Engaging in A Sound Musicianship Brown

Engaging in a sound musicianship
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
The Child as Musician: A handbook of musical

development
Gary E. McPherson
Print publication date: 2015

Print ISBN-13: 9780198744443
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198744443.001.0001

Andrew R. Brown
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198744443.003.0011
Abstract and Keywords

Our contemporary sound world is ever expanding, driven
largely by advances in modern technologies that continue to
expand a child’s ability to engage with music. This chapter
explores how musical practices have responded to the
changing technocultural context and describes conceptual
frameworks designed to assist with understanding these
practices. The chapter outlines modes of creative engagement
that provide a guide to the range of musical activities that a
child can undertake. It explores contexts for meaning that
highlight the value of undertaking activities across private,
social, and cultural settings. The final section discusses four
perspectives of a sound musicianship—sonic, psychological,
embodied, and cultural—that define particular dimensions of a
child’s musicality and highlight the types of skills and
understandings that can be developed through their
engagement with music.
Keywords: music, sound, musicianship, technocultural, musical practices,

engagement, culture, musical development
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University; date: 16 January 2019
A child born today may well live to the end of the century. For
these children, the world presents a range of opportunities
and challenges for music-making with increasing access to a
variety of musical heritages through enhanced travel and the
distribution of audio-visual materials over the Internet. The
efforts of science continue to expand what we know about the
physics of sound, the operation of the musical mind, how to
monitor our expressive bodily gestures and physiological
responses. Digital technologies allow us to amplify our
musicality through new mobile devices and apps, and social
networking technologies enable fluid communication about
music and how it relates to our life and culture. Some of these
trends have only become apparent in recent decades, and
there will certainly be more change ahead for today’s young
musician. As Robinson and Aronica (2009) remind us,
Children starting school this year [2009] will be retiring

in 2070. No one has any idea of what the world will look
like in ten years’ time, let alone in 2070. There are two
major drivers of change—technology and
demography . . . These driving cultural and technological
forces are producing profound shifts in the world
economies and increasing diversity and complexity in our
daily lives, and especially in those of young people.
(pp. 17–19)
This chapter helps readers navigate these changes. It outlines

modes of creative engagement that provide a taxonomy of
musical activities that a child can undertake. Second, it
describes contexts for meaning which highlight the value of
creative activities when undertaken in private, social, and
cultural settings. Third, four perspectives of a sound
musicianship—the sonic, psychological, embodied, and
cultural—outline various dimensions of a child’s musicality and
highlight the types of skills and understandings that can be
developed through meaningfully engaging with music.
These connections between technology and culture are deep

and impossible to disentangle. This is why the contemporary
context can be described as a technoculture; the culture that
emerges from the impacts of mechanization and computation
(Green, 2002; Sangüesa, 2011). These various frameworks
interlock to provide a robust foundation on which musical
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practices can be understood in our current technocultural

context.
Music and technoculture

Children in the developed countries today live in a
technoculture, in a world saturated with digital technologies,
where information and entertainment alike are largely
mediated by computing technologies. With touchscreen mobile
devices for accessing the Internet, children can play games
and make video calls to their grandparents. Access to these
experiences is often time limited and they are interspersed
with more traditional and physical interactions. But this does
not reduce the significance or pervasiveness of digital
experiences.
One effect of these technological interactions is increased

access to media other than text. Digital devices have
microphones, cameras, and gesture sensors. These allow the
capture, manipulation, (p.209) and transmission of multiple
and integrated media forms, including drawings, photos,
videos, audio recordings, and—of course—music. It is not that
these media types did not exist prior to the emergence of the
technoculture, but resistance of analog media to integration
and transmission provided a degree of friction in earlier eras
that moderated their cultural influence.
Children today have tools that provide an increasing capacity

for media creation. Easy and inexpensive apps for mobile
devices and expanding storage and sharing facilities play a
part in allowing the current generation of children to be more
focused on generating content than on consuming it.
Moreover, as this content expands across media forms it is not
dominated, as in the past, by textural literacy as the means of
expression. As Lessig (2008), the notable lawyer and theorist
of digital culture, notes: “These other forms of ‘creating’ are
becoming an increasingly dominant form of ‘writing.’ The
internet didn’t make these other forms of ‘writing’ (what I will
call simply ‘media’) significant. But the internet and digital
technologies opened these media up to the masses” (p. 69). On
a positive note, music is one of the media that is elevated by
digital infrastructure and it is already evident that the access
to music creation with digital tools is moving composition
(music production) forwards from being only a minority
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activity to being almost as accessible as performance and

