Musical Play in Early Childhood: Why it’s complicated
Musical play is a very important part of The Music Work's current Youth Music-funded project “Playing Around Sound”. Through an action research approach we are working with deaf children aged 8 or under, their siblings and their parents, in order to find out what approaches to active music-making “work”. We aim to develop a pedagogy for this audience of carefully chosen repertoire, musical instruments and ways of presenting an environment that is conducive to musical play.
Here are some thoughts about Musical Play because popping bubblewrap, for example, is not a "conventional" choice of musical activity.
But this post won't tell you what musical play is. Hopefully it just helps to explain why musical play is difficult to explain and evaluate.
The two main tenets of Playing Around Sound are that children learn through play and that music is communicative. Therefore encouraging musical play in a friendly atmosphere encourages communication. Better communication is desirable because children who can express their needs tend to be happier.
In order to work out “what works” in musical play we need to have a thorough understanding of music and play. It’s a tough task – during sessions I have observed children and adults engage with song, speech, crying, shouting, silence, noise, resistance, cooperation, anarchy, free will, adult-led activity, signs, blank faces and frustration. I’ve also observed magical moments of realisation and cooperation, melody and rhythm and times when an hour has flown by as the group is deep in “flow” which proves that all involved have been engaged and challenged. It’s a messy, complicated, wonderful business which eludes a reductive approach which can be adapted or applied by other groups and here’s my explanation as to why.
I like Russell’s (2015 p193) line “The idea of play as a synecdoche encompassing children’s play and adults’ support of it”. Here the term synecdoche (a figure of speech where a part is used to represent the whole of something) is used to represent the complex set of interactions that occur in play that can be validly identified as individual transformative moments or equally as a collection of transformative moments. To give a separate example of synecdoche, the term “bread” can be many forms of cooked dough or a term used in connection with livelihood or money. Within the realm of play, Russell is suggesting that the term “play” can represent a myriad of collective or individual expressions of play. That is why play is so difficult to define.
Play has many guises: Bob Hughes’ Taxonomy of Play Types (2002) lists sixteen play types including Creative Play, Rough and Tumble Play, Role Play, Risky Play. At about the same time, Howard Gardner proposed his Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1999 – his website is http://multipleintelligencesoasis.org ) . Interestingly, Hughes never listed “Musical Play” as a play type whilst “Musical Intelligence” was recognised by Gardner. I’ve long wondered why “Musical Play” is not a play type and suspect that “music” and “play” are inextricably linked. The Dutch historian Huizinga (1955) said “in everything that pertains to music, we find ourselves in the play sphere”. Manipulation of musical instruments is termed “play” in Arabic, Germanic and Slavonic languages and Huizinga assumed some deep-rooted psychological reason for diverse languages to reflect such an affinity between music and play.
When we turn to “music”, one could consider music as synecdoche because the term “music” can refer to the dots or the tune or the performance or something non-musical, like making “sweet music together”. Combined with “Play” the term “Musical Play” is synecdoche “squared”. No wonder we have trouble pinning it down. Musical Play is a multiplication of two complex ideas and it’s easy to see how “accounting” for it is troublesome.
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Hughes, B. (2002) A Playworker’s Taxonomy of Play Types, 2nd Edition, London: Playlink.
Huizinga, J. (1955) Homo Ludens, Boston:Beacon Press.
Russell, W. (2015) Entangled in the midst of it, in Philosophical Perspectives on Play. Mclean,M,. Russell, W., Ryall, E. (Eds).London:Routledge