In Practice. Playful Music Experiences

The following sections detail practical approaches for facilitating composition with young learners. Despite an underdeveloped role in music education programs, scholars such as John Kratus (1989) have long emphasized a need for composition. Authors have described the significance of exploration and development (Kratus, 1989; Levi, 1991), which can lead to a rich musical life through playful experience, while enhancing and expanding composition skills. Children’s exposure to, and experiences of music, when playfully and creatively encountered, can equip them with understandings that build a foundation of musical thinking.

Playful Music Experiences.Musical experiences, which children acquire everywhere, have potential to deeply engage children. Music teachers and caregivers can foster a broad array of experiences that, as Folkestad (2004) described, are an important component of one’s creative potential and a foundation on which to build a musical identity. Piaget (1970/2008) wrote that children assimilate new information and accommodate growing understandings in relationship to previously acquired knowledge and skills. Vygotsky described psychological tools (and acquisition of them), leading to the notion of multiple literacies (Kozulin, 2003). Tools can include artifacts like signs, symbols, and texts (Kozulin, 2003), possibly representative of Bruner’s (1977) sequence of representations (i.e., enac- tive, iconic, symbolic). Drawings, icons, and symbols, for example, have been described by music educators as ways for children to represent compositions (e.g., Barrett, 2002; Miller, 2007).

While music teachers may be concerned with their role in broadening children’s musical perspectives by exposing them to unfamiliar repertoire, it is equally important to create space for already-existing musical interests. One’s foundation of experience could be, in some cases, considered enculturation (Barrett, 1996), necessary in order to become acquainted with a domain (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Robinson, 2001). However, definitions of a musical domain can differ among children and adults. While musical experiences provide knowledge and understanding that one can use to compose, such experience can also potentially constrain one’s thinking (Stauffer, 2013). This might be particularly so if unrelated to past experiences and preferences, therefore difficult to assimilate. Pedagogical approaches to composition should be considered a lived process (Stauffer, 2013). Teachers and caregivers must create space for diverse musics while also valuing ideas stemming from children’s unique lived experiences.

Before and Beyond School. Prior to school age, children’s growing world of musical experiences may develop from caregivers, music groups or classes, child care teachers and babysitters, television, apps, toys, siblings, films, instruments, and more (Barrett, 2012). According to Margaret Barrett (2012), the home environment plays a critical role in providing the support, exposure, practice, and formal instruction that contribute to musical understandings. Children’s early musical interactions tend to be improvisatory and involve a variety of experimental sound-sources (e.g., rattles, pots and pans, forks and plates, vocalizations). Interactions with others contribute to quality of experience and might “emphasize generative and playful music- and meaning-making” (Barrett, 2012, p. 58) between child and caregiver. As Sandra Stauffer (2013) noted, every musical activity can be an opportunity for questioning, invention, and creating. With such an approach, children can be encouraged to take ownership of repertoire by applying, adapting, and transforming it.

Although music teachers may have little to say about students’ musical lives prior to and outside of school, Barrett (2012) stressed the importance of access, particularly important for students who did not have musically enriching early years. Playful musical engagement in school can promote music-making within households and communities, and playful musical engagement outside of school can spark ownership and creative thinking in school music. Music teachers can create opportunities in schools intending continued playful musical engagements in home environments. Caregivers, including child care centers, may also appreciate collaborative opportunities to promote musical and creative readiness, for instance sing-alongs with school groups that encourage divergent renditions of familiar songs and cross-age collaborations that allow children to make music their own, perhaps with older siblings. A song or musical game may make its way into one setting from another, through a sibling, perhaps. Caregivers can listen, value, and potentially incorporate these moments.

Personal and Group Repertoire. Children are influenced by music that teachers may not know about or may not think to include. Repertoire commonly used in music classrooms includes folk songs, songs of varied cultures, and Western classical art music, but music educators have faced criticism for a lack of connection between school music and children’s musical lives (Schuler, 2011). Schuler (2011) argued that teachers must value prior musical experiences, tastes, and interests. For young learners, this may also encompass music from toys, cartoon theme songs, and various performing artists. Children’s creative work will incorporate such influences. When teachers value and encourage them, children will be more likely to share and to create with meaning.

