The Child as Musician: A Handbook of Musical Development

Edited by Gary McPherson

Oxford, England, 2006: Oxford University Press, 501pp.

ISBN 0-19853032-3

Reviewed by Peter Dunbar-Hall

Perhaps reflecting the need for published research to cover a wide range of applications, ideas and outcomes, handbooks have become standard in academic disciplines. They allow an editor the chance to cover important research, to include snapshots of best practice, to present discussion across a field, and to include extensive bibliographies through which the bases of thinking in a particular topic area are demonstrated. The latest handbook relevant for music educators, and for those with interests in studies of childhood, is The Child as Musician. Apart from its comprehensiveness, what marks this out as essential reading for students and practitioners are its implicit agendas - among these, demonstration of children as musicians rather than as learners who might one day develop into musicians. This is a significant step in the thinking about children and their relationships to music that helps justify the book's purpose and its range of writers and topics.

Topics covered in The Child as Musician include medical, social, cultural, psychological, historical, philosophical, technological and pedagogical readings of music by, for and with children from pre-natal stages through to pre-teen age groups. As Gary McPherson points out in his introduction to the book, the research presented is based on work with children, not on ideas read backwards from research on adults. Even though individual writers discuss the research samples of their specific topics and geographical locations, as a whole a global picture emerges of the ways children engage with music.

Another aspect of the book that indicates new ways of thinking about children and music is its inclusion of a range of approaches to research and the topic. Especially noticeable in this respect is reference to childhood as a site that can be studied as a culture in the way that ethnomusicologists would understand it, and increasing acknowledgement of the anthropology of learning - that children acquire music and the skills and knowledges needed to create, perform and think about it in culturally specific ways. In these areas, the chapters by Kathryn Marsh, Susan Young, Pamela Burnard, Patricia Shehan Campbell and Robert Walker provide a healthy balance to the more quantitative approaches of other writers that have tended to dominate much of the published research into children and music.

There is a level of stripping away of myths about children and their relationships to music that will cause feelings of unease among many in the music teaching profession - again, I read this as one of the agendas of the book. One example of this is the chapter by Janet Mills and Gary McPherson on musical literacy. In their explanation of how children handle music notation, these authors indicate that much of the canon of teaching practice is questionable - particularly misunderstanding of how children perceive attempts to teach rhythm and its notation. Myths surrounding the so-called 'Mozart effect' (that listening to music by Mozart can cause increased intelligence levels) are also given a sound airing and critique.

Appearing at a time when in Australia the provision of music to children in primary (elementary) schools is being seriously debated, and when the status and condition of music education for children in general is demonstrated as unsatisfactory, The Child as Musician will do much to support claims for music to be included in all education programs, and for its integrity as a subject requiring depth of understanding and training by those who teach it to be acknowledged.

Music Forum Volume 13 No 1