Singing in the Education of Children (original) (raw)
Related papers
Doing (things with) sounds: introduction to the special issue
Social Semiotics, 2014
This special issue aims at analyzing music as a site of social semiosis, i.e., at investigating the manifold ways in which music is constituted as a socially shared event. The papers collected here follow three main threads, considered as central aspects of music making: studying the kind of coordination and participation required to make music together; looking at the semiotic resources employed by musicians to construct their roles in interaction; examining the relationship between language and music. A variety of perspectives is adopted, ranging from social semiotics to conversation analysis, anthropology, multimodal analysis, and critical discourse analysis. Such a variety is also reflected in the musical traditions -Western art music, jazz, gospel, church hymns, pop musicand in the settings under examination, which comprise instructional activities like musical classes and rehearsals, as well as ordinary conversations and written accounts of musicians' biographies. Issues of epistemicity and authority, intersubjectivity, correction of musical action, solidarity, and ideology are thereby addressed. The issue thus aims at exploring the richness and complexity of music making as a social practice, and documents how the integration of different disciplinary perspectives can offer fruitful insights on music as a domain of sociality which lies at the intersection of aurality and writing, norm and creativity, individuality and collectiveness.
In human musicality, only together are its features normally counted by us to be those of 'music' or to be 'musical'. So we may think that any one feature of human musicality does not constitute ‘music’. Thus, though any of these features may sometimes alone be counted ‘musical’, some of them may seem to us to be less ‘musical’ than others. But, in regard to 'music', the most fundamental controversy is whether the essence of 'music' is exclusively a human thing. This begs the question of what is the essence of music. We, of course, may want to know what is the essence that makes some human sonic artifacts 'music', and others not. But, even if we presuppose that the subset of human sonic artifacts that are 'music' are what make that 'music' music, the foundational issue is about how we can have the auditory perception that we call 'music'. For, if humans, as humans, had never perceived 'music', then there could not, in the first place, ever have been any human artifacts that we today call 'music'.
Accomplishing the categorial landscape of the classroom: The case of group singing
2021
This article contributes to the corpus of ethnomethodological studies concerning the lived order of educational settings and, specifically, the accomplishment of what we call the 'categorial landscape'. In this sense, we aim to further demonstrate the contribution of ethnomethodology for understanding educational settings as accomplished through the local, practical, reflexive, and accountable accomplishment of the 'classroom-as-context' by its participants. Our particular contribution is the description of how institutional educational settings are not only accomplished in and through stable category relations (i.e., "teacher" – "pupil") and associated 'bound activities' but, rather, how other category relevancies and devices might be in play for specific activities which sustain the setting as one in which 'education' is demonstrably getting done in this instance, a class singing session. Drawing on insights from studies of membe...
Musical beings: is music an artefact?
2015
Do we have musicality, or are we musical? To what extent is music an artefact and how much does it shape us? It is suggested that our first musical experience is in the mother’s womb, that we result from an accurate selection by ancestral women towards ’musicians’, and that music affects our brain, cognition and mood. It will be concluded that the inseparability of humans from music makes us musical beings.
What Music Isn't and How to Teach It
Action Criticism and Theory For Music Education, 2009
Unlike the other arts, music has no direct connection with the rest of the human world. True, there are bird songs and natural "melodies" in the gurgling of brooks, but these are hardly the materials of music in the way that landscape can be the subject-matter of painting or the human body the material of dance. And no natural sounds can stand alone as quasi-artworks the way that the deeply eroded limestone blocks from China's Lake Tai can be admired as abstract sculptures. Music demands to be understood on its own terms. This is not a new requirement, for others, from
jean.vion-dury.pagesperso-orange.fr
What does music convey to the mind that may possibly explain its powerful effect on human behavior? While it is already well known that music can convey emotions, there is little evidence that it can also communicate concepts. We will first describe the theoretical framework that needs to be taken into account when studying conceptual processing in music. We will then present recent results that have been interpreted as signs of conceptual processing in music: the effect of a sound or a musical context on the processing of a target word (and vice-versa) as well as a gating paradigm exploring the unfolding of familiarity in music listening.
Song singing: how children apply musico-linguistic rules or a grammar
Songs are cultural rituals that are governed by rules in order to yield well-formed performances. Traditionally, parents and caretakers intuitively introduce infants and young children into this practice, for instance by lullabies and play songs. Provided that children are engaged in this practice, they start song singing around the end of the first year and during their second year. In order to study the teaching and learning of songs as a trans-generational cultural practice, the formal principles and rules of traditional children's songs have been extracted and initially sketched out as a grammar. This grammar of children's songs draws on music and language as generative systems, and it elucidates the rules how musical and linguistic elements are simultaneously combined into a coherent and well-formed unit. As each language has specific prosodic rules, this grammar so far is restricted to children's songs in a particular language, i.e., German. The application of the grammar is shown by microanalyses of children's song acquisition processes. In a quasi-experimental study, children were asked to learn newly composed songs that tacitly, yet deliberately violate the grammar. Case studies demonstrate the strategies children apply to cope with the violations and to create well-formed songs. Interestingly, children not only show implicit knowledge of the children's songs' grammar, but also exhibit an aesthetic sense of well-formedness. Since the grammar of children's songs encompasses musico-linguistic elements and rules, implications not only concern a structural approach to musical development, but also to language and to the synchronisation of movements.