While the newspapers regularly report the demise of ‘traditional games’ and many adults in schools express concern about the extent and quality of play at break times, other research shows a flourishing culture of play among children at primary school (e.g. Bishop & Curtis, Reference BISHOP and CURTIS2001; Roud, Reference ROUD2010). The picture is one of continuity and change – older games rub shoulders with the latest crazes, games come and go, and children make up new games and adapt existing ones, often incorporating elements from other aspects of their worlds, especially their media cultures. Few of the older singing games may be found in more recent musical play, at least in the UK, but clapping games and pop singing and dancing are burgeoning (Playtimes; Roud, Reference ROUD2010).

Kathryn Marsh has undertaken a masterly study of this musical culture. The outcome of 16 years’ work, involving fieldwork in 14 schools across five countries and the analysis of over 2000 items, it is a thoroughly researched and richly detailed book. Indeed, it is by far the most extensive ethnographic study ever undertaken in this area of children's music-making. Marsh's motivation is not only its intrinsic interest, however. As a music educator as well as an ethnomusicologist, she goes on to explore the relevance of her findings to contemporary music pedagogies and the theories of children's musical development and creativity on which they are based; she demonstrates the richness, sophistication and relevance of children's musical play for music education today. The result is an inspiring, eye-opening, timely and challenging text which should become required reading for all music educators.

Building on previous critiques of music pedagogies, especially Orff-Schulwerk and the Kodály method, as well as earlier ethnomusicology and folk music research, Marsh sets out the evidence for a ‘mismatch’ between them and children's contemporary playground practices and auditory worlds. Her aim is to prompt adults to think about children's creativity as revealed in the generation and transmission of music in musical play occurring in naturalistic settings. Beginning with in-depth fieldwork in a multi-ethnic elementary school in Sydney, Marsh extended the geographical and cultural purview of her research to include Aboriginal children in Australia and children in the USA, UK, Norway and Korea, in each case filming them in elementary/primary school settings. She filmed children's musical interactions as they occurred in the playground, and requested repeat performances at quieter times or in quieter spaces. These many events were then transcribed and analysed with reference to their music, movement and verbal components and for the light they shed on transmission, sources, composition and improvisation. Aware of the difficulty of doing justice to children's play on paper, Marsh has made a selection of her films available via the publisher's website (username and password obtainable from a copy of the book). These are essential viewing, bringing the play to life and allowing the information from key transcriptions and description in the book to be triangulated with a record of the performance events themselves. Another strength of the data is Marsh's documentation of the players’ own commentaries on their games. She quotes extensively from these with the result that the book is suffused with children's voices as well as her own. Even allowing for the fact that the accounts included have been selected precisely for the illumination they provide, the amount of implicit knowledge the children demonstrate, and the degree to which they can articulate for adults what they are doing, is impressive and instructive.

From this evidence, Marsh begins by characterising the social groupings in which musical play takes place, typically peer friendship groups of two to six children. She considers the dynamics of these groups and their performances, including the ways in which the children negotiate variant forms of text, music and movements, disagreements, power relations and group membership. She argues that the friendship group provides a kind of psychological safe haven within which children can accommodate socio-cultural and aesthetic differences and undertake experimentation.

Games, and the verbal, musical and kinaesthetic skills needed to accomplish them, are generally transmitted among age peers and from older to younger children and Marsh explains what this entails with precision. Learning takes place through observation and participation in performances with more proficient children. She found instances where novices were coached by other children in a manner similar to ‘scaffolding’ and guidance was offered through physical manipulation of the hands as well as modelling and verbal advice. Games are ‘caught’ (the children's own metaphor) through the recognition of their associated movement, textual and melodic formulae. One fascinating finding is that learning is aggregative in relation to whole performances. Children do not ‘break down’ the game into smaller units for learning purposes. Another striking finding is the rhythmic complexity of the games. It is common to find that the meter of the text and the movements do not coincide, resulting in polymetric textures which may be interrupted by non-rhythmicised elements for dramatic and humorous effect. Conversely, ‘melody seems to be of secondary significance in game performance practice’ (p. 273).