consumption.
An obvious challenge for the development of a child as

musician in a technoculture is how to incorporate digital
literacy and competency into musical studies. It is also clear
that the impact of digital technologies will vary between
musicians, like any other element. However, there is a growing
number of musicians for whom working with music technology
is a core skill. In particular, for those musicians whose
instrument is the computer and where the creative workflow
from conception to distribution is digital. Hugill (2012) has
identified this particularly contemporary form of practice as
requiring a “[d]igital musicianship—a different kind of artistry
—[that] is largely a disembodied form of knowledge made
evident through a set of technical skills and critical
judgments” (p. 52).
And, as if the reforms of human creative activities were not

enough to navigate through, computing technologies can make
their own claims on creative agency as a result of automated
and adaptive processes programmed into them. Presently
these are not convincing claims, but they may be important
philosophically. Musical instruments have always amplified
human musicality, but “smart” digital music systems can
enable new levels of scaffolding for inexperienced musicians
and provide creative leverage and collaborations for the
experienced. In the same way that a Google web search
enhances a person’s capacity for research, so an interactive
music system enhances a person’s musical expression.
Scholars have highlighted a future life with intellectual
prostheses of this kind for some decades (Clark, 2008; Perkins,
1993). But, like a fish in water, these capabilities may simply
be second nature, perhaps invisible, to musicians of the future.
So what are some of the effects of the technoculture on the

child as musician? One effect is increasing diversity and
complexity in available music, there is an expansion in the
range of musical styles and genres that children are exposed
to or can learn to master. Also expanding is the range of
methods for accessing musical experience and the varied
contexts in which music is encountered. In particular, mobile
and networked technologies provide an almost endless variety
of music to listen to and apps to make music with.
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As the range of musical practices expands through

internationalization and technological development, new
musical opportunities are opened up. These include access to
musical genres from all over the world with their particular
traditions, instruments, and sounds. They include new musical
practices enabled by technologies, such as DJing, chip tunes,
glitch music, live coding, and more. While musical genres
share many common elements, each musical practice has its
own ecosystem of knowledge and skills, its own definitions of
quality and virtuosity, and its own (p.210) cultural habits and
conventions. Add to these the rich history of music-making in
the West, such as classical and popular music, jazz, and the
twentieth-century avant-garde that we are already familiar
with, and the diversity is great indeed.
The expectations around musical experiences for twenty-first-

century children expanded well beyond instrumental
performance or concert attendance. Digital technologies have
allowed them to increasingly emphasize a broader range of
tasks including creation and production, distribution and
promotion, and analysis and review. As music and other arts
are framed as part of the creative industries, the expectations
for musicians to understand aspects of business, law, and
economics intensify and there is greater recognition of music
careers beyond composing and performing. This trend is
underscored by books on music careers like those from
Beeching (2010), Cann (2007), and D’Eith (2013).
Reframing musical experience

In the face of the challenges of an expanding array of musical
experiences and expectations driven by changes in technology
and culture, the ways in which we think about engaging with
music are adapting. Robinson and Aronica (2009) suggest that
the key to managing this situation is a shift in focus from
particular aspects of the field on to the child’s interests and
capability, to create links with their aptitude and passion.
While motivation and amplification of capacity are certainly
key to engagement and learning, I suggest that these alone
may be too abstract to help reorient understanding of musical
experience and development. To achieve this reorientation, I
suggest that we reframe our thinking about music around
more generalized descriptions of music activities, what I call
modes of engagement, to help focus our developmental efforts
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in a new direction, and to frame the selection and pruning of

musical experiences based on relevance and context.
Modes of creative engagement

Engagement involves immersion in a dynamic process of
interpretation and action. The modes of creative engagement
outline different classes of creative behaviors. They are
articulated here as types of actions undertaken during creative
practice. These modes have been derived from studies of
expert musicians (Brown, 2003), but have been shown to be a
useful guide to understanding children’s experiences (Hirche,
2011). A well-rounded musical life includes all the modes of
creative engagement, and a broad range of developmental
activities should enable children to encounter them.
A child or adolescent can be engaged with music by:
◆ Attending—paying careful attention to creative works and

analyzing their representations;
◆ Evaluating—judging aesthetic value and cultural

appropriateness;
◆ Directing—crafting creative outcomes and leading

creative activities;
◆ Exploring—searching through artistic possibilities;
◆ Embodying—being engrossed in fluent creative

