Introduction
At present, in music education scholarship, there is a renewed interest in materiality and proposals for novel understandings of matter that broadly assemble under the title of ‘new materialism’. The current popularity of this approach in music education is demonstrated by articles, special journal issues, conference presentations and post graduate theses. However, outside of music education circles there is a rising tide of challenge to new materialist theories which seems not to be entering into music education discussions; at least not yet. So the aim of this article is to introduce those challenges and prompt debate.
It is relevant, before I continue, to briefly explain my positionality. My outward-facing academic activity is primarily within the field of early childhood music education. However, in addition, I have directed and lectured on a university programme in childhood studies and studied for and wrote a second, late-career thesis in biological anthropology. In these two fields, childhood studies and anthropology, I had encountered posthuman and new materialist thinking (in anthropology via what is usually referred to as the ontological turn) prior to its arrival in music education. While I would agree there may be a certain ‘stuckness’ in our music education theories at present and that we should always aim to push forward with innovative and adventurous approaches to theory and research, I am uneasy about the current moves to new materialism in music education, in particular as it is being applied to early childhood music education. In this article, I explore that uneasiness and review some of the conceptual implications of the moves to new materialism, reading this small area of new scholarship in part through my experiences of new materialist ideas in the two fields of childhood studies and anthropology. I am convinced that a cross-disciplinary, together with a historical gaze is more likely to identify assumptions to which viewpoints confined narrowly to a standpoint in new materialism are vulnerable. At present I observe that new materialists in music education are relying on citing internally the originating philosophies and a small inner circle of like-minded scholars but without pausing to examine these baseline concepts. This kind of self-enclosure risks neglecting important theoretical debates taking place elsewhere that have the potential to adjust these originating assumptions. I agree with childhood studies scholar Burman when she writes that she is ‘perplexed by the presumed self-evidence of the conceptual claims’ of new materialists (Burman, Reference BURMAN2024: 290).
A brief introduction to new materialisms
The new materialisms are a disparate collection of theories arising from a diversity of disciplines, but they share a broadly common drift. They include object-oriented ontology (OOO) (Harman, Reference HARMAN2018), actor-network-theory (ANT) (Latour, Reference LATOUR1993), agential realism (Barad, Reference BARAD2007) and new materialism itself (Coole & Frost, Reference COOLE and FROST2010). Ideally, they should not be collapsed into each other because although containing similar lines of thought, they do not combine into a unified framework. All share a commitment to take matter more seriously, although they differ markedly in how they conceptualise matter. They all displace the focus on ‘the human’ and disavow the apparent privilege of the human perspective. They challenge, in particular, the idea that language can accurately represent things in the world. The result, they propose, is a false dualism where thought never engages the world as it truly is, but only ever mediated through discursive and social constructions. The aim to overcome this shortcoming leads to various efforts to be responsive to what is ‘real’ and to distribute agency to the nonhuman living and non-living world, to vitalise matter and to focus attention on dispersed and hybrid entities, networks and entanglements.
Properly speaking, therefore, ‘new materialism’, as it is usually termed, is a loose collection of ideas, arguments and approaches that have a similar tone and outlook. As several commentators have pointed out (e.g., Lettow, Reference LETTOW2017), addressing work in new materialisms (I think the plural term is preferable) is complicated by this diversity of perspectives. Therefore it can be difficult for the reader to pin down work that declares itself to be ‘new materialist’ in order to address it. That said, the adoption of new materialisms in early childhood music education is cohering around some commonalities of approach (that I will explain as the article progresses), with at least enough coherence to be able to address it as a small and emerging field of academic activity (Arculus, Reference ARCULUS2020, Reference ARCULUS2023; Broad, Reference BROAD2017; Burnard & Köbli, Reference BURNARD and KÖBLI2024; Crickmay, Reference CRICKMAY2024; Elwick et al., Reference ELWICK, BURNARD, HUHTINEN-HILDÉN, OSGOOD and PITT2019; Osgood & Burnard, Reference OSGOOD and BURNARD2019; Pitt, Reference PITT2024a, Reference PITT2024b; Pitt & Cavanagh, Reference PITT and CAVANAGH2023; Williams, Reference WILLIAMS2022). Moreover, taking articles published in a 2024 special issue journal as representative (Pitt, Reference PITT2024b), it would also seem that new materialist approaches are being applied to young children’s musical activity more so than other age phases. This suggests to me that scholars find what Crickmay has referred to as a ‘synergy’ (Crickmay, Reference CRICKMAY2024) between new materialist approaches and the characteristics of young children as musical; a synergy which deserves exploration. Likewise, Burnard and Köbli (Reference BURNARD and KÖBLI2024: 256) write, ‘therefore, posthumanist and new materialist reimaginings of early music education’ (I presumel they are referring to early childhood music education) … ‘need to be recognized in order to better nourish children’s learning and development’. While I mainly address this article to early childhood, the theoretical discussion will, I hope, have relevance beyond this age phase.