Marsh provides fascinating insights into inter-ethnic transmission, especially how different language and movement formulae are accommodated and what supports this process. She also traces children's use of material derived from audio-visual and print media and the classroom, demonstrating the creative uses to which these are put. Central to the book is Marsh's in-depth analysis of children's compositional practices. Crucially, she highlights children's motivations to creativity, and how composition is undertaken collaboratively and recursively in performance, with children employing a vast range of strategies, often quite consciously: ‘The performative element is integral to composition in the playground. It is part of the process of thinking out and sounding out that characterises generative practices in musical play in this context. This cycle of composition and performance is ongoing. At no stage is there a clearly identifiable, unchanging product to be preserved’ (p. 202). Here and later Marsh draws out the implications of these observations for our understanding of children's creativity, comparing them to developmental models and highlighting the need to focus on composition and improvisation as equally valid and, at times, inseparable processes.

Marsh's consideration of her findings in relation to music education theory is robust but balanced and contains many suggestions for practice. She highlights disparities between playground games and classroom materials as well as implications for teaching strategies. She states in her conclusion, ‘I have endeavoured to demonstrate that music educators, musicologists, and other adults have much to learn from the detailed and contextualised observation and analysis of the operant processes and characteristics of children's musical play’ (p. 317). There is no doubt that she has been successful in both raising awareness and suggesting ways to build on this knowledge. The Musical Playground is remarkable for the seriousness with which it treats children's own musical games and for the respect it accords their musical identities. It amply succeeds in revealing children's abilities, expertise and awareness in this area of their lives, and in comparing and contrasting them with the methods of contemporary music education. There can now be no excuse that ‘classroom methods have acknowledged the importance of allowing children to engage in musical play, to explore and create music and movement in the classroom, but they have tended not to acknowledge in a similar way the real complexity of children's compositional and performance skills’ (p. 316). As Marsh argues, this acknowledgement entails noticing children's musical play, accepting it, becoming informed about it and in turn allowing it to inform teaching methods. There are compelling reasons for doing this. For one thing, this kind of music-making shows no signs of going away and is apparently increasing. The final period of Marsh's research coincided with the creation of new forms of participatory media with far-reaching potential for the global transmission of singing games. For example, hundreds of films of children and young people performing clapping games have been uploaded to YouTube™ since its inception in 2005. One hopes, then, that music educators will take more of an interest in contemporary musical play and take up debate of its implications for music pedagogies. I would, however, add a few notes of caution.

Firstly, as Marsh stresses, it is possible to generalise some aspects of children's musical play but there are also features which are specific to certain locations and temporal moments. It is thus essential for us to balance knowledge of the general with knowledge of the particular musical worlds of playgrounds local to them. But how are teachers to achieve this? As Marsh herself highlights, the teacher role is not particularly conducive to fieldwork: ‘though I seemingly had greater access [undertaking fieldwork as a teacher in the school], this position actually created a greater distance between myself and the children in the school, both in terms of time and role. Whereas I had been regarded as an interested adult observer, I was now a teacher with an entirely different power relationship with the children’ (p. 55). This resulted in the children being more diffident and polite, and in their producing more rehearsed performances. One solution might be for teachers to explore the playground in a nearby school rather than their own. Another approach is to support student teachers specialising in Primary Music to undertake this kind of research as part of their training (cf. Grugeon, Reference GRUGEON2005, in respect of playground language and literacy teaching).

Another consideration is the varying degrees to which children take part in these kinds of musical play. Some children play such games regularly, some participate for a while and move on, others never become involved. Even those who play regularly may only do this at certain points in their primary school careers and may subsequently come to see themselves as having outgrown such games. We must be careful not to assume, then, that all of this musical play is conducive to, known about and practised by all children all of the time. Indeed, it might be instructive to focus just as much on those who participate rarely, if at all, and the reasons for this. Finally, as others have cautioned, there is a fine line between adults appropriating this material and undermining it in the playground (e.g. Opie & Opie, Reference OPIE and OPIE1969). None of this weakens Marsh's basic case, and could be seen to strengthen it, but it does serve to emphasise that children's culture is not straightforward, simple or static and research of any kind in this area needs to be carefully, flexibly and respectfully carried out.

The outstanding achievement of Marsh's work was recognised in 2009 when The Musical Playground won the Katherine Briggs Folklore Award. The ultimate accolade, though, would surely be to see engagement with its ideas, and their application and evaluation, in music education on an international scale.