640106

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RSM0010.1177/1321103X16640106Research Studies in Music EducationYoung

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Research Studies in Music Education

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Early childhood music education © The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1321103X16640106
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Susan Young
University of Exeter, UK

Abstract
This article offers a short commentary on the “state of play” in early childhood music education research
to accompany the articles published in this special issue. It provides an international overview of recent
research trends in this field, with examples drawn from Europe, the Americas, Asia, the Middle East, East
and South Africa and Australia.

Keywords
birth to five music, early childhood, music education, research, review of research

This article offers a short commentary on the “state of play” in early childhood music educa-
tion research to accompany the articles published in this issue. The commentary that follows
presents my personal views, offered as someone who has been involved in music education first
as an educator and then researcher for all my professional life. Hopefully it will prompt others
to share their views so that through dialogue we can help to shape the future directions for
early childhood music education research. Another author, from another part of the world,
working in a different educational system, from a different disciplinary background, with a dif-
ferent biography would no doubt offer a different view.
Interest in increasing our understanding of music among very young children has
expanded considerably in the last 20 years. Contributions span multiple academic disci-
plines—psychology, sociology, musicology, ethnomusicology, folklore and cultural studies,
neuroscience—as well as the areas of applied research, primarily education, but increasingly
therapy, community arts, parenting studies and childcare practices. In this edition alone the
articles are orientated by theories from social cognition, psychoanalysis, developmental psy-
chology, social psychology and identity formation and phenomenology. So the field of early
childhood music, although comparatively small and internationally dispersed, is character-
ised by varying theoretical frameworks and underpinned by different and often competing
epistemological perspectives. The varying frameworks and perspectives may, in turn, be
aligned and interrelated with policy contexts and pedagogical ideals, strategies and curricula
that vary considerably from country to country.

Corresponding author:
Susan Young, University of Exeter, Heavitree Road, Exeter, EX1 2LU, UK.
Email: susanyoung351@gmail.com

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2 Research Studies in Music Education 

To compound this complexity, the places where young children engage with music are also
varied. Mainstream music education is primarily concerned with music learning and teaching
in schools, but music for preschool children takes place in a wide range of places and situations.
The studies reported in this special issue have been carried out in contexts that range from the
home, a piano lesson, a preschool children’s centre and the New York subway. Home may still
be the place where the majority of infants and very young children spend most of their time in
close proximity to their primary carers and so music at home and its integration with parenting
practices has become an important topic of research (e.g. Addessi, 2009; Custodero, 2006;
Dean, 2014; Street, 2006). Equally, many mothers are employed in paid work and need to find
alternative childcare arrangements and therefore many young children attend a variety of out-
of-home provision ranging from care provided by extended family members, nannies, daycare,
kindergartens and preschool. The setting, be it institutional or home-based, pedagogical or
“everyday”, will impact on the possibilities for music, the expectations and aims for music, and
the pedagogical or parenting strategies for achieving those aims. Carrying out research in such
a variety of settings poses methodological and theoretical challenges for early childhood music
researchers and, as the articles in this issue aptly illustrate, there are innovative approaches to
research being adopted by early childhood music educators, particularly in endeavouring to
access and research musical experiences and learning taking place in naturalistic settings out-
side institutional care and education.
Researchers working in different countries are drawing attention to how early childhood
music education in their country is inscribed with distinctive values, understandings, con-
cepts and goals and how they impinge on children’s musical activity (Andango & Mugo, 2007;
Ilari, 2007; Kiilu, 2010; Lum & Whiteman, 2012; Miya, 2007; Whiteman, 2014; Woodward,
2007). Theory and understandings of children as musical that have been forged in the afflu-
ent Euro-American countries cannot be lifted out of context to be applied to other countries.
Adachi (2001, 2013), for example, discusses spontaneous singing among Japanese children
in Japanese early childhood education, finding interesting differences from the accounts of
spontaneous singing from North American and European contexts. Similarly, Girdzijauskienė
(2011) discusses concepts of creativity in the context of a Lithuanian education system that
provides and values a comparatively formal music education for all children from a young age.
New theoretical concepts are starting to emerge that have relevance to diverse populations of
children rather than just relevance to minority, affluent children living in Europe and North
America (see Miya, 2007; Whiteman, 2014). A study by Lum (2016), for example, explores
the parenting goals of Chinese parents in Singapore and how music learning is articulated
within those goals. Similarly, Ilari (2007) has explored conceptions of music and early child-
hood in Brazil.
Given the considerable variations in theoretical viewpoints, contexts, concepts, values and
goals, it is little wonder that early childhood music education research can be a wide-ranging,
disparate and often fragmented field. It can seem to comprise, particularly for newcomers, a
bewildering array of different theories, aims, perspectives, methods and findings. This fragmen-
tation highlights the value and usefulness of texts and review articles that aim to bring together,
analyse and synthesise broad areas of research and find the links and commonalities (e.g.
Young, 2013).