Before I continue with the main thread of discussion I need to raise an important point. Many in academia have become aware of a specific difficulty encountered by those who express doubts or reservations about new materialisms (Boysen & Rasmussen, Reference BOYSEN and RASMUSSEN2020, Reference BOYSEN, RASMUSSEN, Boysen and Rasmussen2023; Burman, Reference BURMAN2024; Cole, Reference COLE2013; Lemke, Reference LEMKE2015; Petersen, Reference PETERSEN2018; Rekret, Reference REKRET2016). The new materialist approach is surrounded by an aura of enthusiasm, creativity and positivity such that challenges are perceived as hidebound, censorious or even arrogant. Rekret writes of a ‘vexing imperviousness to critique’ (Rekret, Reference REKRET2016: 6) that is baked into new materialist theorising. He adds that whoever ‘interrogates the position … is easily brushed aside as “resentful” and “hubristic”, still too attached to modern dualisms and concepts’ (Rekret, Reference REKRET2016: 6). Critique, is viewed, he adds, as merely an affective error and need not be engaged with on its own terms (ibid.). In this way, he argues, the new materialist position immunises itself against critics and does not see a need to create a dialogue outside its own discursive bubble.
The arrival of new materialism
An interest in new materialisms arrived in early childhood music education via sideways steps from other domains of early childhood education. Posthumanist materialist thinking has supported early childhood educator-scholars in conceptualising indigenous approaches to education, particularly in the global South (e.g., Murris, Reference MURRIS2016) and in rethinking the positioning of young children as close to nature (Taylor, Reference TAYLOR2013). It has inspired a revision of conceptions of language learning through young children’s embodied and material encounters (Hackett, Reference HACKETT2021) and some interesting explorations of children’s play with typical early childhood practice materials such as sand, paper and clay (Taguchi, Reference TAGUCHI2010). There is creative and illuminating work in all these areas. This does not mean, however, that the usefulness of new materialist thinking in opening up reconceptualisations within those respective areas of early childhood education with their distinctive points of contestation automatically transfers directly into music education. The gradual integration of new materialism into childhood studies offers an informative comparison. From Prout’s (Reference PROUT2005) initiations, turning first to actor network theory, the moves by childhood studies scholars towards new materialisms progressed incrementally, the theoretical coordinates debated, evaluated and selected in response to the needs of the field, primarily a view that the signature concept of childhood agency had reached an impasse and new materialist thinking offered a possible solution (Kraftl, Reference KRAFTL2020; Spyrou, Reference SPYROU2018; Spyrou, Rosen & Cook, Reference SPYROU, ROSEN and COOK2019). In early childhood music education, the step across from other fields of early childhood education means that the internal continuity, the knitting into what has gone before in music education to identify where new materialism can enhance, add to or overcome shortcomings has not taken place. Nor, equally, consideration of where its turn to ontological questions can prompt reconceptualisations born of exigencies that are peculiar to (early childhood) music education research; an approach that would be more akin to the gradual and heavily debated ontological turn in anthropology (Halbraad & Pedersen, Reference HALBRAAD and PEDERSEN2017).
At root, those who adopt a new materialist approach in music education focus on new materialist concepts, as espoused by the key theorists, as a way to gain insight into varying types of musical activity. The task then becomes one of bringing those concepts, or principles, to light by demonstrating how they manifest in musical experience; typically short, single instances. It is noticeable that short excerpts of young children’s musical play are often selected as the activity most suited to this purpose (e.g., Arculus, Reference ARCULUS2023; Burnard and Köbli, Reference BURNARD and KÖBLI2024; Crickmay, Reference CRICKMAY2024; Pitt, Reference PITT2024a). Thus, the initial motivation is to adopt the speculative philosophies of new materialism and the scholar is on the lookout for a suitable focus, finding, in young children’s music-making an activity which accommodates that interest. The point here is that children’s music-making is not the starting point, being observed and studied, reflexively (in the anthropological use of that term) to give up its own, intrinsic concepts.
