The Interpersonal Dimension: A Potential Source of Musical Creativity for Young Children?

Abstract

German

Spanish

French

Italian

This article describes one strand of a study of self-initiated improvisation among three- and four-year-olds attending nursery education in London which aimed to understand some fundamental, generative processes. Early in the study differences had been noted between children's music play with an adult in comparison with play alone. Rather than seek to abstract the sound of children's music from all contextual features, as other studies of children's creativity have done, this study took as one of its main foci, the nature of children's improvisation when playing with an adult partner.

For the purposes of the study, young children's play on an Orff xylophone was continuously recorded on video-tape. A transcription of the video data focused initially on the close observation and identification of small units of behaviour. The children's visible music play behaviours were analysed as situated systems of interaction between the child's movements, the structure of the xylophone and social interactions with an attendant adult. The study had three successive phases, each undertaken in a new nursery with a new sample of children. In total, 95 children took part across the three phases. The evolving nature of this phased study allowed salient aspects of children's play to emerge from a process of constant comparison and revaluation of the video data.

It is proposed that the social interactive processes of play are one generative source of the child's musical ideas. These ideas are understood, first, as arising from the child's movement vocabulary and the play potentials of the instrument itself. Then, with a participatory adult, the child's play with the instrument is further structured by the intention to communicate. With reciprocating and “attuned” adult partners, the children began to play in spontaneously well-balanced, phrased exchanges, they created accumulative sequences, linked and transformed musical ideas and played with expressively varied dynamics.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bailey

(1992). Improvisation: its Nature and Practice in Music. London: The British Library National Sound Archive.

Bakeman

Gottman

J.M.

(reprinted 1992, first published 1986). Observing Interaction: An ntroduction to Sequential Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bjdrkvold

(1989). The Muse Within: Creativity and Communication, Song and Play from Childhood through Maturity ( Halverson

W.H.

, Trans.). New York: Harper Collins.

Blacking

(1987). A CommonsenseView of All Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blacking

(1988). Dance and Music in Venda Children's Cognitive Development, 1956–8. In Jahoda

Lewis

I. M.

(Eds), Acquiring Culture: Cross-cultural Studies in Child Development (pp. 91–112). London: Croom Helm.

Bornstein

M.H.

Tamis-LeMonda (1995). Parent-Child Symbolic Play: Three Theories in search of an Effect. Developmental Review, 15, 382–400.

Camaioni

(1993). The Social Construction of Meaning in early Infant-parent and Infant-peer Relationships. In Nadel

Camaioni

(Eds), New Perspectives in Early Communicative Development (pp. 234–59). London: Roudedge.

Cohen

(1980). The Emergence of Musical Gestures in Kindergarten Children. Unpublished Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana.

Cook

Everist

(Eds) (1999). Rethinking Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

10.

Dissanayake

(2000). Antecedents of the Temporal Arts in Early Mother-infant Interaction. In Wallin

Merker

Brown

(Eds), The Origins of Music (pp. 389–410). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

11.

Flohr

(1985). Young Children's Improvisations: Emerging Creative Thought. The Creative Child and Adult Quarterly, X (2), 79–85.

12.

Glover

(1999). “Don't ask for the Meaning: Ask for the Use”: Issues in Researching and Contextualising Children's Composition, paper presented at the conference: Research in Music Education. Exeter University, April, 1999.

13.

Jopling

(1993). The Philosophy of Dialogue. In Neisser

(Ed.),The Perceived Self Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self Knowledge (pp. 290–309). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

14.

Kratus

(1994). The Ways Children Compose. In Lees

(Ed.), Musical Connections: Tradition and Change. Proceedings of the 21st World Conference of the International Society for Music Education, held in Tampa, Florida (pp. 128–41). Auckland, N.Z.: Uniprint, The University of Auckland, 128–41.

15.

Levi

(1991). Investigating the Creativity Process: The Role of Regular Musical Composition Experiences for the Elementary Child. Journal of Creative Behaviour, 25 (2), 123–36.

16.

MacDonald

Miell

Mitchell

. (2000). An Empirical Investigation of the Social and Musical Process Involved in Children's Collaborative Compositions. In Woods

Luck

Brochard

Seddon

Sloboda

(Eds), Proceedings, Sixth International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Keele, UK, August 5–10, 2000.

17.

Moorhead

G.E.

Pond

. (1941, reprinted 1978). Music of Young Children: 11. General Observations. Music of Young Children: Pillsbury Foundation Studies. Santa Barbara: Pillsbury Foundation for Advancement of Music Education.

18.

Nettl

Russell

(Eds.) (1998). In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

19.

Newson

(1977). An Intersubjective Approach to the Systematic Description of Mother-Infant Interaction. In Schaffer

H. R.

(Ed.), Studies in Mother-Infant Interaction (pp. 47–61). New York Academic Press.

20.

Pond

(1981). A Composer's Study of Young Children's Innate Musicality. Bulletin: Council for Research in Music Education, 68, 1–12.

21.

Stern

(1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books.

22.

Strauss

Corbin

. (1998). Grounded Theory Methodology: An Overview. In Denzin

N.K.

Lincoln

Y.S.

(Eds), Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry (pp. 262–72). Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage Publications.

23.

Sundin

(1998). Musical Creativity in the First Six Years. In Sundin

McPherson

G.E.

Folkestad

(Eds), Children Composing: Research in Music Education 1998: 1 (pp. 3556). Lund, Sweden: Malmo Academy of Music, Lund University.

24.

Tillman

(1987). Towards a Model of the Development of Musical Creativity Unpublished PhD thesis, London University Institute of Education.

25.

Trevarthen

(1993). The Self Born in Intersubjectivity: The Psychology of Infant Communicating. In Neisser

(Ed.), The Perceived Self Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self Knowledge (pp. 121–73). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

26.

Trevarthen

(1999). The Psychology of “Communicative Musicality”; Evidence from Infancy. Talk given at the BPS Seminar, Musical Communication: Therapy and Research. University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, September 20, 1999.

27.

Trevarthen

(2000). Musicality and the Intrinsic Motive Pulse: Evidence from Human Psychobiology and Infant Communication. Musicae Scientiae: Journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music: Special Issue 1999–2000, 155–215.

28.

Webster

(1990). Creativity as Creative Thinkng. Music Educators'Journal, May 1990, Music Educators' National Conference.

29.

Webster

Hickey

. (2000). The Development and Refinement of a Computerized Version of the Measure of Creative Thinking in Music. Report presented at the MENC National Convention Special Research Interest Group: Creativity, Washington, DC, March 10, 2000.

30.

Wright

S. K.

(1996). Lookng at Children's Musical Compositions in Relation to their Thinkng, Expression and Experiences. Queensland Journal of Music Education, 4 (1), 6–17.

31.

Young

(1999). Interpersonal Features of Spontaneous Music-play on Instruments among Three and Four Year Olds. Unpublished paper presented at the conference ‘Cognitive Processes of Children Engaged in Musical Activity’ School of Music, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, IL, June 3–5, 1999.

32.

Young

(2000). Young Children's Spontaneous Instrumental Music-making in Nursery Settings. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Surrey Roehampton, London, UK.

33.

Young

Gillen

, (2000). Sharing the Initiative with 3–4year old Children in Two Areas of Educational Research (Instrumental Music-making and Telephone Discourse): Exploring Challenges and Rewards. Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, held in Cardiff, Wales, September 7–9, 2000.