Attending to “culture in the small”: A narrative analysis of the role of play,thought and music in young children’s world-making

Young children and their early utterances

The study of young children’s early thought and language has received considerable attention. A seminal publication in this area has been Katherine Nelson’s (1989a) edited volume Narratives from the Crib, in which transcripts of the nap and night-time monologues of a 2-year-old, Emily, were analysed by a group of researchers in order to provide a range of perspectives on the “meaning and significance” of these in Emily’s development. This work built in part on that of Ruth Weir (1962), in which she studied the “crib monologues” of her young son Anthony; specifically by providing a method that incorporated recordings of “pre-sleep” monologues with reports of experience from parents. Over a period of some 15 months Emily’s parents recorded her monologues thereby providing a rich body of data for the study of the independent language work of a young child between the ages of 21 and 36 months.

The group of academics who analysed the transcripts of Emily’s monologues brought a range of perspectives to their examination of the ways in which Emily’s monologues might be understood, including as a representation of real-life experience (Nelson, 1989b), as a narrative recreation of her world (Bruner & Lucariello, 1989), as problem-solving (Feldman, 1989) or as reinvoicement of dialogue (Dore, 1989). As a musician I found myself intrigued by the relative absence of consideration of music and song in these analyses. Nelson (1989a) acknowledges that some of Emily’s monologues contained “bits and pieces of song and nursery rhymes” (p. 7). Stern (1989) makes a point of noting that in the preverbal, pre-narrative period of life “it is not at all uncommon for infants to ‘sing’ to themselves at bedtime after the parents have left the room” and outlines some possibilities including “melodic line(s) … that undergoes variations, or rather that wanders” (p. 314). These comments are in relation to anecdotal reports he adds, not systematic inquiry or indeed the analysis of Emily’s monologues, and he goes on to observe that some songs might be “self-regulatory” whilst others accompany specific mental activities or states.

It is only in Dore’s interpretation of monologue as reinvoicement of dialogue that Emily’s use of song or singing is mentioned at any length. Dore draws on the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin to present a view of children’s language learning as dialogic, a process of genre acquisition and use. Dore suggests that Emily’s monologues arise from a system of feedback loops, a collective mind that is made up of Emily and her parents (1989, p. 231). In this system Emily’s monologues might be understood as “trial-and-error productions” that operate as “self-corrective feedback mechanisms” as she acquires the forms and conventions of the “three-person language system of her family” (1989, p. 234). In short, in a Vygotskian model of language acquisition Emily is constructing an internal monologue from her external experience of narratives with her parents (Dore, 1989, p. 235). Dore notes that one of Emily’s early monologues is “entirely sung” in a process in which “a melodic rhythm is established and then words are ‘backfilled’ into it” (1989, p. 249). The monologue contains references to the nursery rhyme “Ring a Ring a Rosy”, and as a reader I speculate that it is the rhythms and modes of this song that regulate the language use.

I have dwelt at such length on the work of Nelson and her collaborators for two reasons. First, the analyses offered provide valuable insights into young children’s language development. Second, these analyses also signal the ways in which we can overlook one of the means by which children experience, engage with, and make meaning of their worlds: that is through music and song. When we examine research in the developmental psychology of music there exists some tradition of analysing children’s musical utterances as a means to understanding aspects of their musical development. My interest moves beyond that of seeking to understand children’s musical development in order to understand the ways in which children use music as a narrative construct in their world-making and identity work. In what follows I shall outline the ways in which young children’s musical utterances have been researched in order to provide a context for the examination of their musical narratives.

