In her study of children inventing songs, Coral Davies suggests that quite young children demonstrate an understanding of musical structure, especially in the sense of having a beginning, an end and a sense of overall pattern. The conditions for this appear to be encouragement over time and the opportunity to make music vocally, away from the technical demands of instruments. This may indeed be so, though it is difficult to be certain, since most of her examples are of songs where word sounds, patterns and meanings appear to lead the composer-singers into vernacular conventions. These include regular
and answering phrase patterns and sometimes quirky deviations which are so embedded in verbal meanings that it is difficult to isolate the element of musical speculation. What emerges clearly from this work is the musical imagery in the minds of very young children. Not so transparent is whether these expressive icons are organised into speculative relationships with musical extension, contrast, transformation or surprise. A coherent and steady image of any kind is in one sense a ‘form’—some order having been brought into the perceptual process. But having an iconic representation, a mental picture, an internal musical replica, is not necessarily the same as being able to combine these images in acts of speculation. From recordings of the music of the children working with Coral Davies it is not always clear whether or not there is deliberate structural experimentation, ‘playing about’ with musical rather than linguistic images.
Davies’ research method was to interpret and respond to the songs of children as ‘action research’ in the classroom. Since the subsequent evolution of criteria for composing, it now becomes possible to objectify this approach a little more by having other people interpret the compositions of her children. In the arts this idea of inter-subjective judgement is important; it is the equivalent of a repeated litmus test, the judgement of several people rather than one individual. In this case, five observers independently listened to the first 12 of the compositions on the Davies tape. How did these judges perceive them in the light of the criteria given above, criteria to which Coral Davies
Figure 11 Vocal compositions of young children: five judges place 12
was working? Figure 11 shows that 14 judgements were made at the speculative level and even one at the idiomatic, while 45 are placed in lower categories.
Drawing on the subjective impressions of more than one person helps us to get some purchase here. There is certainly evidence that musical speculation can be perceived in the invented songs of some 5- to 6-year-old children but perhaps not to the extent originally believed. Seventy-five percent of 60 judgements suggest otherwise. As in language development, adults often impute higher levels of communicative intention than may be steadily in the mind of a child. Our interpretation may be very different from their experience. For instance, just now I am listening to the children in the next- door garden playing. A 7-year-old is leaning out of the window shouting to his 5-year-old brother: ‘what are you doing out there?’ A third child, aged perhaps between a year and 18 months, also shouts in a parody of the same accentuated tone of voice but is completely unintelligible in terms of verbal meaning. He has picked up the sound shape of his older brother’s call but he is not really saying ‘what are you doing out there?’ nor does he expect an answer. Bruner calls this ‘a kind of prosodic envelope’ (Bruner 1975).
But ‘there is something more that leads the child towards elaborating rule structures in communication’. This ‘something more’ is that ‘play has the effect of drawing the child’s attention to communication itself, and to the structure of the acts in which communication is taking place’ (p. 10). Play in terms of musical speculation is precisely this enjoyment of musical action which goes beyond making sonorous patterns or expressive gestures. Children elaborate in music, ‘searching for varied orders of combining acts and signals’ (p. 11). We move beyond imitation into structural experimentation, literally playing with musical ideas, combining expressive gestures into structural patterns that have the potential for surprising and delighting us. We can learn from studies of language acquisition just how important it is to respond to children in ways that affirm the existence of meaning, even if their utterance is not completely formed and crystal clear. So we might respond to the youngest child in the garden as though he had indeed shouted ‘what are you doing out there?’ with ‘mind your own business’ and to young composers as though there were indeed speculative ideas in their music: and one day there may be.
As parents or teachers, in the interests of encouraging children’s development we tend to assume the highest possible level of intention in the way we respond, while at the same time being cautiously realistic in the way we assess. It would be unwise to believe that the young child really did understand the linguistic significance of ‘what are you doing out there?’ and to proceed on that basis at a time of crisis. When a 7-year-old tells me that he has no money because his mother makes him pay half the mortgage, I might respond by commiserating with him but I am not obliged to interpret him
literally. That would be a foolish assessment of the situation. He is just talking like a grown up within an ‘envelope’ of adult manners. In the same way a teacher might respond to the compositions of children in a way that assumes the presence of structural speculation or that they have valued symbolic meaning, in this way anticipating future development.