expression.
The order of the modes as listed does not imply a particular

hierarchy; rather, individuals can encounter modes in any
order and shift between modes during a single creative
activity. It is for pragmatic reasons that the modes are
described as activities; this makes it straightforward to talk
about a child being engaged in a particular mode.
As well as being activities, these modes of engagement also

relate to different phenomenological experiences that include,
or promote, varying degrees of intuitive and analytic
knowledge—and (p.211) working styles (Spinosa, Flores, &
Dreyfus, 1997). As a result, the modes of engagement promote
a broad range of musical experiences and understandings
without being tied to particular musical genres, repertoire, or
technologies.
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As a phenomenological category, “engagement” with creative

activities has similarities to the notion of “flow.” The state of
flow is described by Csikszentmihalyi (1992) as one in which
people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to
matter; flow is a type of “optimal experience.” This is clearly a
high bar for any experience to aspire to, and is certainly a
desirable target for a child “engaged” in music-making. It also
raises an important point concerning the modes of
engagement.
As the term is used here, engagement is measured by degree,

ranging from short periods of attention and action through to
the flow state and the mastery of a skill. Engagement is not
seen as a binary state where a child switches between being
engaged or disengaged, but rather it is viewed as a
continuum, which increases as a child is drawn further into an
experience and develops expertise. It follows, then, that it is
possible to be simultaneously engaged to varying extents in
more than one mode. It is also common that within one task a
person switches between modes, perhaps quite frequently.
However, despite the fluidity and flexibility of these ways of

engaging, most musical tasks tend to favor one mode of
engagement in particular. For example, listening to recorded
music is most likely to engage someone in attending, even
though a listener may also be writing a review which would
lead them toward evaluating, or they may dance to the music
or play along with it, which would lead them toward
embodying.
These tendencies for correlations between activities and

modes of engagement allow the modes of engagement to be
applied to activity planning and participatory experience.
Taking on board the suggestion made earlier, that a well-
rounded musical life involves access to each of the modes of
engagement, an activity plan or a review of a child’s musical
activities can be interrogated to see the extent to which each
of the modes of engagement is likely to be, or have been, part
of their experience. Modifications can then be made to musical
tasks, if required, to rebalance access to the modes of
engagement.
The meaningful engagement matrix
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Engagement with music can be experienced in different

contexts. In particular, the difference between private and
public contexts is seen to be significant and has been
implicated in the development of personal identity (e.g.,
Connell & Gibson, 2013; Ruud 1997). In his work on meaning
and music education, Steve Dillon (2001, 2007) highlighted
three contexts and the opportunities for meaning they provide:
◆ Personal—the intrinsic enjoyment of creative activities;
◆ Social—the development of artistic relationships with

others;
◆ Cultural—the feeling that one’s creative actions are

valued by the community.
The modes of engagement and contexts for meaning can be

combined to form a meaningful engagement matrix (MEM), as
shown in Table 11.1. The matrix results in cells where modes
of engagement and contexts for meaning intersect. For
example, conducting a choir rehearsal provides meaningful
engagement in the directing + social cell of the matrix. It
creates an opportunity for the conductor to exercise musical
leadership, to feel a sense of accomplishment at assisting
others in their musical expression, and to develop friendships
with the members of the ensemble. A young child playing
alone at home with a xylophone or iPad music app can
experience (p.212) meaningful engagement in the exploring
+ person and the embodying + personal cells of the matrix.
The child can experience the pleasure of sound, and can
marvel at their ability to have agency in the world and to
develop coordination between their physical actions and visual
and sonic acuity.
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Table 11.1 The meaningful engagement matrix (MEM)
Appreciating Evaluating Directing Exploring Embodying
Personal
Social
Cultural
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The MEM has the capacity to act as a visualization tool for

categorizing and examining musical practices. Activities or
experiences can be plotted on the matrix allowing areas of
concentration or absence to become visible.
Just as musical activities can be seen to promote particular

modes of engagement, so too can they be classified according
to the context in which meaning arises. As a demonstration of
this, Table 11.2 has a variety of music activities plotted on the
MEM. The addition of contexts for meaning as a second
dimension helps to further differentiate musical activities (and
their associated experiences) to provide a useful map of
experience that can help guide thinking about a child’s or an
adolescent’s musical life.
Page 10 of 27
Table 11.2 The MEM with exemplary musical activities in each cell
Appreciating Evaluating Directing Exploring Embodying
Personal Listen, Read, Watch Analyze, Select Compose, Produce Improvise, Practice, Play
Experiment
Social Share files Discuss, Share Conduct, Lead Jam Rehearse, Record
playlists
Cultural Attend events, Curate, Publish Promote, Manage Publish research Perform
Patronage reviews
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For more detail about the notion of meaningful engagement