Young children and their early musical utterances

From the earliest moments of life infants draw on sound-making as a means to communicate their thoughts and desires. Whilst these early communications are concerned largely with expressing needs such as food, warmth, comfort and security, the use of sound as a means to engage with and elicit response from others emerges early in life. Through the rhythms and modes of “communicative musicality” (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2010) infants engage with care-givers in a dialogue that is imbued with mutuality, meaning and emotion. Malloch (1999/2000) describes communicative musicality as a form of “coordinated companionship” that draws on the elements of pulse (timing), quality (expressive musical qualities of dynamics, timbre and tone-colour) and narrative (the co-ordination of pulse and quality in forming companionship through time), and is vital to parent–infant communication. Drawing on this work, Dissanayake suggests that the earliest narratives we experience are musical, illustrating this theory through an analysis of “motherese” or “parentese” in which she outlines the musical and dynamic features of such communications. Significantly, she suggests that infants, rather than being the passive recipients of such narratives, “teach us to perform for them” (2012, p. 2) by rewarding us with their delighted reception at our attempts to communicate. She outlines a number of ways in which these early communications contribute to development, including through promoting: bonding; emotion recognition and regulation; cognitive practice; social practice; language learning; and learning of culture. Importantly, such communicative interactions “prepare infants to be musical” (2012, p. 4). For Dissanayake (2012), we have an “in-born receptivity to music-like narrative” (p. 4), a quality that has been, I suggest, largely ignored in general accounts of development.

Studies of infants and young children’s engagement with music have focused largely on the ways in which the end-products of such events (however defined) can provide us with some insight into their musical development in terms of children’s capacity to match pitch, mark pulse and rhythms, to sing in time and in tune, to attend to the nuances of musical emotion and dynamic effect. A number of researchers have focused their efforts on the investigation of children’s generative musical narratives and the ways in which they use these in their world-making and play. ¹ Studies of infants’ and young children’s generative musical engagement conducted variously in the US (Campbell, 2010; Davidson, 1994; Dowling 1984a, 1984b; Moorhead & Pond, 1941/1978), France (Delalande, 2009; Dumaurier, 1982; Mialaret, 1997), Sweden (Sundin, 1997), Germany (Moog, 1976), Norway (Bjørkvold, 1989), Italy (Imberty, 2002; Tafuri, 2008), Australia, (Barrett, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012a, 2012c; Marsh, 2008) and Hawaii (Whiteman, 2013), have illustrated young children’s immense capacity to generate and perform musical narratives as the focus of, or as an accompaniment to their play.

The studies referred to above suggest that young children’s generative musical narratives fulfil a range of purposes including: establishing the mutuality of the infant-caregiver relationship in communicative musicality (Malloch & Trevarthen 2010); establishing the basis of playground interactions (Bjørkvold, 1989; Marsh, 2008); establishing social bonds and communicating feeling-states (H. Papoušek, 1996; M. Papoušek, 1996; Campbell, 2010); and trialling different ways of being in the world and undertaking identity work (Barrett, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012a, 2012c). To these instrumental purposes might be added the role of song-making and vocalization in underpinning early music and language development.

Play as a learning activity

The power of play as a medium for and means of learning has long been recognized across cultures (Shipley, 2012). Sustained engagement in play activity has been linked to the development of stronger neural pathways that support learning potential (Bodrova & Leong, 2005). Whilst play has been described in a range of ways the following captures the dual and seemingly oppositional focus of play as being both “free” and improvisatory and, rule-governed:

Play is enjoyable, it is intrinsically voluntary, and it is at the same time essentially a rule-governed activity: Its two essential components are the presence of an imaginary situation and the rules implicit in this imaginary situation. … Furthermore, play is always a learning activity because it requires learning and grasping these rules, seeing that they form a system. … Even simple pretense play—for example, a little girl pretending to be a “mother”—requires attending to and making explicit the normally implicit rules embedded in the role of the “mother”. (Nicolopoulou & Cole, 1993, pp. 293–294)

Musical play is no less a learning activity, governed by implicit rules that underpin the structure of music whilst at the same time providing opportunity for exploration and improvisatory activity. Musical play in the form of children’s inventive song-making (Barrett, 2006) may be viewed as a form of learning as children learn and apply the fundamental musical structures they encounter in their daily lives.

