Link Search Menu Expand Document

Music and Childhood

Persona

Ortenz is a Music historian with a background in art history and literature.

Goal

Ortenz is planning to write an article about the role of music in children education as a means to develop national identity.

Scenario

Ortenz wants to characterize children’s experience of music as witnessed in bibliographic and artistic sources. She is looking for primary sources (e.g. Personal journals, literary texts) wherein to find evidence of listening experiences.

She needs to collect and analyze large corpora of texts and images recording or depicting children’s experience with music. Documents include official sources (e.g. newspaper articles, reviews of concerts, paintings) and sources produced by “ordinary people”. She prefers the latter as they provide more reliable feedback, and she looks at the context of production of such sources (where, when, who created the source, the goal, which related events exist), contents (recurring motifs and themes), and elicited emotional responses. She collects sources belonging to different historical periods so as to characterize the development of identified phenomena.

Competency questions

CQ1. What is the difference between the ‘official’ perception of the role of music and how music is experienced?

  • CQ1.1 What are the aspects that characterize an official source? E.g. context of production, creator’s role, relation between the source and political or national events
  • CQ1.2 What are the official sources? What are the sources produced by ordinary people?
  • CQ1.3 What are the aspects that characterize the source at hand as trustworthy? E.g. context of production, creator’s occupation
  • CQ1.4 What are the goals of the source?
  • CQ1.5 What is the emotional response of music listeners/authors in both types of sources?

CQ2. How is music used to teach children about identity and heritage?

  • CQ2.1 In which source there is evidence of children as target audience and music as subject?
  • CQ2.2 What are the subjects of the source?
  • CQ2.3 What are the subjects that are related to national identity?
  • CQ2.4 What are the subjects that are related to national heritage?
  • CQ2.5 When was the source produced?
  • CQ2.6 Where was the source produced?
  • CQ2.7 Who produced the source?
  • CQ2.8 What type of source is it? E.g. Literary text, painting
  • CQ2.9 What is the context of production of the source? E.g. academic, official source, personal or primary source, commission to an artist
  • CQ2.10 Are there related events connected to the production of the source? E.g. national fests, war period, political or historical events
  • CQ2.11 What is context of usage of the source? E.g. propaganda, personal account, review of an event, teaching
  • CQ2.12 How subjects/goals/contexts of usage change over time?

CQ3. What is the adult perception of the role of music in children’s education?

  • CQ3.1 What is the goal of the official sources?
  • CQ3.2 To what extent are music subjects relevant (among the others) in official sources targeted to children?

Resources