Before We Teach Music
Lori A. Custodero
Abstract
Abstract Music is a human activity—a social phenomenon, functioning as a means of comfort, expression, and communication that serves us throughout our lifespan—and one of the few activities that can be meaningful for an eight-week-old infant as well as an octogenarian. This book examines childhood as a site where enculturation mixes with individual experience to create foundational ways of being musical. Through accessing interdisciplinary scholarship and multiple sources of data, this volume reveals how our capacities to live musically and to cultivate a musical life are derived from the legacies of childhood. Within this book, the reader will find excerpted musical autobiographies culled from over 200 music education graduate students as a way to understand the variability of “how music means” within broadly conceived developmental contexts: early childhood memories of music evoked strong associations with family members; dispositional practices and expressions of musical identities surfaced in memories of middle childhood; and strong memories of disruption, renewal, and resistance around musical trajectories occurred mainly in later adolescence and early adulthood. These stories are meant to generate the reader’s own recollections and provoke a process of self-reflection on how the past informs the present, and how our current actions help shape future experiences. The book addresses what parents, teachers, performers, and composers learn from their encounters with children; they speak with much passion of how their enthusiastic discovery of what to us seems mundane can renew a sense of wonder and curiosity that fuels creative and ethical work.