Music as a narrative art, music-making as a narrative act

The term “narrative” has been pressed into service in a range of forms in the research literature. Within the methodological literature, narrative may be understood variously as: a form of data (interview data); a methodological choice that embraces the relationality of researcher and research participant in and through time and place, and acknowledges and supports their joint meaning-making; and, as a means of reporting narrative work (Clandinin, Pushor, & Orr, 2007). For Bruner (1986, 1987, 1990), narrative constitutes a particular “way of knowing” and communicating our experiences of the world. Bruner (1996) links this way of knowing the world to identity work explicitly, stating that:

It is only in the narrative mode that one can construct an identity and find a place in one’s culture. Schools must cultivate it, nurture it, cease taking it for granted. (p. 42)

Bruner’s concern here is with understanding how we construct our versions of the world rather than with how we come to discover a (singular) version of the world that exists beyond our experience. For Bruner, individuals and groups make sense and meaning of their worlds through constructing narratives that organize the key features of their lives. These narratives not only shape and re-count our experience, they also demonstrate our “cultural membership” (Webster & Mertova, 2007). This occurs not only in the stories that we tell but through the shared symbols and forms on which we draw to tell these stories. Music is one of the shared symbols and forms of community on which individuals draw in their identity work, and is a powerful tool through which meaning is constructed and cultural membership demonstrated. Through music engagement as listeners and audience members, performers, improvisers and composers, individuals are able to explore a range of identities in and through music. This notion has been theorized as identities in music (IIM) and music in identities (MII) (MacDonald, Hargreaves, & Miell, 2002). The first of these, IIM, focuses on the varying social and cultural roles that we might take in music; as audience members, as singers, as performer, as improvisers, as composers, for example. The second refers to the ways in which we use music as a resource (Batt-Rawdon & DeNora, 2005; DeNora, 2000) for a range of purposes, including: to shape our environments (e.g., through creating a private space on a crowded train by using an iPod of favourite tracks to block out the sounds and interactions of fellow commuters); to modulate our feeling states (e.g., by listening to or performing particular musics to lift our moods, or embrace an emotional state more deeply); or, to demonstrate affiliation with particular social and cultural groups (e.g., through wearing t-shirts that promote particular music groups and listening to their musics). These uses of music in identity work are evidenced in the music-making of young children as they trial different music identities in music as singer, song-maker, audience-member and employ music for a range of purposes (see, e.g., Barrett, 2009, 2011, 2012a; Campbell, 2010).

Whilst the concepts of IIM and MII have been separated for the purposes of explanation, these concepts are often overlapping and multiple. Our identities in music are potentially multiple and might include for example those of a keen enthusiast of traditional jazz music as audience member, a singer in a church community that specializes in the performance of particular genres of sacred musics, and a song-maker in the popular tradition. We may also use any one of these identities in music as a means to modulate our moods, to communicate and engage with others (Batt-Rawdon & DeNora, 2005), or to demonstrate a group affiliation. Through these processes music becomes a means by which the self is constructed, narrated and communicated. In short, music may be viewed as a narrative art, and music-making as a narrative act in our identity project.

Well before children have a firm grasp of language and the capacity to construct and recount their experiences in words, music is available to them as a shared cultural resource through which they can communicate with self and others. Recognition of these features of music and music-making has led me to ask how young children use music in their early identity work and self-making, in their play, thought and music-making. To this end I have undertaken a longitudinal collective case-study of the music-making of 18 young children. In what follows I provide a narrative analysis of the music-making of Cara, a 2-year-old girl (at the commencement of the study).

Episode 1: Elmo songs

Cara is in her bedroom, gently twirling a red balloon tied to a string with her right hand whilst she rummages with her left hand in the plastic crates that store her toys. A toy Elmo sits prominently on one of the boxes and all the while she sings a falling interval (variant of major and minor third) to the word Elmo. Suddenly she spots a mobile phone in one of the crates and abandoning both song and balloon pulls it out from the piles of toys. She says thoughtfully “Mum, this is my telephone” before exclaiming “Oh—I need my bag”. She turns to face the centre of the room, and after a quick survey of the contents rushes to the door where she pulls her pink satin handbag from the door-handle. Returning to her bed she puts the phone in the bag, and then takes it out again with some fuss and haste to answer a call.

