Scholarship and research about young children's musical play is helping educators understand more about children's ways of knowing music. Play is central to human learning and development: the Early Years Foundation Stage framework states its importance for young children's learning. It is in freely chosen, intrinsically motivated play that curiosity, cause and effect, creativity, imagination and critical thinking can be exercised.
Early childhood music education (ECME) is underpinned by ideas from many disciplines: developmental psychology and constructivist theories, neuroscience, sociology, biology, anthropology and ethnomusicology as well as music training methods. This provides a rich palette of ideas and concepts with which to consider the ways that young children are conceived as learners. Based on these conceptualisations, various approaches exist for practice with very young children in a music learning-teaching context. Perhaps because of this rich theoretical basis, there are myriad aims and purposes for music education and the very young.
ECME might be considered preparation for instrumental learning, or as a tool for other learning areas – for example, language and literacy, or numeracy. Perhaps its purpose is to help develop children's social interaction and group cooperation skills? All these reasons, and more, are justification for including music as part of young children's education; and yet what the children bring in terms of their ways of knowing can get lost.
The following sections explore the origins of free musical play, its value for communication and expression, and how to work with and encourage awareness of this aspect of young children's knowing and understanding.
Communicative musicality
In the first months of life, it is music and musicality that coordinates, sustains and connects caregiver-infant interaction. Words at this point mean very little in the communicative process. What is crucial is the connection between adult and infant. Professor Colwyn Trevarthen and his colleague Stephen Malloch coined the term ‘communicative musicality’ (2000) to describe the ways that parent/caregiver and infant interact. The interchange is rhythmically coordinated, comprises phrases of exaggerated pitches, and is a storying narrative between the two. Both partners are invested emotionally. Significantly, it is the infant who leads and gives a clear ending to the communicative event.
Musical play
One of the reasons why musical play is so valuable is its expressive potential, and not being reliant on words to convey meaning. SALTmusic (see Pitt, 2020) was a study that brought together Speech and Language Therapists (SLT), early childhood music-arts practitioners, children under three with a speech and language referral, and their caregivers. The communication pyramid shown below (Figure 1), shared as part of the evolving SALTmusic community of practitioners, is a tool frequently used by SLTs to demonstrate that social interaction, attention and listening and play are integral to communication. We found that free musical play in an enabling environment, with attentive play partners, proved to be effective in offering space and time for expression and communication of complex thoughts and feelings beyond words. Pre- and post-attendance assessment visits by the SLTs recorded marked increases in children's confidence and number of words used.
Figure 1. Communication Pyramid (used in Speech & Language Therapy practice)
Musical play in settings
In early years settings, young children's musical worlds find expression in free play opportunities. Here it is possible to see a range of musical characteristics: music expressed in bodies with gross motor, rhythmic movement/dance, often in the outdoors; music expressed vocally with glissandi, chanting, and other playful uses of the voice; snippets of known melodies brought together in newly composed ways during play with objects, and/or other humans or musical instruments; rhythmic play with objects; listening intently and intentionally; being still and silent. Musicality pervades many free play scenarios but may not resemble adult notions of ‘music’ – it can range from noisy and polyphonic, to subtle and so quiet it may go unnoticed. More detail can be found in a recent research highlight I devised for the Froebel Trust.
Starting points
Musicians are expert listeners attuned to a learner's musical expression; these skills are essential when being with young children as they play. Noticing what children are interested in, how they express their musicality, and what they can already do will enable adult-designed musical activities to be grounded in this knowledge and understanding.
Here are some suggestions for when working in EYFS:
- Ideally, work in partnership with teachers, practitioners and parents/caregivers who know the children. This will provide invaluable information about the children's preferences and known repertoire.
- Explore together the music that the children enjoy at home, and work with this music as starting points for learning activities where the child takes the lead.
- Together, assess the setting's music provision – the following self-evaluation tool might prove useful: tinyurl.com/4xhe2vpv
- Find ways to document children's musical play and learning, and share this in the setting. This raises awareness of the importance of music in children's daily lives.
- There has been a call recently for ‘slow pedagogy’ (Clark, 2022) in early years education. One valuable aspect of music is the way that it can alter the tempo and atmosphere within a setting. Slowing down the pace through carefully selected musical activities, or the use of recorded music, can bring calm and an altered pace that can be helpful for everyone in a busy classroom.
In some settings, music is an area of the curriculum that may not be a priority. Music teachers can call attention to the unique affordance of music for children to express themselves, feel, act and achieve in ways that no other subject area can offer.
References
- Clark, A. (2022) Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child. Routledge
- Pitt, J. (2020) ‘Communicating through Musical Play: Combining Speech and Language Therapy Practices with Those of ECME – the SALTmusic approach’, Music Education Research, 22, pp. 68–86. doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2019.1703927
- Trevarthen, C., and Malloch, S. N. (2000) ‘The Dance of Wellbeing: Defining the Musical Therapeutic Effect’, Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 9(2), pp. 3–17