Paradigm shifts
Broadly speaking, in recent years there have been two major paradigm shifts in research into
young children’s music (see Young, 2005a, 2012). The first has been a major shift in how

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Young 3

infancy and the first three years of childhood are viewed. The formerly “incompetent” infant of
behaviourism, the infant as “blank slate”, has been eclipsed by the “competent” infant who is
capable and skilful and is attuned and responsive to her environment (Tronick, 2007). This
revised view of infancy has resulted in a considerable expansion of research into musical abili-
ties, experience and activity in the first year and extended those interests into the first three
years of childhood (see Trainor & Hannon, 2013 for an overview; also Trehub, 2004;
Trevarthen & Malloch, 2002). Researching the musicality of infants has been greatly facili-
tated by tools and methods, mainly laboratory based, that have been developed to examine
early infant behaviour (Trehub, 2010, 2016). The infant in her first year is now understood to
possess and to use core musical competences to attune and engage with her world socially and
for cognitive development (Adachi & Trehub, 2012). Moreover, via theories of musical attune-
ment and entrainment, the infant is understood to be not merely the passive receiver of experi-
ence, but an active participant, intrinsically influencing her own developmental pathway
(Malloch & Trevarthen, 2010; Young & Ilari, 2012). There have been advances in our knowl-
edge of inherent musical proclivities (Trehub, 2010), how infants perceive and discriminate
music (for representative examples see Costa-Giomi & Davila, 2014; Hannon & Trehub, 2005;
Stalinski, Schellenberg, & Trehub, 2008) and have musical preferences (Lamont, 2003).
This expanded knowledge of music in the earliest years has then increased our understand-
ing of how these competences impact on infant and toddler musical behaviours (Delalande &
Cornara, 2010; Trainor & Hannon, 2013; Young & Ilari, 2012). Research interest in the first
three years of childhood includes a range of foci of which representative examples are music in
the care of premature babies (Filippa, Devouche, Arioni, Imberty, & Gratier, 2015; Harmer,
2013), adult–infant musical exchanges (usually parent and infant) (Dionyssiou, 2009; Street,
2006), music in daily routines at home (Addessi, 2009), musical parenting (Custodero, 2006,
2008a; Ilari, 2005; Ilari, Moura, & Bourscheidt, 2011) and the musical activities of very young
children in their families and homes (Custodero, Britto, & Brooks-Gunn, 2003; de Vries, 2005,
2009; Kida & Adachi, 2008; Young & Gillen, 2010). The revised view of the competent child
has also generated considerable interest in the spontaneously generated musical activity of
young children and studies have explored spontaneous singing (see Dean, 2014 for a recent
review; also: Knudsen, 2008; Young, 2002, 2006) and music-making on instruments
(Delalande & Cornara, 2010; Young, 2003, 2008a). More recently interest in neo-Darwinian
theory, mainly from an anthropological perspective, and the possible evolutionary origins of
music has given rise to interesting theoretical positions on the adaptive uses of music (e.g.
Dissanayake, 2008) that have provided an additional theoretical lens for the interpretation of
musical behaviours in infancy and early childhood. This perspective has motivated specific
studies on musical competences that might have biologically beneficial origins such as rhyth-
mic synchronisation and its relationship to prosocial behaviours (Kirschner & Tomasello,
2010). The age span of the children discussed in the articles in this issue reflects the strong
leaning of contemporary early childhood music research towards the birth-to-three age phase.
This revised view of the competent under-three-year-old has led to a rapid expansion (in
affluent societies) of provision for babies and toddlers (usually accompanied by their parents)
in the form of private classes, concert performances and multi-arts events. Arts and music
organisations are interested in broadening their remit and widening their reach to be more
inclusive of families with young children. Freelance individuals and companies are providing
private classes. All of this increased activity has generated research projects interested to
develop approaches, design artistic experiences and evaluate them and also to train creative
practitioners who may not have an early childhood or educational background (e.g. T. F.
Smith, 2011; Young, 2005b; Young & Rowe, 2010).