The unease I experience with respect to new materialisms as currently being adopted in music education has four main sources which I now list and then develop as the article unfolds. First is the declared ‘newness’ and radicality of new materialism, typically setting up an opposition to – and break from – what has gone before, often with quite polemical, over-simplifying and dismissive statements. The most serious consequence of this break is to lose sight of the genealogy of music education thought. The second source centres on internal inconsistencies and ambiguities in the theoretical ideas themselves. These include the central notion of agency, the calling up of concepts from quantum physics and questions of scale. I will argue that these limit the purchase of new materialisms on the musical experiences and practices of and with young children, often in stark contrast to the ambitious claims for the approach. Thirdly, I am concerned that new materialism has homed in on early childhood and musical play but that in doing so unwittingly reinforces a stereotypical figure of the young child; an argument that I craft from critiques of new materialism by queer and critical race theorists. Finally, I introduce the thinking of Nealon (Reference NEALON2021), Kornbluh (Reference KORNBLUH2024), Boysen and Rasmussen (Reference BOYSEN and RASMUSSEN2020, Reference BOYSEN, RASMUSSEN, Boysen and Rasmussen2023) and Malm (Reference MALM2020) who, from differing angles, suggest that the new materialisms are a product of the zeitgeist, finding Nealon’s arguments that it represents a further twist of the bio-politics of late neoliberalism particularly convincing (Nealon, Reference NEALON2021).
The appeal of the new
The first point of concern is the claims to ‘newness’ and radicality. Burnard and Köbli (Reference BURNARD and KÖBLI2024), for example, propose a radical reconceptualisation of music education through new materialism and provide a road map for music educators in making the changes they recommend. It is almost mandatory to embrace new materialism with enthusiasm, with a call to abandon the ‘old ways’ and suggest that the new theories offer insights to overcome what has been inadequate and wrong-sighted. However, these bold moves disavow any debts or possible connections and continuities with any other work, either prior or parallel.
Furthermore, many of the so-called ‘new’ moves and discussions have a familiar ring, particularly around embodiment, processes of musical play and engagement with sound-making objects and environments; as the eminent music educator Espeland points out (Reference ESPELAND, Holdhus, Murphy and Espeland2020). By creating a break from anything that has gone before new materialist work forgets all the existing work around these topics and does not acknowledge the complexity and richness of theoretical traditions (see also Burman, Reference BURMAN2024: 208-9). Swathes of scholarship in early childhood music which have a materialist dimension could inform the current shift to a new materialism. Of course, this ‘old’ work is framed by theoretical thinking of its time which would require review and discussion, but nevertheless, it is insightful and informative. In part, I think this ‘historical amnesia’, as Gough and Whitehouse (Reference GOUGH and WHITEHOUSE2020) term it, is symptomatic of a general trend in contemporary academic scholarship; to constantly churn theory, to claim that previous forms of theory are obsolete, to abandon the past and, as Furedi writes, to ‘fetishize change and newness’ (Furedi, Reference FUREDI2021: 217).
Internal inconsistencies
There are some internal inconsistencies and conceptual ambiguities to new materialisms that many are pointing out and these limit the application of new materialist thinking to music education. In an article, I can only indicate these and not expand on them, but in each case, I give ample references.
A fundamental philosophical concept of realism underpins new materialist approaches which, if it is to be genuinely embraced, puts forward the view that forms of reality exist independently of thought and culture. However, this emphasis on realism then seems at odds with the recommendation to attend with greater sensorial awareness, usually, for music education, a recommendation to listen with greater attunement; in essence, an empirical approach, as explained by Galloway (Galloway, Reference GALLOWAY2016). This tension arises, it would seem, because a philosophy is put to work as a method. Clearly the attempt to conceive a musical reality that is independent of thought and culture and that is not situated in human subjectivity presents a challenge. Efforts to evoke a non-representational approach which somehow goes beyond the reaches of human thought, to attune to what you cannot think or hear, ultimately appeals to a belief, an affective commitment and a willingness to be open to the imaginative. Our relationship to the world of music education research becomes one of personal, affective inner experience that we need to cultivate, a particular stance that often has an implied ethical dimension to it, suggesting that we have a responsibility to become ‘response-able’ (Haraway, Reference HARAWAY2016). It becomes, as Rekret terms it, ‘a sort of epistemic blackmail, amputating critical interrogation’ of the conditions of thought by implying that if we are unwilling to adopt this approach it is a personal failure of affect and imagination (Rekret, Reference REKRET2016). Kornbluh (Reference KORNBLUH2024) in an extended and interesting text makes a matching argument. I will return to this idea of the cultivation of self in a later section and extend it in relation to late neoliberal thinking.
