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Current Musicology 
, No. 86 (Fall 2008)© 2008 by the Trustees o Columbia University in the City o New York
167
Susan Boynton and Roe-Min Kok, eds. 2006.
Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth
. Music/Culture.Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Reviewed by Tyler Bickford
Studies o music and childhood have a long, i irregular, history (Minks2002), but childhood nonetheless remains a marginal topic in musicology—Ruth Solie calls it “unusual” in her blurb on the cover o this volume. Inthe last decade a number o books, articles, and dissertations have begunto argue that music and aesthetics are key elements in children’s socialpractices, in the articulation o childhood identity, and in adult rameworksor understanding their own and others’ childhoods, and that children andchildhood deserve prominent attention rom musicologists. In this environ-ment,
 Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth
represents an importantachievement, appearing at an opportune moment to consolidate this emerg-ing literature and lay the oundations o a developing eld o study.This is above all a diverse collection. The authors take variously histo-riographic, ethnographic, and critical approaches to topics ranging romearly modern Seville to modernist opera and Reorm Jewish summer campsin the US. This variety refects the extreme reach o childhood as a topicand exposes the limitations o contemporary musicological scholarshipon childhood to date, as each chapter suggests even more new directionsor study. By grouping the chapters into thematic units, each with its ownintroduction, and bookending the collection with a synthesizing preace andan aterward by Amanda Minks, editors Susan Boynton and Roe-Min Kokhave brought into dialogue a wealth o scholarship that may otherwise havebeen mutually incomprehensible.
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The editors’ accomplishment is to gatherand present these various approaches to produce a volume that is not only intelligible but intellectually productive: establishing an emerging eld o study without limiting its reach or stifing its methodological diversity. Thisvolume stands out as particularly ambitious and successul in its commit-ment to interdisciplinarity, which should be credited to both its competentproduction and the unique potential an “unusual topic” like music andchildhood oers or reaching across disciplinary lines. Boynton’s and Kok’spreace is a useul starting point or anyone interested in the history o child-hood studies and the current state o music and childhood scholarship. AndMinks, whose 2002 article about twentieth-century traditions o music andchildhood research established hersel as a major voice in the eld, provides
 
Current Musicology
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a necessary theoretical synthesis in the aterward, tracing out shared themesand extending the volume’s intellectual reach.The ten chapters are grouped into three thematic units. The rst sec-tion, “Ritual Perormance,” includes two chapters about religious music inmedieval and early modern Europe and one about contemporary Apachegirls’ coming-o-age ceremonies. In the rst chapter, Boynton and IsabelleCochelin engage with debates about medieval childhood that have continuedsince Philippe Ariès’s seminal
Centuries of Childhood
(1962) put into disputethe historical applicability o “childhood” as a distinctly recognized phase o lie in that era. While critics o Ariès argue that medieval notions o child-hood are essentially continuous with contemporary childhood, Boyntonand Cochelin nd a middle ground, pointing out dramatic changes in therole o child oblates in the Burgundian abbey o Cluny rom the eleventhto the twelth centuries—when increasing numbers o adult converts beganto ll monastic roles that once would have gone to oblates—that suggestshiting congurations o the relationship between amily and church and o the role o children in medieval Europe. Boynton and Cochelin are criticalo discussions o medieval childhood that “have studied children alone,without trying to understand them in regard to other age groups” (5), andthey present instead a careul analysis o the role o child oblates at thebottom o monastic hierarchies but nonetheless playing an indispensablerole in the perormance o the daily liturgy.Todd Borgerding’s contribution considers the public perormances o choirboys in early modern Seville, and it makes an eective companion toBoynton’s and Cochelin’s chapter. Both chapters note the charged attentionto boys’ bodies in religious rituals where discourses o sexuality, gender, andspirituality are intertwined. In eleventh-century Cluny, attainment o angelicstatus was the accomplishment o older, aithul monks, while child oblateswere understood both to be physically vulnerable to disease and exposureand to be potential dangers to monks threatened by “these prepubescentbodies that represented potential objects o desire in a world devoid o women” (12). Conversely, in sixteenth-century Spanish east perormances,Borgerding argues, theological emphasis on boys’ preadult status led theirperorming bodies and voices to be understood as signiers o purity andvirtue. In the context o the east o Corpus Christi and Marian celebrations,perormances by boys accomplished the delicate task o representing divineembodiment, as “their underlying purity could be molded and directed by costume, context, and text, to communicate specic messages” (31).Anne McLucas’s chapter on Apache girls’ coming-o-age ceremonies hasdiculty nding purchase in this section, in part because it is simply abouta very dierent time and place, but also because McLucas’s emphasis on
 
Tyler Bickford
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ormal explication o “the elaborate and beautiul symmetry o the Mescaleroceremony” (51) leaves little space or directly thematizing childhood as it isconstructed in the rites o passage she documents. McLucas ocuses insteadon gender roles, arguing that, despite participant girls’ and women’s vocalsilence during these perormances, they are ull participants and even leadersthroughout the ceremony. She outlines a “separate but equal” understandingo the “balance” o gender roles in Apache society (58–59), where silenceneed not imply powerlessness. The milieu McLucas describes surroundingthese events is complex and ascinating: the ceremonies are perormed ona rodeo grounds with loudspeakers and vendors, viewed rom a permanentset o bleachers, and despite the “carnival-like atmosphere . . . the actualperormance o the ritual is carried out with care and dignity” (50). This juxtaposition o “modernity” (in the orm o capitalism and public spec-tacle) and “tradition” (in the orm o “native” rituals) need not be seen asincongruous, but I wished or more attention to the apparently complexnegotiations and settings in which these ceremonies take place, with thegoal o better understanding the multiple identications involved in theceremonial perormance o girls’ transition to “womanhood” in contem-porary Apache lie. I worry that McLucas’s quick deense o the ceremonies’“beauty” and “dignity” in the ace o the commercialized scene, and herpointed indication that, in addition to tourists, the audience also includesNative Americans rom around the county, may only reproduce unhelpulbinaries o “tradition” against or in spite o—rather than in engaged dialoguewith—“modernity.”These disjunctures notwithstanding, grouping McLucas’s piece withBoynton’s and Cochelin’s and Borgerding’s highlights important themes. Inlight o the requent invisibility o children in academic study, the chaptersin this section together orceully demonstrate the central role children play in perormative enactments o group values and identities in dierent timesand in dierent places.Three o the our chapters in the ollowing section, “Identity Formation,ocus on adult memories o childhood musical training, though rom widely dierent perspectives. The other is a critical reading by Stephen Huebnero Ravel’s
L’enfant et les sortilèges
that proposes applying the theorieso infuential developmental psychologist Jean Piaget in place o morecommon Freudian readings. Huebner’s chapter is provocatively arguedand compellingly written, and his application o Piaget is convincing andnovel. Especially rereshing is Huebner’s commitment to “employ[ing]child development theories as narrative constructs” (73), rather than as“scientic” truths about human development. Developmental models areoten eschewed in the “new social studies o childhood” (James, Prout, and

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