, McPherson, Davidson, and Faulkner show how certain types of transactions between a learner and others can result in long-term positive or negative motivational effects on participation and learning. For example, among the many examples of highly motivational incidents that they report in their extensive data was one learner, who reflected as an adult on his learning in a school band program:.

And um, one guy was—like the first time we went busking—my friend went off to get a drink and this guy invited us to [play this song], and he actually just stopped and listened. Cause no one does, they just kind of throw their coins and keep walking. Not just to sound corny, but I really did enjoy being in a band…I couldn't play by myself in my room or anything but as soon as I, like, if there was a concert or something.

And then I went in year 11 to Montreal Jazz Festival with our band. We went all around Canada and America in jazz festivals on a jazz tour, and one of the stops was at the Montreal Jazz Festival and that was amazing. And that was in year 11 and got me—I was going to stop at the end of that and just focus on studies for year 12—but it kept in me for another year.

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And it got me a lot more, doing a lot of musical things with friends and stuff. This example can be compared to another of their participants, one who had been assigned an instrument rather than allowed to choose one himself. According to this participant's mother, learning became a stressful experience for her child because he was the sole player of the instrument in the ensemble and felt isolated socially:.

Lewis came to the school in Grade 3 and he had not established friends, he didn't seem to cope, perhaps, with all the changes in his life, but didn't know how to explain. Perhaps it was unfortunate timing. They the school could have been more aware of a child who is feeling apprehensive but still would like to learn how!

Throughout their book, McPherson, Davidson, and Faulkner organize the many varied transactions they catalogue according to how learners can come to feel competent or incompetent, connected or disconnected with others, and autonomous, in terms of being able to make personal choices and take responsibility for their own learning or alternatively come to feel left out or under the control of others.

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