“Hello?”

After a listening pause she says “Pardon?” before moving the phone away from her ear to look at the screen. “Sorry” she says, “I got you on the wrong speaker … Sorry” and continues listening intently as she grasps the handbag in her spare hand and walks out of the bedroom.

Later Jane tells me that Cara “pretends to be a mummy going to work and so she’ll sing ‘time to go to work now’ or ‘see you later’ and then she’ll have a normal conversation on a pretend phone but now it’s quite often a sing-a-long conversation on the phone, ‘See you in the morning’ or ‘back soon’… she’s kind of putting a tune to all these little conversations that she’s having”.

Cara’s singing of the “Elmo” song provides an accompaniment to activity, a form of externalized musical monologue as she searches for something to play with in her toy boxes. The song is provoked by the presence of the Elmo toy, one of Cara’s favourite stuffed toys and might be viewed as a means of stating companionship with the toy. The function of her solitary music-making here is primarily one of accompaniment of activity, perhaps of comfort and companionship, and is abandoned once the phone offers her another opportunity for playful narrative. Her mother confirms Cara’s trialling of different roles with music as an accompaniment to that activity.

Episode 2: Rock-a-Bye Baby song

Emily tells me that Cara has quite an extensive repertoire of songs. These include songs Jane learnt from her mother as a child (e.g., “Angels Watching Over Me”) and has subsequently sung to Cara, traditional Scottish folk songs Jane’s mother now sings to Cara, songs learnt in Kindermusik classes, and songs learnt through music media programmes and resources such as The Wiggles, PlaySchool, Hi-5 and Bananas in Pyjamas. Cara is captured on video one evening dancing with her cousin to the song “Rock-a-Bye Baby”, as the family goes about preparing dinner in the kitchen next door. Cara and her cousin watch the television screen intently as they complete the dance movements and sing along with the song with great gusto. Their focus on the screen is mutual. As Jeff, the “sleepy” Wiggle, falls asleep, they screech with delight and call out to the characters on the screen “He’s fallen asleep! Wake up Jeff!”.

In this episode of parallel music-making Cara and her cousin take on the forms of engagement offered them as audience participants and performers (singers and dancers) through the music media interactions of the Wiggles’ programmes. They have learnt the forms of movement and song that are available to them in this setting and use these as a means to interact not only with each other, but also with the larger community of musical practice that is presented through the music DVD. Their participation is mutually reinforcing of the repertoire and associated gestures and action, and their roles as singers/dancers. They contribute to the stories offered by that setting, for example, that of Jeff, the “sleepy” Wiggle, through engaging in the ritualized responses to his sleeping through cries of “wake-up Jeff!”. In these various roles they explore a range of identities in music (singer and dancer).

Episode 3: Cooking songs

Cara is in the kitchen, working at a child-sized toy table. Evidently she has been singing as she has been working the Play-Doh into various food items in preparation for the evening meal. Her parents are both in the kitchen preparing the evening meal and her father prompts her to sing her song again saying, “Sing it again so I know how to sing it”. Cara obliges, singing the phrase “Crunchy, Munchy Honey Cakes” repeatedly as she presses biscuit shapes into the layer of brown Play-Doh spread on the table. Her parents encourage her to sing the “Pie song”, her father beginning to sing “Patty cake, Patty cake”, before being corrected by her mother “It’s “Patta-cake, Patta-cake!”. Cara takes up some of the song but chooses to focus on her baking rather than the requests to sing. Both parents sing the song line-by-line prompting Cara to sing every alternate line until the end is reached. Her mother asks her how the “Dorothy the Dinosaur” song goes and Cara begins to sing “Dorothy, Dorothy” as she presses the Play-Doh flat. She interrupts her singing to say, “Mum, these are two steaks”. Her mother directs her back to the song by asking her who says, “romp pompa chomp”. By way of answer Cara sings “Dorothy” and launches into another song snippet before returning to singing the opening phrase of the “Dorothy the Dinosaur” song. As they continue to play with the Play-Doh Cara’s mother makes suggestions of what the Play-Doh could be including “a hot potato”; a suggestion that prompts Cara to sing the Wiggles song “Hot Potato Hot Potato”. This song is then extended through suggestions from Cara’s mother that she could pretend the Play-Doh is “mashed potato”.

