This book is part of a series at Indiana University Press entitled ‘Counterpoints: Music and Education’. It further expands the work of both Beatriz Ilari (Assistant Professor of Music Education at the University of Southern California) and Susan Young (retired Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter) in the field of early childhood studies. The book analyses the home musical experiences of middle-class seven-year-olds in 12 different countries. The editors brought together 14 members of the International Society for Music Education Early Childhood Commission and conducted a collaborative project where each researcher analysed one or two children within their social network.
Each research team member recruited their participants and arranged a home visit of one to two hours. The children and parents were then interviewed about their musical lives, and the children were asked to do a ‘show and tell’ session which included showing important musical items in the home (e.g. instruments and technological gadgets) and a simple performance of their favourite songs. These sessions were either videotaped or audiotaped, and the parents were also asked to fill in a weekly schedule of a typical week of musical activities. In addition, researchers also made notes on participants’ homes, surrounding neighbourhoods, family configuration, musical interests and social, cultural or religious background. In this book, we see children sharing their own secret musical games and talking about their favourite songs and toy instruments.
Each researcher had the opportunity to follow their own theoretical framework to employ their own strategies for collecting and interpreting data. In total, 17 children were analysed with the aim of identifying variations in their home musical experiences.
Three major research questions underpin Ilari and Young’s book:
(1) What is the nature and range of home musical activities for middle-class seven-year-olds in diverse locations across the world?
(2) What and who are the major influences in children’s musical engagements in the home?
(3) What do home musical experiences mean for children, their families and their communities?
The book is organised in three main sections: ‘Theoretical Framework and Methods’, ‘Thematic Interpretations’ and ‘New Ideas’. An introductory chapter precedes these sections where the editors argue that children spend considerable time at home, and as such it is the ideal site for the investigation of musical learning experiences in childhood. Furthermore, the authors’ focus on the ‘late years’ is explained by the fact that even though it is the time when children undergo a key transition from their early years to compulsory schooling, it has not received enough attention in the existing literature.
In the first chapter of section one, Susan Young explores the different worlds in which children negotiate their musical identities: she challenges previous developmental theories that assume that all children are the same, proposing instead a more fluid process of interaction between environments and experiences. This chapter is followed by a striking discussion by Jessica Perez-Moreno who considers the adoption of a wiki platform to support the process of collaborative research. To my knowledge, this is the first music education project exploring the potential of a wiki platform, and therefore, it offers a significant contribution to this field of study and a first step into the use of social media platforms as a tool for gathering researchers from different parts of the world outside of the traditional conference setting.
In the following chapters, authors deal variously with intriguing thematic interpretations such as the child’s private musical world, gender identity in music, parental perspectives and influences, and the role of social class in the construction of musical childhoods. One of the features of this section is that each chapter is written by a different researcher, which allows the reader to come close to each individual researcher’s voice and interpretation. However, it gives the sense that each author is writing on a different study and introduces inconsistencies in structure that confuses the reader and undermines the collaborative nature of the study.
The last section of the book, ‘New Ideas’, places its focus on projects that emerged from the original study. In the first chapter of this section, Diane Persellin further explores the topic of children’s musical preferences by revisiting her participants three years later and analysing changes. Sheila Woodward discusses the musical lives of her two participants in South Africa and compares them with her own experiences during the apartheid. And finally, Chee-Hoo Lum writes on Singaporean musical childhoods by applying the original study to 16 more participants. This section demonstrates the potential that this research has as a starting point for further investigation of children’s musical experiences.
In the concluding chapter, Ilari, Young and Gluschankof successfully acknowledge the complexity of implementing a cross-cultural collaborative qualitative music research project with children and remind us that the aim of the book was to bring out the more striking elements of children’s musical experiences rather than ‘an exhaustive account of all the unique details’ (p. 158). The findings were analysed by focusing predominantly on the similarities between the children. In doing so, the authors identified main trends, and these are discussed in the last section of the book. The main implication of these trends for music education research is that these demonstrate how musical childhoods are a ‘plural concept’ influenced by local realities and different experiences.
The last chapter also includes a discussion on the challenges of sustaining collaboration between researchers from so many different countries while maintaining consistency and cultural sensitivity. Furthermore, the authors also refer to other issues relating to the multiple layers of interpretation, which arise due to each researcher’s involvement and interactions within their own specific contexts.
While this book offers a significant contribution to this area of research, the majority of the children analysed have privileged access to musical activities, either through their school, parental attitudes or the musical gadgets available in their home. Israel is, for example, represented by only one participant who has piano and cello lessons, attends music in school and whose mother is a professional musician who collects musical instruments. This is an exploratory study, with only one or two (maximum three) participants per country, and there is clearly scope for future research aiming for greater consistency and representation through a much larger sample. That said, there are many key strengths of this book that need to be praised: it explores a musical environment that has previously been private and off limits to the researcher; it gives the children in this study an active voice; and finally it pioneers the wiki as a social media platform for research collaboration.
This book not only provides an academic discussion of home early musical experiences, but it also makes a significant contribution to music education research and practice by demonstrating that children’s musical engagement is linked to many issues such as identity, family life, gender, culture, social class and schooling as opposed to being bound to theories of child development. This book would be of interest to many readers as it encourages us to reflect on our own musical childhoods. However, I would recommend it particularly to music teachers because it demonstrates how musical engagement differs considerably even at such an early stage, and it offers the opportunity to better understand young children’s musical learning and development.