and discussion of its basis in philosophical and psychological
literature, see other publications by Brown and Dillon (Brown,
2003, 2014; Brown & Dillon, 2012; Dillon, 2001, 2007).
A sound musicianship
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Along with rethinking the categories of activity that define

children’s engagement with music, it follows that our
understanding of musicianship be broadened as well. During
the twentieth century the focus of musicianship was on the
development of aural and notational skills required by Western
instrumental and vocal repertoire. Despite musicianship being
narrowly defined in some quarters, it has long been
understood amongst musicians that the skills and abilities
required to be an active creative artist were many and varied.
Musicianship, understood more broadly, extends even beyond
the actual practice of music-making and appreciation to
include interpersonal and entrepreneurial expertise that
assists artists to operationalize their talents within society.
Around (p.213) the turn of the century this socio-economic
perspective gathered momentum through the redefinition of
the creative arts as the creative industries (Caves, 2000). The
positioning of music as part of the creative industries has had
its advocates and its skeptics. Because of this controversial
history the concept of creative industries could not be
considered a broadly accepted framework suitable for the
contemporary reconceptualization of musicianship.
Our understanding of musicianship should evolve to

accommodate changes in musical practices arising from
globalization and technology. A review is important because
the way we understand musicianship informs the way it guides
the development of children as musicians. Concepts of
musicianship shape the kind and range of activities that are
seen as a valid part of a musical life, and provide horizons and
boundaries for the knowledge and understandings that are
considered necessary in being a musician.
I propose the concept of a sound musicianship that adopts a

humanistic perspective on music but also considers the
broader physical and cultural contexts within which people
make and experience music. A sound musicianship does not
limit itself to notational literacy or decontextualized aural
competencies, but embraces the broader demands of musical
activities relevant to the child or adolescent living in a
technoculture. These demands include developing skills and
understanding that use sound-making techniques, an
understanding of music perception and contextualized aural
awareness, the acquisition of appropriate motor skills for
Page 13 of 27
gestural expression, and awareness of the role of music in the

community and one’s interrelatedness with others through
music.
As a way of reframing our thinking about musicianship, four

distinct perspectives will be discussed: music and sound,
music and cognition, music and the body, and music and
culture. These perspectives respect the multi-dimensional
nature of music and highlight important aspects of the lived
impressions of musical experiences. Music is a sonic art form
and, therefore, understanding the characteristics of music as
sound is fundamental to musical awareness. Musicians employ
both their cognitive and bodily capabilities to make and
experience music; therefore, the psychological and embodied
aspects of musicianship both need attention. Music is, along
with other art forms, a cultural expression. It has social and
community dimensions and there is an economy and an
industry that surrounds it. Appreciating and navigating these
cultural considerations is a critical part of operating in the
world as a musician. In the sections that follow, each of these
four perspectives on musicianship will be examined in more
detail.
Music and sound

Understanding music as sound involves exploring music from
a scientific angle, particularly in terms of understanding music
as acoustical vibrations, audio recordings, and digital
representations. Music and sound are also central to hearing
and listening, although aural training and awareness will be
considered more fully from the perspective of cognition and
interpretation in a later section.
Musical acoustics is concerned with the motion of sound in

physical materials and in the air. The vibrations of acoustic
instruments and voices produce sounds, organized and
expressed as music by musicians. Given the generality of these
phenomena, they form a critical aspect of every person’s
musicianship. Being aware of how sounds are produced and
how materials affect sound production can assist musical
expression. Principles of the physics of sound, in particular the
harmonic series and the temporal aspects of periodic motion,
are fundamental to understandings of timbre, pitch, harmony,
pulse, and meter that appear across all music systems.
Page 14 of 27
Musical sounds are heard and felt by musicians. Therefore,

being aware of how hearing and perception operate to filter
and transform sound is useful. A re-engagement with the
purely sonic (p.214) within musical discourse was driven in
the second half of the twentieth century by experiments in
electronic music, experimental endeavors in composition by
the likes of John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer that focused on
sound objects and their organization, and the concerns about
acoustic ecology and increasing awareness of the natural
sound world led by R. Murray Shafer, Hildegard Westerkamp,
and others.
For over a century sound recording has transformed musical

