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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 rameworksor 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 Reorm 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 directionsor study. By grouping the chapters into thematic units, each with its ownintroduction, and bookending the collection with a synthesizing preace andan aterward 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 successul in its commit-ment to interdisciplinarity, which should be credited to both its competentproduction and the unique potential an “unusual topic” like music andchildhood oers or reaching across disciplinary lines. Boynton’s and Kok’spreace is a useul 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 aterward, tracing out shared themesand extending the volume’s intellectual reach.The ten chapters are grouped into three thematic units. The rst sec-tion, “Ritual Perormance,” 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 lie 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 twelth centuries—when increasing numbers o adult converts beganto ll monastic roles that once would have gone to oblates—that suggestshiting congurations 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 careul analysis o the role o child oblates at thebottom o monastic hierarchies but nonetheless playing an indispensablerole in the perormance o the daily liturgy.Todd Borgerding’s contribution considers the public perormances o choirboys in early modern Seville, and it makes an eective 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, aithul 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 perormances,Borgerding argues, theological emphasis on boys’ preadult status led theirperorming bodies and voices to be understood as signiers o purity andvirtue. In the context o the east o Corpus Christi and Marian celebrations,perormances 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 specic messages” (31).Anne McLucas’s chapter on Apache girls’ coming-o-age ceremonies hasdiculty nding purchase in this section, in part because it is simply abouta very dierent time and place, but also because McLucas’s emphasis on
Tyler Bickford
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ormal explication o “the elaborate and beautiul 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 perormances, 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 perormed ona rodeo grounds with loudspeakers and vendors, viewed rom a permanentset o bleachers, and despite the “carnival-like atmosphere . . . the actualperormance 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 identications involved in theceremonial perormance o girls’ transition to “womanhood” in contem-porary Apache lie. I worry that McLucas’s quick deense 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 unhelpulbinaries 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 orceully demonstrate the central role children play in perormative enactments o group values and identities in dierent timesand in dierent places.Three o the our chapters in the ollowing section, “Identity Formation,”ocus on adult memories o childhood musical training, though rom widely dierent 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 rereshing is Huebner’s commitment to “employ[ing]child development theories as narrative constructs” (73), rather than as“scientic” truths about human development. Developmental models areoten eschewed in the “new social studies o childhood” (James, Prout, and
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