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4 Research Studies in Music Education 

The second paradigm shift has been a move away from attempting to identify and define
normative models of musical development that can be applied universally to all children, to a
view that recognises that children develop in individually nuanced ways. The developmental
perspective views “the child” as self-contained and detached from context. However that view
has shifted to a recognition that children are embedded in sociocultural environments, and
their musical actions and experiences are therefore influenced by and contingent upon their
environment (e.g. Barrett, 2010a). Adhering to this paradigm shift, research now takes account
of the real circumstances of children’s everyday lives in all its ramifications; the resources and
activities available to the children and the values, expectations and aspirations held by the
adults and culture surrounding them (Young, 2009, 2012). On the one hand this perspective
has motivated an expansion of research activity into the diverse cultural contexts of children’s
music worldwide (see, e.g. Koops, 2010; Lew, 2005; Lum, 2008, 2009; Marsh, 2008) and on
the other hand motivated research close to home to be sensitive to sociocultural context and
how it impinges on the nature of children’s experiences (Young & Gillen, 2010). Important
volumes representing this domain of research are Musical Childhoods of Asia and the Pacific
(Lum & Whiteman, 2012) and Campbell and Wiggins’ (2013) seminal text on children’s musi-
cal cultures, both of which include a few chapters that focus on early childhood. Sociological
and anthropological perspectives on childhood have been influential in this turn to under-
standing how the musical child is constructed within social and cultural contexts. These
approaches emphasise children’s own cultural worlds and their agency in shaping these. Some
leading examples of work in this vein are Gluschankof ’s study (2002) of musical style among
kindergarten children in a range of musical activities and Marsh’s (2008, 2013) studies of
playground games in multiple cultural contexts. The articles in this journal issue reflect the
turn to sociocultural perspectives and incorporate to varying degrees the influence of environ-
ment on the musical behaviours of the children they study.
Meanwhile, interest in understanding musical development has not been abandoned.
Continuations of this traditional, but nevertheless valuable, lens through which to view
children’s musicality have continued to occupy the interest of some researchers, with chil-
dren’s singing, as has always been the case, occupying the lion’s share of attention (e.g.
Gudmundsdottir, 2014; Stadler Elmer, 2000). Greater consideration, however, is being paid
to the impact of environmental affordances on development, reflecting the sociocultural
turn (e.g. Barrett, 2010b).
This second paradigm shift, in taking account of the social and cultural realities of chil-
dren’s everyday lives could not ignore the rapidly changing circumstances of contemporary
children’s lives. There has been increased movement of populations, which adds rich diversity
to the societies of many countries. Incoming families bring with them a variety of musical
traditions and will hold different expectations for their children as musical when compared
with resident populations. The importance has been recognised of studying music as sociocul-
tural practice among families and young children of diverse ethnicities now living in the same
countries as a result of migration for historical or recent reasons (Gluschankof, 2015; Huynh,
2014; Marsh, 2013; Wu, 2015). One of the features of the changing demography of many
societies is that divisions and differences are opening up along new fault lines. Differences
have tended to be simply etched along ethnicity lines, under loosely defined conceptions of
“culture”, for which music education must adapt by incorporating “multicultural” materials
that positively acknowledge cultural difference and assist with integration. But, increasingly,
it is being recognised that there are intersecting divisions of poverty, gender, religion and
urban/rural location and that genuinely accommodating difference to avoid replicating disad-
vantage, even unwittingly, is complex.

