Tag Archives: Children

Lilliput in Greece

In 1975, during the transition in Greece from military dictatorship to democracy, the composer Manos Chatzidakis was appointed director of the Third Program of Ellīnikī Radiofonīa and asked the choreographer and director Reggina Kapetanaki to help him create an educational radio show for small children.

The result of this collaboration was Edō Lilipoupolī (“Here is Lilliput”), set in an imaginary world loosely based on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s travels. The show’s locations and characters could often be identified by older listeners as satirical references to Greek places and people, and songs composed for it became popular vehicles of political commentary. Sometimes the satire bit too deeply for the government, which accused the creators of producing Communist propaganda, but Chatzidakis, thanks to his personal prestige, was generally able to protect them. The program ran until 1980.

This according to “Children’s songs as socio-political comment in the Greek radio show Edō Lilipoupoli” by Aikaterinī Giampoura, an essay included in Radio art and music: Culture, aesthetics, politics (Lanham: Lexington Books 2020, 235–54).

Below, an album compiled from various episodes.

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Filed under Curiosities, Humor, Mass media, Pedagogy, Politics

International journal of music in early childhood

 

In 2019 Intellect launched the International journal of music in early childhood (ISSN 2516-1989; EISSN 2516-1997), an interdisciplinary forum directed at the empirical study of music in early childhood, or pre-birth to age 8.

The journal welcomes research-based contributions from fields such as music education, music therapy, community music, psychology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, childhood studies, and social work that are concerned with diverse aspects relating to music in the lives of young children.

IJMEC publishes original research reports, best practice papers, case studies of specific programs, critical literature reviews, and book/media reviews. Areas covered will include young children’s development in and through music, pedagogical theories and tools for practitioners and researchers, early childhood music education policy, and music therapy for infants and young children, exploring music in settings such as daycares, preschools, and other educational spaces, as well as within families, peer groups, and the community. The journal is published in partnership with the Early Childhood Music & Movement Association.

Below, a short film about the Suzuki method, the subject of an article in the journal’s inaugural issue.

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Filed under New periodicals, Pedagogy

Children and music-animal pairs

 

In a study of the development of children’s ability to relate musical forms to extramusical concepts, four- and six-year-old children matched appropriate animal pictures to excerpts from Sergej Prokof’ev’s Petya i volk (Peter and the wolf) significantly better than chance, but identified the wolf and bird more readily than the cat and duck excerpts.

Three-year-olds participating in a simplified version of the task experienced a comparable order of difficulty in matching the various music-animal pairs.

A third experiment replicated the first, but with the less familiar music of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Le carnaval des animaux. Again, performance was above chance, increasing the likelihood that children’s success in the first two experiments was not attributable to previous exposure to the music.

This according to “The development of referential meaning in music” by Sandra E. Trehub and Laurel J. Trainor (Music perception: An interdisciplinary journal  IX/4 [summer 1992] pp. 455–70).

Below, the Saint-Saëns work.

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Filed under Animals, Reception

Perspektiven musikpädagogischer Forschung

Bedeutungszuweisungen

In 2014 Waxmann launched the peer-reviewed series Perspektiven musikpädagogischer Forschung with Bedeutungszuweisungen in der musikalischen Früherziehung: Integration der kindlichen Perspektive in musikalische Bildungsprozesse by Anne Weber-Krüger.

The series aims to support the scientific examination of music education in all its substantive and methodological breadth with writings by young scientists and researchers as well as experienced scientists. The editorial team hopes that this series excites discussion in both the professional and interdisciplinary worlds.

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Filed under New series, Pedagogy

Ravel and childhood

ravel with mouni

The roles and realizations of childhood in Ravel’s music were inextricably linked with the language, traditions, and idioms of the literary fairytale—an idea that he himself supported when he wrote that his intention in his fairytale-based Ma mère l’Oye was to evoke “the poetry of childhood”.

Ravel deliberately aligned his music with the traditions of the fairytale through the creation and expressive manipulation of musical and dramatic structure, language, gesture, and perspective. One may trace the voice and presence of the storyteller in Ma mère l’Oye, a work dedicated to two children for whom Ravel was a favorite companion and teller of fairytales.

This according to The language of enchantment: Childhood and fairytale in the music of Maurice Ravel by Emily Alison Kilpatrick, a dissertation accepted by Elder Conservatorium of Music at The University of Adelaide in 2008.

Today is Ravel’s 140th birthday! Above, the composer with his cat Mouni; below, Edward Gardner directs the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest in Ma mère l’Oye.

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Filed under Curiosities, Romantic era

Ngariwanajirri (Strong kids song)

Ngariwanajirri

The Strong Women from the Tiwi Islands (northern Australia) are concerned that young Tiwi people are straddling two cultures, losing their language and their Tiwi identity.

To address this problem, the women and their grandchildren have composed a song that emphasizes connection to the ancestors, to country, to language, and to the elders. With lyrics in English, traditional Tiwi song language, and the contemporary spoken language, and with a hip-hop dance-mix sampling an ethnographic recording made in 1912, Ngariwanajirri (Strong kids song) is an example of new music helping to preserve tradition.

This according to “Ngariwanajirri, the Tiwi Strong kids song: Using repatriated song recordings in a contemporary music project” by Genevieve Campbell (Yearbook for traditional music XLIV [2012] 1–23).

Below, a music video of Ngariwanajirri; the song changes dramatically around 2:00.

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Filed under Australia and Pacific islands, Curiosities, Popular music