Cara’s singing in this episode initially arises from her cooking play. Further singing is prompted by Cara’s parents as they coax her to repeat the song she had been singing prior to them switching on the video camera. Her singing of the “pie song” as described by her father is prompted initially by the activity of “cooking” with Play-Doh and then extends into a performance of a number of food-related songs, each drawn from a repertoire learnt from a range of media sources. Singing here seems to be a co-performance with and commentary on the activity of cooking. Cara’s parents use song both to prompt more song and to prompt language use. This interactive music-making may be viewed as multi-functional in the ways in which it reinforces both musical repertoire and language vocabulary, and provides a context for mutual engagement between Cara and her parents.

Episode 4: Tick-Tock song

Cara is in the kitchen seated on the floor hitting two up-turned saucepans with a wooden spoon. She hits both saucepans three times, but then hits the larger saucepan several times. She experiments with the sound by turning the wooden spoon over and hitting the saucepan with the other side. She begins to play a pattern alternating between the saucepans, pauses, and then begins to hit each saucepan once each (alternating between the two). She turns to her mum and says:

“Mummy, I’m making a tick-tock song”.

“You are too”, her mother responds, “how does it go?”.

Cara plays a tick-tock pattern between the two saucepans with her mother taking up the pattern by saying “tick-tock” in time with Cara’s playing. “Great”, her mother exclaims at the end, whilst Cara moves on to commence a pattern of two quavers and a crochet in duple time on each saucepan.

Cara changes the focus, announcing that she is going to sit on one of the saucepans, and does so in order to play the other. On finding this unstable she tries sitting on the other before resuming her original sitting position. Once she has settled back on the floor, she continues playing the previous patterns (two quavers and crochet) before asking her mum, “What’s that kind of song?”. Her mother repeats the question before Cara continues, “A really loud kind of sing”. Her mother agrees that it is “really loud” and asks her can she sing “a song to go with it”.

Cara sings along with her playing, “a one a two, a three a two, a five a six, a one, two, three”. Cara takes the song up again, using the same melody and now focusing on “one, two, three” for the lyrics. All the while she continues to accompany her singing by beating the pulse regularly and with great accuracy on the saucepan in front of her. It is noticeable that Cara is able to play a steady pulse whilst singing the rhythmic patterns over it.

“Would you like another one?”, she asks her mother, “one, two, three?”. “Yep”, responds her mother and Cara agrees, “I did one to two”. She begins to sing, corrects herself, and plays. She announces that she will “get just another one”, referring to the pots. After playing briefly with a third pot, Cara turns back to the cupboards and points to the wok perched on top “I’ll have another one too”. Her mother explains that the wok has a wobbly bottom and the handles get in the way, suggesting that she use the floor instead. Ever persistent, Cara turns back to the cupboard saying, “I’ll get another one”. When we next see her on the video footage she is seated behind a veritable battery of instruments including three pots, a large pot lid and behind these the up-turned laundry basket. Of the latter she says, “I can play the spoon under here”, lifting the basket and rattling the spoon against it and the floor briefly. She then lifts the pot lid and strikes it down on the laundry basket. “Wow, what a sound, CLANG!”, exclaims her mother whilst Cara turns the largest pot upright and makes an echoing strike of lid on pot and then the laundry basket. The musical episode transitions into cooking play as Cara puts the lid back on the pot saying, “Mummy, I’m cooking, I’m cooking Mummy … we’re having sausages!”.