Yet in striking contrast to the emphasis on affect and imagination, there is also a recourse to the hard ‘truths’ of science, particularly quantum physics through the writing of Barad (Reference BARAD2007). The concept of quantum entanglement has travelled from science to reach deep into the new material turn and has gained nearly hegemonic status. The anchoring to selected concepts in the natural sciences endows new materialism with a certain cachet, authority and value neutrality. Selected empirical facts from science are taken as true, overlooking both contest or context within those scientific fields (see Jaksland, Reference JAKSLAND2021; also Lemke, Reference LEMKE2015: 151). However, a growing group of scholars, many with backgrounds in physics and the philosophy of science, are concerned about the uncritical application of Barad’s theories. Scholars including Faye and Jaksland (Reference FAYE and JAKSLAND2021), Pinch (Reference PINCH2011), Moran (Reference MORAN2019), Holzhey (Reference HOLZHEY, Bernado, Filion-Donato, Miguel and Yuva2021) and Everth and Gurney (Reference EVERTH and GURNEY2022) explain how Barad has drawn selectively and idiosyncratically from physics concepts in fashioning her feminist materialist theory. They explain a number of theoretical tensions that surface when the physics theories are examined more closely and which weaken and destabilise the usual ways that Barad’s ideas have been adopted in new materialist thinking.
Furthermore, the scholars I refer to above raise questions about the extrapolation of quantum theory to the human scale. Barad claims that quantum mechanics is ‘the correct theory of nature that applies to all scales’ (Barad, Reference BARAD2007: 85): a far-reaching claim that has been widely challenged. There is an assumption that there can be a direct relationship between micro and macro entities, as Hollin and colleagues point out; namely, that the micro-level of scientific findings can scale up to the social level of, for example, children making music in a nursery or similar setting, without any frictions, distortions or losses in the process (Hollin, Forsyth, Giraud and Potts Reference HOLLIN, FORSYTH, GIRAUD and POTTS2017: 921).
Agency
The concept of agency in new materialist thinking is distinctive and calls for particular examination.
In the most general terms, new materialists tend to be sceptical about the status of human agency, extending it beyond to non-human beings and to material objects and denying it to individual entities, instead attributing it to the distributed networks within which they are embedded. Thus agency can no longer be located merely in the human subject but is extended to all nonhuman matter, organic and inorganic. The idea that things can be understood as possessing agency in the same sense as humans do is part of a posthuman reshuffle of the distinctions between humans and non-humans. Thus new materialism insists on the importance of moving beyond the human at the centre and grappling with the lively, agentic musicality of entities other than humans.
In reading various new materialist accounts in music education, this distribution of agency takes varying forms. In part, this might be due to varying conceptions of agency among leading theorists, as a brief look at the two main theorists will illustrate. Bennett’s vital materialism (2010) assumes a form of agency or liveliness that inheres in matter itself in contrast to a conception of matter as passive and inert. Accordingly, matter, even, somewhat surprisingly, the most stable materials such as metal, has agentic, generative capacities. In comparison, Barad’s theorising promotes a more relational understanding of matter that does not endow objects with already given agentic propensities, but conceives agency as generated within what Barad defines as ‘intra-actions’ (Barad, Reference BARAD2007: 66). Intra-action proposes that action and agency never emerge as the result of an initiative on the part of an individual entity since agency is widely distributed. Matter is an agentive factor in this process of materialisation. As Barad writes, ‘in an agential realist account, agency is cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit. Agency is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity’ (Barad, Reference BARAD2007: 177).