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Young 5

There are longstanding beliefs, often backed by convincing evidence, that quality early child-
hood experiences in music can contribute to improving the life chances of children who experi-
ence disadvantaged childhoods, mainly due to poverty. The controversial El Sistema project, for
example, which originated in Venezuela and has been taken up in other countries, aims to
increase the life opportunities of low income children (Baker, 2014). Recent research and writ-
ing casts doubt on the “silver bullet” claims of this and similar programmes (Baker, 2014).
Family life and work are transforming (Dencik, 1989) with increasing participation of
women in the workforce, the reduction of family size and loss of extended family networks
(Clarke, 1996), and changing constructions of childhood in contemporary family life. These
transformations have resulted in more out-of-home care and an important paradigm shift away
from a focus on education to a unification of education, care and upbringing for very young
children (Dencik, 1989), in which music as a tool for enhancing care and communication
comes to the fore. This shift can be seen in early childhood music with studies that have devel-
oped models for music practice in daycare for babies and toddlers (Suthers, 2004) and the con-
tribution of music to a holistic view of children’s out-of-home care and upbringing (de Vries,
2006; Young, 2008b; Young, Street, & Davies, 2006).
Greater access to forms of technology, certainly for resource-rich children, but also increas-
ingly accessible for greater numbers of children living in less affluent circumstances, is pro-
foundly altering the nature and kind of musical experiences for young children (Young, 2008b,
2012). Research interest in new technologies has two sides: interest in everyday digital music
experiences of young children (de Vries, 2007; Vestad, 2010; Young, 2012) and interest in how
new technologies may be incorporated into and enhance practice (Kim, 2013; Koops, 2012).
The topic of new technologies in practice can be further divided into technologies specially
designed and developed for music education practice (Ferrari & Addessi, 2014) and adaptations
of ubiquitous and hand-held technologies such as the use of tablets (Burton & Pearsall, this
journal issue).
The media (including social media), enabled by new technologies, is another rapidly evolv-
ing dimension that has prompted interest in exploring the influence of new media and how
young children engage with it (Brooks, 2015). Gluschankof (2011) has been interested in how
young children’s music is presented and represented in social media such as YouTube. The
impact of new technologies and new media on early childhood music, although profound and
far-reaching, represents a new area of research activity, as yet in its infancy.

Connecting research and practice

Many of these advancements—the recognition of children’s musical competences from birth,
the diversity of early childhood musical experiences, the impact of new technologies—have
deepened and developed our understanding of children as musical and are influencing the
design of pedagogical interventions (see, e.g. Gruhn, 2009, 2010).
Many applied research projects have problematised early childhood music practice, seeking
to change and improve it (e.g. K. A. Smith, 2008). Early childhood music education conferences
routinely include many interesting and valuable reports of explorations into pedagogical inno-
vations (e.g. Nyland & Acker, 2012) or the testing of new strategies to assess their impact on
children’s learning (e.g. Persellin & Bateman, 2009; Retra, 2010). The major pedagogical shift
in general early childhood pedagogy has been from a constructivist-developmental framework
to a sociocultural pedagogical approach influenced by Vygotskian theory (Vygotsky, 1978).
There have been some projects that have investigated how Vygotskian pedagogical theory might
be adapted to music education (see Custodero, 2008b; Hsee & Rutkowski, 2006; Nyland &

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6 Research Studies in Music Education 

