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This chapter explores the strong links between perception and production in the development of musical competence in young children. It reviews the literature on developmental aspects of song production and reports two new empirical studies. The first shows that children as young as three years old can reliably discriminate tonal from atonal melodies so long as their song performance is relatively advanced. The second study explores the structure of nursery songs as opposed to folk songs and art songs. The analysis shows that nursery rhymes very rarely depart from strict diatonicity, and this chapter argues that such songs are optimal for children extracting and internalizing rules of tonality. The chapter notes that children's song has elements of reproduction and improvisation inextricably intertwined.

From infancy through to adolescence children engage in musical play when playing alone and with significant adults, peers, and family members. Play occurs in a range of contexts, including the home, formal and informal early childhood settings, school classrooms and playgrounds, and informal and organized recreational environments. This chapter explores ways in which children’s musical play forms a basis for the acquisition of musical skills and understandings, and the creation and expression of musical ideas in these varying contexts. Developmental changes in the types of musical play, skill acquisition, and musical creativity within different age groups are discussed. Environmental influences on musical play, such as dominant forms of popular culture and varying ethnicities of play partners, are an additional focus and children’s use of marketed technology equipment intended for music play in the home is examined.

Chapter 2 details how female performers with Romani (Gypsy) and Magyar ancestry face constraints of mixed ethnicity and gender, discussing the career of singer Ági Szalóki. The chapter outlines how Magyar female performers singing music of all regional ethnicities contributed to the folk revival in Hungary from the 1970s to the present; the international star Márta Sebestyén gave inspiration to young minority performers such as Szalóki, who then oriented their solo careers toward the liberalized society and the middle class. The chapter details how Szalóki left a Balkan Romani-style band to pursue solo projects that blended folk song and jazz, resisting expectations that Romani and other folk music should sound rustic. The chapter argues that Szalóki’s projects got the best response in feminine spheres such as children’s music, even as her solo work challenged ideas around male leadership. It describes ways in which Szalóki spoke out against far-right nationalism.

This chapter makes crucial theoretical and conceptual interventions to support the arguments developed through the ethnographic core of the book. This chapter extends an influential “expressive practices” approach, which emphasizes the centrality of expressive language and communication in the social reproduction of class, gender, and ethnicity in schools, to include the social production of childhood roles and identities. It identifies “instrumentality” and “intimacy” as key concepts linking expressive practices to social relationships. It then argues that the expressive practices of children’s peer cultures are characteristically “intimate” in their linguistic and social features, by contrast with the instrumental approaches to language and communication characterized by classroom routines and literacy education. This contrast between instrumental and intimate modes is important for understanding children’s practices around entertainment media and digital technologies in subsequent chapters. This chapter also overviews children’s expressive traditions and develops key themes involving media and technology in later chapters.

This chapter provides an evolutionary explanation of child prodigies in music. Within the framework of working memory, the purpose of this chapter to show how, during the last million years, (1) the brain’s cerebellum and prefrontal cortex collaborated in the acceleration of attentional control, and (2) through cerebro-cerebellar blending, a common pattern of syntax originated in stone-tool manufacture/use, which was adaptively structured into language, and, through neural plasticity, on into tonal working memory. How cerebro-cerebellar blending among Homo erectus and Homo sapiens constantly increased the speed, efficiency, and appropriateness of cognitive processes is described. It is concluded that (1) rule-governed working memory is highly accelerated in domain-sensitive children through cerebro-cerebellar loops that have exploded in size and information processing capacity over the last million years, and (2) the cerebro-cerebellar loops of such domain-sensitive children first began producing child prodigies about 10,000 years ago.