Clearly both conceptions, although differing, complicate the notion of human musical agency by proposing horizontal conceptions of agency dispersed across networked components. Some scholars may adopt the idea that matter is vital, attributing forms of musical agency to non-living matter with interpretations that may verge on anthropomorphism. Burnard and Köbli (Reference BURNARD and KÖBLI2024), for instance, describe a small observed event in which a child plays with a metal penguin plucking its spikey feathers to produce sound and write that ‘both penguin and child express agency and intentionality, both actively produce something unanticipated, troubling and joyful’. Some conceptions imply that objects have contingent properties that are emergent; a more plausible conception which is akin to Gibson’s theory of affordance (Reference GIBSON, Shaw and Hillsdale1977). However, whatever the conception, it creates internal dilemmas when applied to young children’s musical activity. The ‘one-size-fits-all’ notion of agency that ensues makes it impossible to distinguish between acts or effects. The distribution of agency implies that agency is simply a matter of having consequences and that there is no purposiveness involved; a point developed by Hornborg (Reference HORNBORG, Boysen and Rasmussen2023) in a discussion of Latour’s approach adding that ‘Latour provided foundational concepts for the material turn’ (Hornborg, Reference HORNBORG, Boysen and Rasmussen2023: 147). Thus emphasis on the relational, emergent, ‘always already in process’ dimension of new materialism does not help to illuminate any form of deliberate action either on the part of the children or, indeed, adults as educators. New materialism therefore attempts to by-pass subjective mediation for some form of immediacy and directness of experience, but as a consequence struggles to explain subjective experiences such as intentionality, imaginative thinking or making independent choices (Andersson, Reference ANDERSSON2022; Lettow, Reference LETTOW2017; Sullivan, Reference SULLIVAN2012; Trnka, Reference TRNKA2021). A close reading reveals that music education scholars opt for terms such as encounter, inviting, emerge and expression thus implying a kind of weak agency, that waits, without any deliberate impulse to act. A musical encounter, if it is relational, processual and aleatory cannot take place if there are is no purposeful action either to precipitate it, to make on-going choices among possible forms and directions of action or to cause it to stop (see also Osborne & Rose, Reference OSBORNE and ROSE2024: 90-91).
Furthermore, I agree with Friesen (Reference FRIESEN2018), that from an educational point of view, if a model of distributed agency is adhered to, we deny ourselves, as educators, the ability to alter anything. Forms of pedagogical action require purposeful intentions and interventions, which are undermined and even disabled in a model of dispersed, processual agency. Effective pedagogical actions are designed to intercept the process in order to promote some form of desirable and valuable direction, even if that interception takes the form of a decision to watch and wait before acting.
Moreover, the emphasis on equality between actants, on indeterminacy and continual processual intra-action confounds any possibility of searching to identify some actants or actions as more important than others and to grasp the structures within which they act (Choat, Reference CHOAT2018; Washick & Wingrove, Reference WASHICK and WINGROVE2015). The ability to ascribe importance and some type of structure in this way is arguably a defining feature of any educationally useful concept of agency. I would agree that it is useful to identify and be attentive to all the ‘actants’ involved in children’s musical play, or any kind of musical situation, but without the follow-on moves to ascertain what may be more or less important, what or who are the key actants and what may change, what may emerge from the process there is no way to gain any kind of interpretive purchase. The new materialist lens is helpful insofar as it stimulates speculative thinking, yet it also risks leading to educational practice that does not matter very much because if everything is equal and distributed, attributes are shared out too and none are of any more value or are more desirable than others.
Thus the new materialist regards the actions of children in musical play not as events that require interpretation or pedagogical intervention, but as entities and effects that present and identify themselves. Reading Kornbluh (Reference KORNBLUH2024), she emphasises how new materialist accounts disable any form of interpretation, as if the description speaks for itself, with predications that the description per se is insightful and is of value. It does not tell us anything more than the immediate, descriptive, personal experience of the researcher. Kornbluh goes on to suggest that interpretation that could animate intellectual thinking and theory making is relinquished (2024). Ecological theorist Malm is more outspoken, stating that the forms of indistinction that arise from new materialist approaches ‘ruin as much analytical equipment as possible’ (2020: 51).
So, from the new materialist accounts of music education practice, it is difficult to identify a standpoint for educational interventions. They tend to remain at the level of description or arrive at lightweight educational recommendations for adults to listen attentively and open-mindedly (see, for example, Pitt’s introduction to several articles 2024b). These risk becoming reductionist, unable to move beyond the small scale and internal and can result in a form of reification – a celebration of what can be discerned by the adult who has attuned and become sensitive to the ‘real’. Moreover, remaining at a descriptive level, emphasising the equal capacity of all things to act and create, causes any cultural, historical or social context to disappear (Burman, Reference BURMAN2024). Any socio-cultural specificity of the objects, of the children or adults involved, or the wider context is removed. This effectively disguises and can hide the operations of power and any reproductions of inequality; an important point I now develop.