practices. The ability to store and manipulate sound is
fundamental to music-making in a technoculture. A
musicianship training that includes sound-recording practices
would prepare children with technical, aesthetic, and industry
skills. Increasingly, sound-recording and distribution processes
are digital. It follows that an awareness of how sound is stored
as digital data and how this enables transformation,
replication, and communication of music can assist musicians
to appreciate the possibilities and limitations of digital audio.
For a musician engaging with music expressed in digital form,
fluency with these processes would be a critical part of their
musicianship. As Borgo (2012) points out, digital musicianship
in the twenty-first century is more than simply literacy—
rather, in an age where knowledge is expressed as data, we
are entering an era of musical data virtuosos.
The skills of musicianship also relate to instrument making,

whether or not those instruments are acoustic, digital, or both
in combination. Instrument making is often included as part of
a child’s musical experience as a way of encouraging them to
play with sound and better appreciate sound-making devices.
Often this aspect of musicianship is ignored in later music
education, only to come back into focus for those adults who
regain an interest in instrument design and construction. This
need not be the case. There is good reason to continue
instrument-making practices as part of developing sound
musicianship. It can continue to underscore the relationship
between technologies of sound making and the skills of
controlling them for musical expression. In a technoculture the
Page 15 of 27
opportunities to develop software instruments and musical

apps has re-energized instrument making, albeit in a new way.
Music and cognition

Music occurs in the mind. It occurs through our interpretation
of heard sounds and in our imagination. We respond to music
intellectually and emotionally. Also, we develop mental models,
or theories, of musical patterns and how musical practices and
processes are organized. All of these and more are subjects of
a psychological perspective on musicianship.
In the past century there have been significant developments

in the study of human cognition, and the psychology of music
more specifically (Deutsch, 1999). It is now quite clear what
an important role the mind plays in understanding musical
patterns and structures. In more recent times neuroscience
research has added to the data about how our mind functions
during musical activities. All this information can inform our
appreciation of how we are musical beings and about our
musical tendencies, capacities, and limits. This knowledge can
certainly inform definitions of musicianship and can assist in
shaping the ways we assist children to develop it.
Aural training and awareness have played, and will continue to

play, a significant role in musicianship. How a mind interprets
the sound stimulus it receives is a complex and marvelous
phenomenon. Musicianship includes the ability to identify
elements such as notes and other sound objects, to stream
these into coherent parts and voices, to chunk them over time
into phrases, riffs, and patterns, to identify subtle changes in
timbre, pitch, volume, and location, and to aggregate all of this
(and more) into an expressive and meaningful whole.
Aural training has traditionally included identification,

memorization, transcription, and theorization. There seems
good reason to continue these activities as part of developing
the child as a (p.215) musician, so long as the content is
relevant to the child’s musical interests or future and the sonic
materials are authentic and contextualized. In addition to
aural awareness being based in features of musical repertoire,
these skills can be enhanced by carefully attending to any
sonic context. This was an important insight in the
development of “soundwalks” and “ear cleaning” exercises
during the 1970s that emphasized how aural acuity should be
Page 16 of 27
exercised in any place and at any time, not just in “musical”

settings.
Emotional response to music and sounds is another important

aspect of music and cognition, as highlighted by Schubert and
McPherson (Chapter 12). According to Sloboda (1985), music’s
“emotional factor is . . . transcultural. It seems unlikely that
music could have penetrated to the core of so many different
cultures unless there were some fundamental human
attraction to organised sound which transcends cultural
boundaries” (p. 1). There are two ways in which music and
emotions are linked, and understanding the sometimes-subtle
distinctions between them is important: music can elicit
emotions, and music can express emotions. When music moves
us it is eliciting emotions in us, and there can be a number of
reasons for this. These may have to do with considerations
within the music, such as its expressive nature or its
impressive construction, or it may be a result of external
associations indicated by the lyrical content of a song, or
triggering memories of events or people the music reminds us
of.
On the other hand, when we make a claim about music

expressing emotions we usually mean that music expresses
sadness, happiness, exuberance, pensiveness, or otherwise—
even if it does not make us feel that way. Schubert and
McPherson (Chapter 12) attribute these emotional impressions
to a balancing of schematic and veridical processes that varies
with different stages of a child’s musical development,
meaning that emotional reading of musical stimulus may be
due to sonic qualities, such as tempo or texture, that seem to
align with particular emotional states. Or it may be that the
music has characteristics that have become synonymous with
an external referent, such as a particular event, person, or
mood, or with associated emotive associations. These links
tend to be personally or culturally bound. Developing an
understanding of how music’s internal features and its
external referents have emotive effect is an important factor in
a musician harnessing these for their expressive potential.
The emotive power of music and of musical experiences also