New Music. Continuous experience of new or novel musics can also foster ownership of musical material. A one-time experience does not usually suffice for children, particularly if the style is unfamiliar. Teachers and caregivers will attest to young children’s desire for familiarity through repetition. While a teacher may feel that children have sufficiently experienced repertoire after two or three listening opportunities, children may be overwhelmed with new information they cannot immediately accommodate. It can be satisfying for young learners to engage with repeated repertoire, and repetition can foster their ownership of it, thus preparing them to consider their own creative adaptations.

Shared Experiences. Collective experiences, different from collaborations, are also an important outcome of music composition that can foster shared understandings and group identity. While collaborations tend to involve group efforts toward a particular goal, collectivity is a sense of togetherness—a group who come together as community. Although composition may sometimes be an individual endeavor, social context is paramount for creativity and learning, and will also influence individual projects. A class repertoire can build mutuality and familiarity. Once repertoire is known well, children will playfully reinforce songs and activities to one another in spaces apart from a music classroom. What once was “that music” can become “our music,” hummed on the playground, incorporated into play, and modified and expanded. Children will creatively adapt music. Music teachers should accept and value children’s tendencies to make light of their experiences. Silly, joking renditions of class repertoire can play a powerful role in retention, understandings, and community-building. Children might take ownership through such antics, and if done in a harmless way, can positively demonstrate growing creativities. In other cases, however, teachers and caregivers may not be aware of children’s adapted song forms. Children may softly hum or sing to themselves during play, and adults may not notice the ways one musical idea quietly interacts with those of peers. Intentional and responsive listening as well as recognition and reciprocation are key to teachers and caregivers understanding and fostering children’s diverse creativities.

Children’s Media. For online music classes or classes that incorporate virtual content, the challenge of community-building demands consideration. Children’s media tend to play a significant role in their musical worlds. Children may feel comfortable expressing themselves musically at home, yet on camera or with virtual content they may appear to only passively engage. Despite what may appear to be disinterest, adults may be surprised to hear the child singing or humming the same music later while doing other things. In a similar way, teachers can role model activities that children can take outside the classroom. Young children will not always respond in obvious ways in the learning setting, even when in-person, but may do so in their own time and in their own spaces. Ideally, caregivers will take part, too, to foster music-making with senses beyond the screen (e.g., touch, movement, interaction). Media may plant musical seeds that foster person-to-person musical interactions. Synchronous interactions build young children’s repertoire and skills. Although video content might engage children (Koops, 2020), its substitution for live music may be concerning. Media can nevertheless play a role in exposing children to new musical ideas, particularly when followed up on by a caring adult.

Parents and Peers. Children tend to incorporate musical ideas they learn from peers (Campbell, 2010). This may be difficult to replicate online, as on-camera learning may limit informal and personal interactions. Caregivers of all types, however, might play a key role in what Koops (2020) referred to as parenting musically. Different from musical parenting (e.g., organizing private lessons), Koops explained that parenting musically may involve uninhibited musical and playful interactions for a range of purposes beyond music, for instance in order to build relationships (e.g., to connect, to laugh) or to complete or enforce practical tasks (e.g., dance for brushing teeth, chant for tying shoes, song for going to bed). Peers and siblings play similar reinforcing roles when teachers and caregivers have role-modeled playful musicking for (and with) them.

Listening. Listening can influence children’s creative inspirations and strategies. When trying to achieve or recreate a particular sound, children will “listen with heightened interest and attentiveness to another composer using similar approaches” (Fallin, 1995, p. 25). Interesting musical ideas they hear may also inspire them to create for themselves. While it is necessary to incorporate children’s tastes and experiences, the more they create, the more they will develop a desire to understand new creative pathways that listening to diverse musics can provide.