Decentring
In order to create a non-hierarchical distribution of agency between humans, and other living and non-living entities new materialists adopt a principle of displacing or decentring the human. When principles of distribution are applied to instances of young children in musical play any distinctions between human/non-human are collapsed and the two become indistinguishable. The child becomes an equal entity compared to other entities in the network. Indeed, I might insert here, that it is often the researcher who steps into the central, agentic position, but more of that in a later paragraph. There are two interlinked points here, which I suggest explain why young children’s musical play is particularly susceptible and accommodating to the new materialist purview.
The principle of decentring in posthuman theories has been strongly criticised by queer and critical race scholars (see Hinton, Mehrabi and Barla, [Reference HINTON, MEHRABI and BARLA2015] whose position paper references wider literature; also Thompson, [Reference THOMPSON2017] in relation to sound studies). I draw on these criticisms and fashion them into an argument to apply to young children. These scholars point out that in the process of decentring the ‘human’ becomes a generic, universal ‘thing’. It is noticeable in discussions of young children’s music from a new materialist perspective that there is often a marked shift from talking about the child or children to referring to ‘the human’ (e.g., Pitt, Reference PITT2024a). In becoming a universal human all the differences and social relations of class, gender, race, religion and (dis)ability collapse in that one move and forms of social inequality are obfuscated (Tompkins, Reference TOMPKINS2016). To this list of differences I now add those which particularly pertain to young children on account of their young age (ageism) and immaturity, their different physiology and their resulting dependencies (Young, Reference YOUNG, Wright, Johansen, Kanellopoulos and Schmidt2021). As a result, when the focus shifts to human/nonhuman entanglements all social inequalities and associated power asymmetries disappear and cannot be addressed (also Burman, Reference BURMAN2024: 290). Philosopher Culp sums up this problem writing that the non-hierarchical, flat ontology of new materialism ‘leads to a uniformization of diversity and equalization of inequality’ (CULP, Reference CULP2016, 33).
The queer and critical race theorists in their critiques of materialist approaches point out that because of the deliberate isolation of new materialist thinking links are not made with critical studies within their respective fields that could address such inequalities (Ahmed, Reference AHMED2008; Hinton, Mehrabi and Barla, Reference HINTON, MEHRABI and BARLA2015). In relation to young children, I add that links are not made with childhood studies work that has explored the constructions of childhood and in particular the constructions of young children as musical according to discriminations of age and immature physiology (Young, Reference YOUNG, Wright, Johansen, Kanellopoulos and Schmidt2021). The distinctions that are specific to young children are materialised in direct and practical terms as they make music, and in less direct terms in the resources provided for them by social, cultural and political-economic structures. They are lived by the young children, both limiting and enabling what they can do within frameworks of dependency that adults around them must attend to, manage and accommodate (ibid). A critical new materialist perspective could valuably highlight these dimensions of materialised musical lives for young children. It is noticeable, however, that a new materialist approach tends to privilege only certain human-nonhuman assemblages, typically musical play by a single child with a discrete, hard object and thereby tends to reduce the scope of activity for young children and reinforce existing assumptions of young children and their music-making. Equally, I ask what constructions of age, class, gender, race, physiology in relation to being a musical child are being overlooked and not addressed? Thus adopting a new materialist position proceeds with existing constructions of early childhood and ensuing inequalities intact and does nothing to redress them, leaving them stable and thus inadvertently reinforced.
The next point follows from the argument above and explains, in my view, why there is an attraction between young children’s musical play and new materialism, such that Crickmay refers specifically to a ‘synergy’ (Reference CRICKMAY2024). As already mentioned, according to new materialists, agency is distributed. It asks for a kind of pre-modern ontology which describes the inner (musical) life of things, but this creates a dilemma in how far to attribute musical agency to the nonhuman world without becoming too fantastical or mystical. However, this problem can be side-stepped, or if not side-stepped then smoothed over, if the ‘human’ can be a ‘not quite fully human’; a young child who is constructed as intuitive, spontaneous and ‘not yet’ making music that aligns with conventional genres. Thus things can be ‘not quite human’ (Bennett, Reference BENNETT2010: 3) on a flat plain of equivalence with young children who are also not fully human. The focus on young children helps to overcome an inbuilt conceptual difficulty. The new materialists’ interest in the pre-conscious, unmediated sound-music world of young children has resonances with a form of primitivism (Rekret, Reference REKRET2024: 135), associated with the cognitive capabilities of young children and forms of innocent (un)thinking that are reified in play. Boysen presents a similar line of thinking in an article he titles, ‘the embarrassment of being human’ (Boysen, Reference BOYSEN2018). A new materialist perspective thus reinforces existing, dominant, normative constructions of very young children and an imagined innocence and simplicity, with romantic overtones that is so often associated with young children.