Acker, 2012; K. A. Smith, 2008; St. John, 2006, 2010). The distinct pedagogy developed in
Reggio Emilia nurseries in Italy (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1993) and inspired by the phi-
losophy of Malaguzzi (1998), has motivated many innovations in general early childhood edu-
cation and some specifically in music education (Bremmer & Huisingh, 2009; O’Hagin, 2007;
Reding, 2014).
However, as Gluschankof (2007) reminds us, the often referred to “gap” between research
and practice remains a continuing challenge for early childhood music education researchers.
Arguably, the aim of research should always be to improve the musical experience and learning
of all young children and therefore researchers would wish to emphasise knowledge-for-use
rather than knowledge for its own sake. However, scientific, objective knowledge tends to be
privileged in academic circles and professional advantage for researchers tends to accrue from
the production and publication of “pure” rather than applied research. Some academics have
written highly valuable syntheses of research that are accessible to practitioners and help to
bridge the divide (e.g. Flohr, 2010; Persellin, 2009). On the part of practitioners in a profession
still blighted by low standards of pay and qualification, there is little incentive or support to
engage in research-led practice. Valuable studies on the development of teaching practice for
new (Gruenhagen, 2012) and experienced teachers (Bremmer, 2015) are few and far between
but draw attention to the complexities of what can be neglected dimensions of early childhood
music education practice, the process of teaching itself and how that might be theorised. The
reasons, therefore, for the research/practice “gap” are set deep in the professions of early child-
hood practitioner and academic researcher, for each are bound by institutional demands and
role expectations that impede the integration of research and practice.
An additional point is that the increasing commercialisation of music for very young chil-
dren as a commodity that is purchased by parents in the form of private music classes or one-off
music performances and events, can bring liaisons between research and practice. However,
the commodification of music for very small children can skew the way research is adopted and
used. Here, parents and children are framed as consumers and research may be valued primar-
ily for its usefulness in adding marketable attractiveness to the consumers, which then converts
into financial gain to the providers.

Developments in research method

Early childhood music education research now routinely employs qualitative methods, includ-
ing observation, both participatory and non-participatory and a range of ethnographic
approaches to capture and seek to understand children’s musical activity in naturalistic situa-
tions (see, e.g. Niland, 2012). There are some variations in methodological approach according
to historical-cultural traditions and reflecting the academic environments in different coun-
tries, with researchers in North America tending to lean towards quantitative approaches
within a more positivist paradigm and researchers in Europe, particularly Northern Europe,
adopting more qualitative approaches within a phenomenological paradigm.
One important development has been the shift from viewing children as the subjects of
research to children as equal participants in the research process, a shift which brings methodo-
logical challenges in research with young children. There have been some innovative attempts to
engage children as equal participants, including “show and tell” (Ilari & Young, 2016), the use
of video replay to collect very young children’s responses (Arculus, 2013; Koops, 2012) and
children taking photos to explore their notions of music (Whiteman & Campbell, 2012).
The digitisation of sound and video and new, hand-held portable technologies have probably
contributed the most to revolutionising music education research methods in recent years by

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Young 7

providing easy video and audio recording techniques for the collection, cataloguing, analysis
and sharing of data. New technologies have facilitated, speeded up and expanded the scope,
precision and efficiency of research. As everyday, hand-held technologies become more sophis-
ticated, so they become more adaptable to research; iPhones for example, can capture video
and audio clips quite unobtrusively, then easily replay for shared viewing. Moreover, even quite
young children can use these devices and become active participants in the research process
(Whiteman & Campbell, 2012). Equally, music education practitioners studying early child-
hood music can now routinely collect and analyse video data “on the hoof ” with considerable
benefits to their knowledge and understanding of children’s musical participations. Technology
can also facilitate the process of analysis by quickly converting audio and visual files into dis-
plays and enabling measurements that can be attuned to quite subtle criteria (e.g. Dean, 2014).
As added advantage, for lone researchers living in internationally dispersed locations, social
media provide many means for fruitful research communications (Young & Perez, 2012).

