Not Only Voice and Ears, but also Instruments: New music education perspectives for the under-threes

Abstract

Infants and children in their earliest years are highly motivated to act on objects to produce sounds and to explore the possibilities of sound production, listening attentively.  Yet research and educational practice rarely concentrate on very young children’s interests and abilities to produce sounds with instruments or other objects.  There is, however, a small corpus of Euro-centric studies that have explored sound production with instruments among the under-3s and have demonstrated the importance of this activity in early musical development.  In this article we first introduce and discuss this corpus of studies.  We explain how the pedagogical and theoretical traditions of central European countries have provided a context which has given rise to this area of research and to the insights the studies offer.  The article arrives at some propositions for theorising the ontogenesis of musicality and some applications for music pedagogy.