Children's Home Musical Experiences Across the World by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

SECTION III

NEW IDEAS

7 Nurturing the Musical “Open-Earedness” of Seven-Year-Olds

Diane Persellin

TODAY’S SEVEN-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN exhibit openness and excitement about many genres of musical styles experienced in their everyday lives and in their ever widening world. As these young children from around the world are growing out of their early childhood, they continue to enjoy singing, dancing, moving, and playing at home or on the playground alone or with extended family members as they have since they were toddlers. Many still delight in sharing songs that they have learned at school from their friends and teachers, at home from their parents and siblings, or as they begin to participate in music lessons. Some seven-year-olds still enjoy creating their own spontaneous songs much as they did when they were younger. Music is an important part of their expanding world.

In this digital age, many seven-year olds also now relish singing and dancing to their iPods, television programs, boom boxes, electronic games, computers, and other modern musical toys and instruments. They collect CDs, DVDs, and MP3s of their favorite music. Increasingly, these children learn from popular culture through radio and television programs, from observing older siblings and parents engaged in music technology, and from imitating and emulating popular tunes and advertisement jingles (Campbell and Lum, 2007). Johnson-Green and Custodero (2002) noted the powerful response that music in the media elicits from children as young as one and two. In a large study with over two thousand eight- to eighteen-year-olds in the United States, eight-year-old children were found to listen to a variety of types of music an average of one hour per day (Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout, 2005).

Young children and their parents enthusiastically support diverse genres of digital music. One label, Baby Rock caters to parents in their thirties and forties and features renditions of lullabies and early childhood songs in the style of the Cure, the Beach Boys, and Metallica (La Gorce, 2006). Another popular recording company, Putumayo Kids, was created to introduce children to cultures of the world through music and has become one of the world’s leading children’s record labels. Amazon.com and iTunes feature hundreds of classical music recordings of many categories and traditions targeting young listeners.

This enthusiasm, acceptance, and preference for a wide variety of musical genres by young children have been topics of great interest. Hargreaves (1982) has labeled this characteristic as “open-earedness” and found that children under the age of five are accepting of many genres of music. He has found that this open-earedness appears to wane as children grow older and become less tolerant of a broader range of music in favor of popular music. As they develop, nine- and ten-year-old children may become more interested in popular music that is shared by their peers and family members and reinforced by media.

Several children who were interviewed for our project exhibited broad and eclectic musical interests as seven-year-olds. Would they maintain these interests in diverse music styles and genres over the next few years of their lives? Would active participation

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