I find out that such music-play is a regular feature in Cara’s life when Emily tells me that Cara often makes “pots and pans music” in the kitchen:

Adam [Cara’s father] hangs all the utensils up on the wall, there’s pots and pans and things up on the wall so Cara’s there [standing on the bench] bashing and making a tune … when she was younger I used to hold her and I had the spoon and I’d say “listen to this!”.

In this episode we see Cara position herself as an instrumentalist and singer as she sets up a “battery” of percussion instruments and employs these to create a narrative of self as drummer and singer. Whilst she includes her mother in this music-making, her mother’s role is largely one of audience and commentator rather than joint music-maker. Here singing and music-making are the primary focus of Cara’s play and provide a means for her to explore a range of identities in music. Such exploration builds on a family practice of playing in this way, a practice that is supported and encouraged by her parents.

Episode 5: “Stars” songs

Cara is lying back against a pile of pillows on the couch, her knees drawn up to balance an open book on her lap. She has her mobile in her hands and is “texting” with both thumbs as she sings. Her singing is a pot-pourri version of the song from the Peter Pan movie, “Second Star to the Right” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”. Her singing appears not to be the main focus as she concentrates on the phone and the screen and her “texting” play; rather it is ruminative, and reflects the bedtime rituals of quiet activity and the tropes of night-time, stars, quiet-time and sleep. As she finishes she looks up to her mother and exclaims, “Can I have a look?”, referring to the video-camera, and reaches up to see what has been filmed.

In this episode we see Cara again select song that reflects the activity. Her selection reflects her awareness of the ways in which particular forms and types of song are suited to varying activities, in this instance the role of lullabies as preparation for and accompaniment to the act of sleeping. Cara’s quiet, contemplative singing indicates an understanding of the performance practice of lullabies and night-time songs. Her singing might be viewed as an embodied dialogue between the evening rituals of preparation for rest and the music that supports these rituals. I suggest it may also be viewed as a playful learning activity in which she practises the forms and conventions of lullabies whilst creating her own through the “mash-up” of the two songs. Cara is also alert to the possibilities of performance and whilst not seeming to perform to the camera (and her mother) she understands the import of this form of engagement and the performative possibilities they offer. We see her transition from performer to audience.

Episode 6: “Trampolining” songs

Known song accompanies many of Cara’s activities. Whilst jumping on the trampoline she has been singing through a number of songs including “I’m a Little Teapot”. Her mother captures her on video and asks her to sing these again. “No, I already did it”, is her response. After refusing to sing again for her mother or for the video camera (jumping up and down all the while on the trampoline), she turns towards the trees, her back to the camera, and announces that she will sing it to the trees. She then sings with enthusiasm through “I’m a Little Teapot”, “Hot Potato” and variations on this song of mashed banana, and wriggly spaghetti. These are followed in quick succession by “Warm Houses, Cold Houses”, and “See Saw Margery Daw”, “Row, Row, Row your Boat”, and finally her own song “I’ve Had Enough”. It is noticeable that Cara’s singing is in time with the pulse of her bounces on the trampoline, each bounce emphasized by an aspirant vocalization.

Jane comments that “she sings when she’s jumping up and down on the trampoline. Yelling it ‘cause she’s outside. I guess it’s liberating to yell and sing and stuff”.

In this episode, the choice of songs is sometimes prompted by her mother, sometimes sparked by objects and events in her environment, and at other times emerges from the nature of the activity in which she is engaged. In this episode it is telling that Cara does not wish to share the private space that her singing created whilst trampolining. After repeated refusals to sing to her mother or the video camera she turns away to the trees, preserving her private performative space and singing to the trees. Her singing is co-ordinated and rhythmically attuned with her physical actions and provides a means of highlighting and accentuating that activity. She is both aware of performing to another and her wish to perform for herself, and reconciles these two forms of performance in her final invented song “I’ve had enough!”.