But does the model describe the data in ways that are true to musical development and does it really relate to Piaget’s psychological work? The crucial point here is that we have a possibly helpful way of describing where a composition stands in terms of musical knowledge. The spiral categories go beyond describing levels of skill, though these are included. Manipulative control, the management of the vernacular, idiomatic authenticity; these all say something about musical craft passed on between people and generations, social sharing. But opposite, on the left, are the intuitive mysteries of music: the felt magic of sonorities, the potent sense of the possibilities of expression, the delight of musical form as it leads us as persons on into new relationships. It needs to be emphasised that this process is not a ‘once in a lifetime’ affair. The broken ends of the helix indicate that it is constantly being reactivated, as when, for example, we encounter music that is totally new for us or when we have not engaged in music for a long period of time. I once experienced nearly six weeks without hearing or playing music at all. When I finally did come across music it was part of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture played on a small radio some distance away. The effect of this was like the effect of the sun on the prisoners in Fidelio coming up from the dungeons; I was awash with sound materials.
If I am seated at a computer to make music it takes some time before I have explored possible sonorities and learned to control them. For a while I am back at the level of materials. We never leave the earlier levels behind; they are part of the fabric of musical understanding. The point about the longer term developmental sequence is that any educational endeavour should be organised in a way that is relevant to the range of experience and maturation. In general, children at the age of 5 to 8 do not aspire to idiomatic authenticity but are entering the world of music with a sense of excitement over sound materials and a willingness to engage with vernacular conventions. In general, the story is very different by the age of 14 or so, where making music in ‘grown up’ idiomatic ways is becoming a strong imperative.
No theoretical framework can explain or explain away any potentially profound experience. The magic remains. But we can become more aware of the fibre that constitutes these experiences. The analysis depicted in the spiral offers the possibility of increasing our awareness of ‘what is on’ in music and music education and helps to keep the richness of musical knowledge in mind. To take just one issue, when in Britain in the 1970s and following the lead of some contemporary composers, many general music
class teachers began again from the source of music—sound itself, they were emphasising the bottom left-hand side of the helix. The next level on the left was also thought important and the phrase ‘self-expression’ catches an emphasis of that period as does the idea that children should be encouraged to be imaginative, to speculate in music. At the same time—and often in the next room—the instrumental teacher was trying to take students up the right- hand side. But it is not possible to proceed up one side or the other, to rely only on either intuition or analysis. Crossing over from left to right is what children seem to be doing in their own work and this dialectic needs to be respected at all levels of music education. Simply intuitively ‘experimenting’ and being expressive—‘doing our own thing’—is not sufficient for further musical development; nor is a detached analytical grind in the acquisition of manipulative skills, the ability to work in the vernacular of regular phrases and common metres or even aspiring to stylistic authenticity by simply copying.
Worries about this kind of analysis often seem to focus on the fear of mechanising any understanding of musical response and stereotyping the ways in which we construe and interpret the work of students. The crucial thing though is that this map is organised around the elements of musical knowledge, the four dimensions of critical appraisal: sensitivity to and control of sound materials, of expressive character, of structural relationships, of the recognised value of the experience. The descriptions of the eight elements of the spiral are grouped around these musically validating concepts, and these are based on the centrally important strands of musical knowing.
The mapping of the developmental spiral onto Piagetian concepts raises questions of psychological validity or at least of consistency. To what extent is musical development as I have described it analogous to the general development of mind that is articulated in the theories of Piaget and can we trace parallel concepts throughout the developmental spiral?1 From early
childhood there is an inevitable interaction of accommodation and assimilation—of imitation and play. They do not exist independently, except perhaps fleetingly. It is possible to see very young children engrossed in experimenting with sounds, playfully assimilating them to private worlds, as Piaget puts it, ‘a preoccupation with individual satisfaction’, enjoying ‘the functional pleasure of use’ (Piaget 1951:87–9). But as soon as a child can repeat a musical phrase or the most simple rhythm (in the manipulative mode), accommodation is at work; for however fitful or unsteady that repetition may be, it is made possible by an act of imitation. Even if a repetition immediately follows a model there has to be a guiding internal image, however draft-like and ephemeral, without which we would not be able to reproduce what we heard, not even the shortest pattern.