plays a role in the link between music and well-being, and in
therapeutic applications of music. These connections with
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health, in particular mental health, also extend into the

sociocultural aspects of music explored in a later section.
Many more topics central to cognitive psychology are also

relevant to musicianship; these include interpretation,
representation, memory, and learning. Music psychologists
have studied not only how we perceive music as sound, but
also how we represent and read it as notation. Memory plays
an important part in how our musical expectations arise, how
we can play or sing a tune without reference to a score, and
how training memory through repetition has a significant role
in developing musicianship.
Some psychologists are quick to emphasize that the

contemplation of representations in the mind does not
necessarily explain all our behavior (Brunswick, 1952; Gibson,
1966), whilst others caution that we are not simply cognitive
beings, but rather our minds and body act together to produce
musical competency. In his book on situated cognition, Clancey
(1997) reminds us that:
All human action is at least partially improvisatory by

direct coupling of perceiving, conceiving, and moving—a
coordination mechanism unmediated by descriptions of
associations, laws or procedures. This mechanism
complements the inferential process of deliberation and
planning that form the backbone of theories of cognition
based on manipulation of descriptions.
(p. 2)
(p.216) With this in mind, the next section examines how

human movement and gesture contribute to the physicality of
music-making and experience.
Music and the body

From the embodied perspective, human movement and music
are intertwined. This is clearly evident in the way musical
sounds are produced through physical gestures and how
people are compelled to move to music they hear or imagine.
The most prominent example of embodied musicianship is
performance capability. However, musicianship can be
expressed in many ways, including through singing, tapping a
pulse or rhythm, conducting an ensemble, playing an
instrument, or dancing to music. Performance gestures and
Page 18 of 27
motion synchronization can be associated with many musical

elements including pulse, pitch or volume contour, emotive
intensity, rise and fall of expectation or intensity, and so on.
In acknowledgment of the coupling of sound and motion, many

music activities emphasize participation through singing,
playing, and moving. The developmental interaction between
mind and body is a deliberate part of many early childhood
music programs, of music education methods such as Dalcroze
Eurhythmics, and of many community and therapeutic music
activities. Research, as well as experience, suggests that there
is significant value in gestural participation in music-making
for the development of embodied cognition, that movement is
a valid indicator of musical understanding, and that these
tendencies transcend cultural contexts (Davidson, 2012; Luck
& Toiviainen, 2012).
The relationship between music and the body extends beyond

the connection between movement and sound; it relates to a
sense of intuitive or embodied knowledge and understanding.
This is often developed through repeated action to the point
where responses become unconscious or automatic. Embodied
musicality involves a tight interaction between thought, action,
and environment. Competency emerges through processes of
feedback and adjustment during practice. Embodiment, when
understood this way, is concerned with being a musician. It
emphasizes musicianship beyond competency and deliberate
effort, but strives for fluency and virtuosity.
With a focus on developing embodied expertise through

repetition and reinforcement, Davies suggests (1998) that
there are “degrees of understanding which might be attained
only through years of hard work and there are kinds of music
which yield their richest rewards only to listeners so
prepared” (p. 80). This certainly seems true and reinforces the
notion that the development of musicianship is iterative and
developmental. It is also certain that these “rewards” will be
conferred to modes of engagement other than listening and to
musical genres other than the Western classical canon that
Davies focuses on.
A final aspect of embodiment that needs to be emphasized is

that musicians are situated in an environment. An awareness
of the environment and the skill of interacting with that
environment to musical ends are important aspects of an
Page 19 of 27
embodied musicianship. An environment may include natural

or man-made structures. The ways in which musical
instruments are fashioned from pieces of wood and from
electronic components are examples of effective utilization of
environmental resources. A situated view of embodiment can
also manifest itself in how sounds are positioned in space,
either physically in the world or through virtual positioning via
loudspeakers. An embodied musicianship includes both an
awareness of the surround-sound context and an ability to
construct one as a creative act. One musical practice where
situated embodiment is particularly evident is eco-composing
—a practice which emphasizes the design of musical
experiences via the construction of sonic ecologies and
interactive environments (Keller, 2012). Typically eco-
composition uses sound recordings of the natural world and
combines them with other materials in an immersive
soundscape experience.
(p.217) Developing a child’s embodied awareness of musical

contexts is critical, but can extend beyond the physical
environment to include the sociocultural environment. This
perspective of social and cultural competency is the topic of
the next section.
Music and culture