Whenever the activity of young children is researched and theorised, the social constructions of young children as marginal, primitive and ‘lesser than’ need to be constantly in mind. New materialism may position itself as beyond social constructionism and compensating for what it sees as the inadequacies of that theoretical purview, but these figurations of childhood are deep-set and lurk, always ready to surface in a new formulation, unawares, unless I suggest, critical theory is allowed back into the theoretical framework (Rosa, Henning & Bueno, Reference ROSA, HENNING, BUENO, Rosa, Henning and Bueno2021). We should recognise that young children are already shaped by and constrained by existing materialities, histories, discourses and cultural contexts; these cannot be shed simply by viewing through a new materialist lens.
There is another related aspect to bring into this discussion. In talking about children’s music, the new materialists tend to create a dualism between sound (bodily and affective) and music (mind) which remains undertheorised (Burnard & Köbli, Reference BURNARD and KÖBLI2024; Cooke, Reference COOKE2024; Crickmay, Reference CRICKMAY2024). Conceptualisations of sound stand for materiality, immediacy, sensuousness and flux whereas conceptualisations of music stand for formal structure, meaning, culture and mediated activity. Young children’s play with sound-making objects is assumed to be aleatory, immediate, sensory, affective and non-representational; a ‘not yet music’ activity which is therefore close to an imagined ontological ‘reality’ of sound itself (Rekret, Reference REKRET2024: 22). There is often in the writing informed by new materialisms a noticeable vacillation between music and sound, or various composite terms that smudge the two. As a result an emphasis on the nature of sound, on sound-as-itself as a form of pre-conscious reality goes hand-in-hand with constructions of young children as having access to this world of sound by virtue of their intuitiveness, unknowingness and ‘not yetness’. This also serves to reinforce the existing stereotypical constructions of young children’s musical activity as a form of unthinking play as described by Cook (Reference COOK, Spyrou, Rosen and Cook2019). This contradicts all the work that has demonstrated the ways in which children, from infancy, absorb, think with and think through meaningful sociocultural musical ideas and structures in their play with voices and with sound-makers (Young, 2023) and illustrates, once again, the consequences of by-passing prior work.
Zeitgeist
Theory does not arise in a vacuum but is shaped by exogenous factors. The present period is marked by social anxieties due to climate change, wars, pandemic, the demise of democracy and frustrations born of our feelings of powerlessness in the face of these crises. In a detailed discussion by Boysen and Rasmussen (Reference BOYSEN, RASMUSSEN, Boysen and Rasmussen2023) which is tightly referenced to the writing of new materialist scholars Bennett, Harman and Meillassoux, they propose that new materialism offers a turn towards the enchantment of a hidden reality; of imaginative worlds that exist beyond empirical observation and objective reason, something which can be creatively achieved if the principles are embraced wholeheartedly. Thus new materialism asks us to make changes at the individual level, to work inwardly on our beliefs, feelings and perceptions and adopt new ways of thinking; as exemplified in Burnard and Köbli’s (Reference BURNARD and KÖBLI2024) four ‘points of departure’ for music educators in changing to a posthumanist new materialist approach to music education practice and research. Recommendations from new materialist music educators for attunement, for emergent listening (e.g., Crickmay, Reference CRICKMAY2024) and ‘response-ability’ (e.g., Fjelstad, Reference FJELDSTAD2024), all suggest that we should attempt to register the world in some new way and renounce all feelings of exceptionality. Boysen and Rasmussen write that new materialism promotes ‘a dream of a more direct and therefore more authentic feeling of immediacy and presence’ (Boysen and Rasmussen, Reference BOYSEN, RASMUSSEN, Boysen and Rasmussen2023: 2). The management of our subjectivity becomes an individual, personal task of reorientating our mode of thinking in order to achieve the transformative possibilities. It offers a way to by-pass the seemingly intractable and dispiriting issues of national politics or global crises. Although her social commentary is aimed at popular readership rather than a contribution to academic discussions, Klein echoes just this point when she writes of ‘turning away from large fears’ in favour of what she terms ‘the canvas of the self’ (Klein, Reference KLEIN2023: 66-7). As Kornbluh emphasises, immediacy and authenticity have become an important aspect of self-identity in the individualistic forms of life of late capitalist/neoliberal societies (Kornbluh, Reference KORNBLUH2024).