Together, assimilation and accommodation are at work generating ‘sensory-motor intelligence’ and, as we saw in Part I, it is this facility of image-making that bridges sensation and thought, making possible the further development of mind. But in the earliest developmental layer—that of musical materials—the fleeting image is locked fairly tightly into the immediate management of sounds.
A qualitative shift is necessary for us to regard music as having a potential for meaning that is metaphorical rather than a direct imitation of sensory phenomena. This transformation is the development of what Piaget calls ‘representational imitation’, the ‘representation of an absent object’ (Piaget 1951:111). Representative imitation lies at the,root of musical expressiveness. To produce or empathise with expressive character is essentially to imitate elements of perceived feeling qualities, abstracting them from ‘life’ and transforming them into gestures.
Such a response to music is not dissimilar from identification of or with a character in a play or film; a musical passage can be heard to dance or languish, it can be expansive or contractive, forwardly impelling or dragging back, angular or flowing, and we may feel ourselves taking on something of these characteristics. We can certainly describe them. As the critic who was writing of a performance of the Brahms violin concerto said, ‘it was a genial giant who emerged, refreshed and lighter of heart, in the finale’: only a figure of speech of course, but one to which we can surely relate.
Children’s music-making in the expressive layer thus moves towards a steadier representation of something that is absent and seems initially to be strongly influenced by visual recollections or verbal suggestions of affective states—hence the easy domination of word-meanings in their invented songs. The first phase of musical expression is an imaginative leap into seeing the possibility of representing life experience in music. The impulse is on the intuitive side—as it always is; intuition is the leading edge and musical expression is at first ‘personal’, owing little to external models, strongly assimilatory. But this is quickly followed by a tendency to accommodate to vernacular patterns and conventions ‘out there’ in the environment of musical discourse. Representation passes quickly from fairly spontaneous or ‘personal’ assimilative activity to the stylisation of these otherwise fleeting shadows, a sign of the growing ‘collective rule’.
The development of an understanding of musical structure I supposed to be analogous to what I have called imaginative play—play with images— where expressive characterisations are brought into new relationships and enjoyed as form. To avoid confusion I now think it best to drop the somewhat ambiguous term ‘imaginative play’ and substitute ‘constructional play’. The creative imagination which brought musical expression into being now surfaces intuitively ‘in the form of constructions’ (Piaget 1951:87). This is a
second qualitative shift to a new level of organisation where musical gestures—phrases, motifs—are assembled into sequential or contrapuntal events. When engaged in musical performance, by matching or contrasting articulation or pointing up similarities or differences between phrases or passages, we are engaged in organising and energising structural groupings and coherence. This aspect of musical inventiveness goes beyond imitatively engaging in expressive characterisation and is transformed into imaginatively playful actions; equivalent to weaving characters into a story, combining single gestures or longer passages into dynamic structural events. Of course, constructional play pre-supposes imitation; we cannot combine non-existent gestures into interactive configurations.
The speculative element crucial to musical form thus has an assimilatory, intuitive bias, obvious in the music-making of children as they search for surprises, creating musical twists and variations. The creation of new juxtapositions seems to be a priority. Once again we set off intuitively; the effectiveness of musical form is evaluated by its capacity to engage, to surprise, to lead the listener on, to explore interactive combinations. Here, constructional play is prime and fairly quickly comes to take place within acceptable idiomatic conventions, the distinctive ‘games’ developed within the rule frameworks of particular musical styles.
To put this as briefly as I can: each musical development layer represents a qualitative shift from sensory engagement, to reproductive imitation, to constructional play. No layer is ever left behind, the processes are taken forward as part of the evolving repertoire of musical intelligence. In every layer there is a dialectic between assimilation and accommodation, a kind of alternating current between intuition and analysis, with intuition leading the way. Musical discourse at any level depends upon the fusion of both sides and when we perceive a perfect equilibrium we speak of ‘perfection’, of ‘quality’. And this ‘quality’ can be achieved by any person in any layer, though music that has an enduring appeal—perhaps over centuries—will have the potential for interpretation by performers and listeners in all layers.