Culture includes the social, political, and economic context in
which we make music (and do everything else), and the
accumulated ideas, customs, and social behaviors of a
community. Musical culture includes previous musical actions,
accumulated expertise and innovations, and a community’s
musical conventions, wisdom, and habits. Culture is both a
source of inspiration and an object of study for the child as
musician. As they mature it can become a foil against which to
rebel in order to articulate an individual identity and make a
unique contribution, thus influencing cultural evolution.
Understanding the cultural functions and roles that music

serves in a community enhances musicianship. Music can also
be used to mediate and facilitate relationships between people
in a society. The culturally aware musician understands why
musical practices act to reinforce or disrupt these social
structures.
Page 20 of 27
Music notation systems are a significant artifact of musical

culture, and are used to record and transmit music ideas and
creations. Understanding these notations allows children to
access this history and participate in musical communities.
There is a range of notational literacies, each with a
community with various geographic or stylistic traditions.
There are also many aural musical traditions, and the
increased ubiquity of sound recording is playing a role in
preserving and sharing these traditions.
Another feature of musical culture is commentary and critique.

In an age of pervasive social media, there are more
opportunities than ever for people to share ideas and opinions
about the music they encounter and about their music-making
activities. When formalized, these conversations amount to
music criticism. A sound musicianship should include the
ability to think critically and communicate articulately about
one’s own music and that of others.
One of the larger impacts of globalization is increased access

to musical cultures from around the world. Migration and
travel mean that these encounters may not only be with the
artifacts of those cultures, but also with the musicians making
them. This increased access and the diversity of multicultural
communities present ethical and educational challenges and
opportunities.
Cultures are not only geographically defined, but also exist

within particular demographic and interest groups. Of
particular interest, for readers of this volume, is the
identification of distinctive children’s and youth musical
cultures with their own conventions, social relations, and
sound (Emberly, 2012). This suggests that for the child as
musician opportunities exist not only to learn the ways of
musical cultures they encounter, but also to become culture
creators within their own peer group.
Another meeting place in which particular musical cultures

can develop is the Internet. The online space enables a
freeing-up of geographic-centrality in cultural discussions and
supports the coming together of like-minded musicians and
audiences. Online spaces have become sites for music
production and distribution, and these are often disruptive to
established production and business models as new
technologies and evolving online practices reshape musical
Page 21 of 27
practices. There is also an argument that online platforms

promote a participatory culture often called user-generated
content, driven by the democratization of music production
through the use of digital media tools (Jenkins, 2009).
The cultural impacts of our technoculture are also felt in the

dissolution of music’s boundaries as a discipline—particularly
its blending with visual media practices. The interoperability
of (p.218) digital data between media forms and the
convergence of media tools to a singular computational
platform have meant that previous cultural distinctions
between art forms have dissipated and new inter-media forms
have emerged. As a result, the child today might be less likely
than in any previous generation in the Western world to see
music as separate from other art forms. This questions the
very notion of musicianship as sonic capability alone,
challenging us, again, to reconsider the range of skills and
sensibilities that might come together in a child’s unique
creative output.
Finally, cultures and societies include economic and

organizational structures that support, or suppress, musical
activities. The recasting of the creative arts as the creative
industries in the early years of the twenty-first century drew
this fact into sharp relief. As a result, the contemporary
musician is characterized not only as an artist, but also as an
entrepreneur. With this shift comes an expansion of the
definition of musicianship to explicitly include aspects of
project development and management, economics, marketing,
law, and career planning.
Musical diversity and identity

As we are well aware, musical features and functions can vary
from one style to another and differ between cultures (and
within subcultures). As a result, there is not just one kind of
musicianship. The range and variety of skills and abilities
involved can be as varied as are musicians themselves. Also,
each musical style has its own array of skills and knowledge,
habits, and tools. Making decisions about which skills and
knowledge are relevant to any particular child’s musicianship
will depend on the particulars of their personal circumstances
and interests.
Page 22 of 27
Allowing for diversity in the ways that a child can be a

musician is quite consistent with observations of the diversity
of musicianship in experts. Marcus (2012) observed this
diversity in his investigation of musical expertise where he
noticed enormous variations between experts and in their
expertise: “Some could read music, many couldn’t. Some could
play blisteringly fast, others not. Some had an encyclopedic
knowledge of the history of the music that preceded them,
others only had an intuitive notion of the music they
themselves wanted to create” (p. 161).
Allowing for diversity, however, is not the same as saying all