Young children tend to have favorite repertoire (from media, pop culture, friends, church, dance practice, piano lessons, parents, or more) that they can sing, hum, dance to, or chant. Songs are appealing in that the lyrics may detail an engaging story, tell a joke, set a scene, or cultivate a mood. Lyrics help some children feel the music as concrete, important if they are to deviate from it creatively. In schools, a class can form a shared repertoire of favorite songs, particularly when serving multiple purposes, like songs-with-game, -dance, or -body percussion. Children will often change songs, sometimes accidentally, inadvertently taking ownership.

Self-Made Music. Playing one’s own music can enforce coordination of one’s body and mind in time. Gesturing to create specific patterned sounds on one’s instrument or body, particularly when synchronized with others, is also important in building a schematic understanding of musical parts and interrelations. In the preoperational stage (see Piaget, 1970/2008) children may draw inspiration from such experiences when writing their own music. The action of playing a xylophone, for example, can be an enactment of musical understanding, and when another child joins in, a need to synchronize, take turns, or otherwise formulate a plan will likely arise, presenting a problem that children are challenged to resolve. Negotiations may then proceed.

Movement. Movement and music are deeply connected. Movement is foundational for young children as a basis of development (Anttila & Sansom, 2012); learning (Hannaford, 2007); and creativity, imagination, and knowledge (Sansom, 2007). The body and mind influence one another, building consciousness and reflectivity (Anttila & Sansom, 2012). Researchers have suggested additional purposes for movement that include development of mental operations and one’s nervous system (Stevens-Smith, 2004), emotional scaffolding toward empathy and perspective (Grafton, 2009), and language development (Anttila & Sansom, 2012). Movement comprises synchronized dance as well as creativity and improvisation, often meaningful activities for young children that may be intertwined with acting, storytelling, and visual imagery. Eeva Anttila and Adrienne Sansom (2012) stated that movement allows one to make sense of their experiences and communicate interpretations to others. These “embodied processes—sensations, perceptions, gestures and movements—connect human beings to the material and social world” (Anttila & Sansom, 2012, p. 182). Movement is an important means for children’s communication, improvisation, expression, and creating and shaping of musical ideas.

Literature. Poetry and stories play powerful roles in children’s development of musical ideas. Teachers can use children’s literature; folk tales; fables; the storylines of television, film, and other media; and children’s own invented stories to provide creative activities connected to music. Poetry can enforce rhythm, flow, form, metaphor, and expression. Children’s literature can “stimulate creative thinking by transferring words to sounds and by capturing feelings through sounds” (Fallin, 1995, p. 27). Representation of scene, character, or storyline through sound can provide children with strategies; understandings of representation in general; and structural concepts, including form, mood, and feeling. This may involve analyzing others’ works (e.g., rhythm, repetition, forms of words in stories), adapting existing works to a different context (e.g., changing the mood, adapting the rhyme scheme), to the same context (e.g., a variation on the same theme), or creating one’s own musical representations (e.g., an inspired musical idea). As Jana Fallin (1995) noted, stories can stimulate creativity and inspire through the exciting arc of a story line, rhyme scheme, rhythm of the words, characters, mood, onomatopoeia, imagery, repetition, and contrast.

Kinesthetic Connection. Body percussion can also be used as a representation of actions or sounds in a story (Fallin, 1995). Children should identify sounds that appeal to them and attempt to describe why that is so, reflecting on budding compositional ideas. Educators can emphasize process and respect for the divergent ways by which children make creative musical decisions, giving value to children’s choices and encouraging their ownership. As Fallin (1995) suggested, “The sounds suggested in children’s books can come alive in the music class . . . [to] accompany the story, turn into music, and even become compositions themselves” (p. 24).

Children can also use music already attached to stories to analyze divergent representations of similar content, paving the way for an expanded and empathetic worldview by noting multiple interpretations. In these musical experiences, children should have opportunities to experience music in song, movement, instruments, and story; consider a variety of sound-making sources; and embody musical experiences in diverse ways. Importantly, while these experiences are fundamental building blocks of musicianship in general, the playful ways by which classes consider, improvise, experiment with, and evaluate small adaptations can lead children to make their own playful changes, setting a tone for creative musical decisionmaking and growing creative skills.