Popular music is repeatedly treated as a form of youth music. The ‘rebellious teenager ’ has been established as the quintessential popular music consumer, and accounts on late-teen or twenty-something metalheads, clubbers, ravers and what have you abound. But this is usually as far as the problematisation of age goes within popular music studies. Within ethnomusicology, in contrast, the role of children has been more readily acknowledged, although not necessarily, let alone frequently, deprived of ‘[t]he model of an adult hegemony imposing itself on youth’, to quote the formulation used by Judah M. Cohen in the anthology at hand (p. 190). In other words, when studying music or anything else, it has been quite common to approach childhood through adult reminiscences or aspirations, ‘framing childhood as a time for testing out musical norms imposed by a stable (and static) adult world’ (p. 190).

Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth clearly aims to challenge these tenets, as the editors claim that a central point of departure in the anthology is to embrace both the ethnographic/sociological and the historical/archival trajectories within humanistic children's and youth studies, with their focus on cultural agency and relations to families, institutions and policies, respectively. The collection of essays aims also to foreground and explore less-known repertories and areas, as well as to reveal ‘the persistent presence and power of institutions, broadly defined, over musical repertories written for, performed, and consumed by the young’ (p. xi).

The anthology comprises ten articles grouped into three sections and supported by a brief preface by the editors as well as a lengthier afterword by ethnomusicologist Amanda Minks. The first section is entitled ‘Ritual Performance’ and includes articles on eleventh-century boy oblates at Cluny Abbey by Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin; on sixteenth-century choirboy dances in Seville by Todd M. Borgerding; and the coming-of-age ceremony for girls amongst contemporary Mescalero Apaches by Anne Dhu McLucas. While these accounts vividly testify to the interwovenness of music, age and belief systems regardless of the time and place in which the human community in question exists, I would argue that there is a danger of conflating rituals with religious or spiritual behaviour here. One might indeed ask whether all rituals are conditioned by adult institutions, religious or not, and whether it would it be possible to approach the music in the rituals of childhood on their own terms? In fact, one could argue that Boynton and Cochelin actually are studying adults through children rather than children themselves.

The second section, ‘Identity Formation’, comprises four articles, beginning with Steven Huebner's psychologically and psychoanalytically informed close-reading of Ravel's (and Colette's) opera L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1925). While the analysis is theoretically well founded, as is the case with so many psychoanalytically and textually oriented analyses, the promise of critical understanding fades into unsubstantiated speculation. If there is one article contradicting the rest of the anthology, this is it, as clearly what one has here is a case of approaching childhood in terms of and on conditions based on adult conceptualisations. After Huebner, Roe-Min Kok introduces the reader to her own recollections of her first piano examination at the age of seven. The account is intriguing and revealing in its post-colonial undertones and intersections – a Malaysian girl at the whim of a British male examiner – but in the end the article strikes one as a form of therapy for the author's psyche. Not that there would be anything inherently wrong about this, but if this is the case, a more elaborate self-reflexive treatment would have been in order.

Patricia Tang then writes about the way in which modern West-African griots (hereditary praise singers) are constructing their identities by ‘perpetuating their own histories, especially to Western researchers who continue to document them and preserve their memories on paper’ (p. 105). This is a brilliant point of departure for questioning both the griot narratives and scholarly fieldwork, and it is a pity that in the end this self-reflexive attitude is not very strongly present in the actual treatment of the narratives, which tends to shrivel into series of lengthy citations. One also wonders whether or not it would have been possible to juxtapose the reminiscences with contemporary practices, for example through observation. One thing that is peculiar in the article is the summary of another scholar's account as a separate case study amongst three ‘self-authored’ ones. The section closes with Heather A. Willoughby's account on the coming-of-age experiences of three Korean p'ansori performers, one of which is in fact a fictional character from a popular film. At first, this feels rather awkward, but eventually it proves to be a solid solution through which stereotypical textual representations and actual experiences are nicely related to each other. In the article also the ever-so-present unequal power relations between children and adults, and their expression in the form of physical pain, are fiercely present.

The three remaining articles form the third section, labelled ‘Musical Socialization’. Here, Joy H. Calico writes about the so-called new German folk music, created deliberately for the purposes of East-German socialist party politics in the 1950s. This is followed by Hermann and Machiko Gottschewski's account of different ways of conceptualising children's music as post-feudal – or post-shogun, or ‘Westernised’, if you wish – in Japan. Then we have Judah M. Cohen's examination of the current song-leading practices in the reform Jewish summer camps. In all three articles on the one hand, issues of ideology – whether relating to state politics, construction of national identity or ideas about religious traditions – and their links to age, music and institutions are proficiently put forward. On the other hand, however, the essays bespeak of the main problems in the anthology as a whole. First, Calico's account turns out to be a set of speculations based on formal analysis of the music and taken-for-granted assumptions about the ‘simplicity’ of children's music. Here there would have been a splendid possibility to elaborate on the relationships of such musical categories as ‘folk’ and ‘children's music’, but unfortunately this is lost in the description of details of the musical structures. Second, the Gottschewskis do not discuss musical childhoods per se; instead they rather evaluate the educational system – and thus adult values – with somewhat evolutionist and essentialist undertones. Third, Cohen's notion that concepts of youth and childhood ‘represent a condition rather than an age span, during which individuals are not expected to provide for themselves’ (p. 188) does not really help solve the obscure relationship or difference between childhood and youth.

In general, the anthology provides the reader with refreshingly multiple methodological possibilities valid not only for the study of musical childhood or youth. Yet it is surprising that accounts based on ethnography amongst prepubescent children are missing from the compilation. Popular music scholars may be further disappointed by the fact that the only references to the concept of popular music are to be found in Cohen's article. However, the absence of the appellation ‘popular’ should not be taken as an indication of the book's lack of relevance for popular music scholars. In fact, its strength lies in the methodological pluralism that the contributors have to offer, despite the possible dangers of eclecticism. In addition, Cohen's summary of the role of youth and children within ethnomusicology and popular music studies is undoubtedly useful, as well as Minks' afterwords, particualrly in the way it outlines future challenges that relate to unfolding ‘the construction of exoticism and authenticity through musical representations of childhood, perhaps appropriating the analytical term of infantilism to complement primitivism and indigenism in modernist aesthetic discourses’ (p. 217; emphasis in original). In the end, the lack of considerations of ‘popular’ can be used in a positive and productive sense, as it ultimately helps us question the meaning of the term.