sets of musical skills and knowledge are of equal value.
Rather, the benchmark for the utility of a set of musical skills
is a child’s ability to operate effectively in a chosen musical
context. There will be many abilities and understandings that
are shared between musical styles and roles, allowing for peer
learning and for the transference of competencies from one
musical domain to another. What should be avoided, however,
is the imposition of the competency values from one style or
culture onto musicians wishing to operate in another. This
would be both unfair and unproductive. As each child engages
with meaningful musical activities they develop their
particular musicianship as a part of their individual identity.
Conclusion
The twenty-first century is well upon us and the globalized
technoculture in which we find ourselves calls for a re-
examination of the musical life of today’s child, whose musical
activities may continue into the twenty-second century. It is
also timely that we take the opportunity to revisit the
frameworks that guide children’s music activities and our
thinking about them. This chapter presents several
frameworks that may assist us to meet these challenges.
The modes of creative engagement outline the range of

musical activities that a child can undertake. The contexts for
meaning highlight the value of these activities when
undertaken in private, (p.219) social, and cultural settings.
The four perspectives of a sound musicianship outline various
perspectives on musicality and highlight the types of skills and
understandings that a child can develop through meaningful
engagement with music.
Page 23 of 27
The MEM brings together the modes and contexts to provide a

conceptual landscape on which to map the child’s musical
activities. Doing so will assist in better understanding the
extent of the child’s musical experiences and highlight ways of
extending or rebalancing their musical lives.
The view of musicianship presented here is intentionally

broad. It considers the sonic, cognitive, embodied, and
cultural aspects of musicianship. The child as musician may
develop these skills and understandings through an equally
broad range of musical activities and experiences that cover
different modes of engagement. However, each child’s musical
profile will be a unique and personal one, which can arise by
prioritizing aspects of musicianship relevant to the child’s
cultural context and personal interests.
Reflective questions
1 What are new opportunities and challenges faced by
the child musician today compared to previous
generations?
2 How might you define the term technoculture?
3 What are the activity descriptors for the five modes of
engagement?
4 What are the three contexts for meaning that are part
of the meaningful engagement matrix (MEM)?
5 How might your understanding of musical
development be shaped through a consideration of the
four perspectives of a sound musicianship proposed in
this chapter?
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Engaging in a sound musicianship

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Oxford Scholarship Online

The Child as Musician: A handbook of musical

Print publication date: 2015

Engaging in a sound musicianship

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: music, sound, musicianship, technocultural, musical practices,

Children starting school this year [2009] will be retiring

This chapter helps readers navigate these changes. It outlines

These connections between technology and culture are deep

practices can be understood in our current technocultural

Music and technoculture

One effect of these technological interactions is increased

Children today have tools that provide an increasing capacity

activity to being almost as accessible as performance and

An obvious challenge for the development of a child as

And, as if the reforms of human creative activities were not

So what are some of the effects of the technoculture on the

As the range of musical practices expands through

The expectations around musical experiences for twenty-first-

Reframing musical experience

in a new direction, and to frame the selection and pruning of

Modes of creative engagement

A child or adolescent can be engaged with music by:

◆ Attending—paying careful attention to creative works and

◆ Evaluating—judging aesthetic value and cultural

◆ Directing—crafting creative outcomes and leading

◆ Exploring—searching through artistic possibilities;

◆ Embodying—being engrossed in fluent creative

The order of the modes as listed does not imply a particular

As well as being activities, these modes of engagement also

As a phenomenological category, “engagement” with creative

As the term is used here, engagement is measured by degree,

However, despite the fluidity and flexibility of these ways of

These tendencies for correlations between activities and

The meaningful engagement matrix

Engagement with music can be experienced in different

◆ Personal—the intrinsic enjoyment of creative activities;

◆ Social—the development of artistic relationships with

◆ Cultural—the feeling that one’s creative actions are

The modes of engagement and contexts for meaning can be

Table 11.1 The meaningful engagement matrix (MEM)

Appreciating Evaluating Directing Exploring Embodying

The MEM has the capacity to act as a visualization tool for

Just as musical activities can be seen to promote particular

Appreciating Evaluating Directing Exploring Embodying

For more detail about the notion of meaningful engagement

Along with rethinking the categories of activity that define

Our understanding of musicianship should evolve to

I propose the concept of a sound musicianship that adopts a

gestural expression, and awareness of the role of music in the

As a way of reframing our thinking about musicianship, four

Music and sound

Musical acoustics is concerned with the motion of sound in

Musical sounds are heard and felt by musicians. Therefore,

For over a century sound recording has transformed musical

The skills of musicianship also relate to instrument making,

opportunities to develop software instruments and musical

Music and cognition

In the past century there have been significant developments

Aural training and awareness have played, and will continue to

Aural training has traditionally included identification,