Conclusion
In this overview I have highlighted the considerable advances in early childhood music edu-
cation research. In the last 20 years, research has expanded downwards in age and much
increased our knowledge and understanding of the birth-to-three age phase. It has also
expanded outwards into sociocultural worlds and increased our knowledge and understanding
of the interactions between the social, cultural and material environments and children’s musi-
cal participations. What challenges remain? There is still a shortage of research on very young
children from diverse economic, social and cultural backgrounds. The bulk of research has
been carried out in Western contexts, among Western children. If early childhood music edu-
cation research is truly to adopt a global perspective the Euro-American orientation of research
has to be decentred, and the white, middle-class child who all too often is the unchallenged
central figure of research has to be dislodged (see Ilari, 2013).
As a result of the expansion of interest in the birth-to-three age phase, children in the tran-
sitional ages of five to seven seemed to have slipped from focus. Yet these are the children for
whom recent social and technological changes have a major impact on their musical child-
hoods (Ilari & Young, 2016). These children move between family and home, school and peers,
community and cultural groups, live music and digitised media-music worlds, musics that are
traditional to their family or drawn from children’s popular culture and are knitting these
together musically in agentive and innovative ways (Ilari & Young, 2016).
Research quite rightly focuses on the musical experiences of young children—that is its core
purpose and endeavour—and the music-making of young children is, for the majority of
researchers, what we find endlessly fascinating and absorbing in our work. However, this focus
on children’s activity per se can be short-sighted and can allow research and theorising to over-
look the wider sociopolitical issues (see Bond, 2012). The danger is that we leave these political
issues which impact significantly on music education to be handled and decided by those who
are detached from and may not have its genuine concerns at heart. An issue of Arts Education
Policy Review (2007) contained commissioned articles dedicated to international accounts of
policy for early childhood education (see, e.g. Andango & Mugo, 2007; Ilari, 2007; Persellin,
2007; Woodward, 2007), and prompted authors to review and in many cases challenge the
institutional and policy context for music in their countries. However, aside from this one issue
and its valuable articles there is no research-based literature describing, analysing and criti-
quing early childhood music education policies, programmes and systems or doing so compara-
tively across multiple societies.

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8 Research Studies in Music Education 

I suggest also that future research should ask more probing, fundamental questions
(Bowman, 2005) and look more closely at the disciplinary and theoretical perspectives that
have most influence on the constructions, discourses and policies for music education in differ-
ent countries. Any research inevitably adopts a particular theoretical perspective which is par-
tial—illuminating some aspects and occluding others. What is important, however, is to be
aware of the theoretical choices and the consequences of those choices, to be aware of whose
voices are heard and whose voices not heard, which children stand to gain and which, impor-
tantly, may lose out.

Last word: A vision

If I venture a vision for the future of early childhood music education research—and to initiate
the dialogue that I hope this article might prompt—it is for international and interdisciplinary
research networks that carry out long-term research projects among quite diverse populations
of children, collecting data across the age phase from birth to seven, and ideally longitudinally.
The team of researchers would adopt integrated and varied methodological approaches both
quantitative and qualitative, including ethnographies, observational studies, surveys, formal
testing and ideally laboratory-based imaging techniques. They would take advantage of every-
day hand-held technological devices for the collection, sharing and analysis of data and actively
involve children, parents and practitioners in the research process. The data would then be
shared collaboratively and interrogated from a number of theoretical viewpoints in order to
build up a rich description of the variability of very young musical childhoods worldwide.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-
profit sectors.

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Author biography
Susan Young recently retired as senior lecturer in early childhood studies and music education at the
University of Exeter, UK. She is also senior research fellow at the University of Roehampton, London,
Research Associate at the Centre for Research in Early Childhood, Birmingham and is affiliated with the
University of Bristol. Her career has combined university lecturing with a range of freelance research,
evaluation and consultancy specialising in early years arts, music and education. Originally trained as a
pianist at the Royal College of Music London, she went on to study Dalcroze Eurhythmics in Switzerland
and the Kodaly method in Hungary. She spent her early career teaching music in secondary and primary
schools and in a range of early years settings before gaining a PhD in early childhood music from the
University of Surrey. She has published widely in professional and academic journals and is frequently
invited to present at conferences, both nationally and internationally. She has written several books,
including Music with the Under-Fours and Music 3-5.

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