So new materialism offers an aura of optimism and creativity in our reconnection to the vitalism of the world. But this work on our inner selves at the individual level, Nealon argues, is the neoliberal project in its most recent incarnation (Nealon, Reference NEALON2021). According to Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, the ideal subject of neoliberalism has absorbed the ability to constantly re-form and re-make themselves, and thus to move further away from a position of being able to challenge the status quo (Foucault, Reference FOUCAULT and Burchell2008). Cole (Reference COLE2013) and Malm (Reference MALM2020) also see new materialism as falling into a trap set by neoliberalism, suggesting that new materialism is the ‘metaphysics of capitalism’ (Cole, ibid: 323) because it diverts attention away from socio-political-economic situations and so allows these to continue unchallenged. Boysen and Rasmussen propose that the turn to new materialism – which, as mentioned above, they refer to as a desire for ‘re-enchantment and re-mythologisation of the world’ (2020: 8) - is in keeping with current social, cultural and political landscape. They liken this to the desire for more religiously inspired ideologies, seen in some current political systems in the face of disillusionment and a wish for retreat and transformation (also Bargetz, Reference BARGETZ2019). They suggest that the wish for retreat obscures the specific social-economic interests and dominances determining the global circumstances of capitalism. This mythologisation is similar to Žižek’s harsh criticism of new materialism as a turn to ‘medievalist concepts and pre-modern mystical fantasies’ (Žižek, Reference ŽIŽEK2015). Collectively, all these scholars suggest, in broad terms, that in a final twist of ‘runaway neoliberal capitalism’ (Pellizzoni, Reference PELLIZZONI2017: 74), new materialist philosophy disempowers politically and would leave us unable to tackle political issues, among them and most seriously from an educational point of view, the material inequalities (taking a historical materialist Marxist point of view as Burman emphasises [2024]) that impact children.
A constructive conclusion
In this final Section I offer some constructive directions. Rather than the emphasis on rupture and novelty, the current material turn in music education could be related to earlier materialist thought, looking for continuities, alliances and links. As I have emphasised, new materialisms lose sight of many analytical resources and sources of information in already existing music education scholarship. This would entail theoretical broadening without setting one approach above others, proliferating our interests rather than creating separations and implied hierarchy. This would, I think, also promote a more discerning and critical eye for the inconsistencies and ambiguities within the new materialist theories themselves and may offer ways to address them.
I suggest we need theoretical resources of all types and interdisciplinary dialogue between music education and sociology, psychology, neuroscience, biology, childhood studies, cultural studies, musicology and popular music studies, trawling wherever there are valuable ideas to incorporate and avoiding the narrow, self-referential approach of new materialism: a criticism I would apply to any one narrow perspective. More specifically we could incorporate the contemporary theories of embodied and enactive cognition (Gallagher, Reference GALLAGHER2023; Van der Schyff, Schiavio & Elliott, Reference VAN DER SCHYFF, SCHIAVIO and ELLIOTT2022), recent versions of Vygotskian theory (Stetsenko, Reference STETSENKO2017), ideas from the large field interested in digital technologies in children’s everyday life, children’s popular culture and look to neuroscience and laboratory studies of musical cognition. All these have contemporary and important things to say about the material/embodied dimensions of young children’s musical experiences. In particular the intersections between digital technologies and young children both in everyday life and education in my view require serious and sustained attention. Here, the ‘new’ socio-materialist concepts of entanglement and relational processes would surely have explanatory purchase.
As a final word I would like to champion what I might refer to as ‘ordinariness’ in research. I stand up for the deliberately unfashionable and mundane and the value of small incremental developments in thinking that weave back and forth, creating continuity. Moving into arcane theoretical domains does not necessarily serve the ‘classroom floor’ of educational practice well nor, as I have explained, does it address the pressing economic-political, socio-cultural and technological issues that impact on music education for children of all ages. The time-consuming and painstaking work of gathering information about children’s musical lives, about what goes on in music education practices and making sense, always with a reflexivity (again emphasising the anthropological and critical theory meaning of that term) that continually searches out inequalities based on constructions of musical childhoods remains, in my view, extremely important. To every thing - turn, turn and turn.
