Reasons for Rhythm: Multimodal Perspectives on Musical Play

Abstract

This chapter describes and analyses aspects of musical play at the two primary schools involved in the research. We are concerned not only with sound but also with other modes of communication, especially sight, gesture and touch, in musical play. There has long been recognition that music’s essentially sonic nature is closely allied to speech, gesture and movement (Tagg, 2002) and there is a growing literature on music and gesture as well as music and language (Godøy and Leman, 2010; Gritten and King, 2006, 2011). As will be seen in this chapter, children’s musical play draws on sedimented and newer cultural resources, including media ones. We argue that these are often artfully combined by the performers in a manner resembling ‘composition-in-performance’, as conceptualised in oral-formulaic theory (Lord, 1960; cf. Marsh, 2008; Parry, 1930). Hitherto mainly studied in terms of verbal and musical texts and individual performers, we explore how composition-in-performance is accomplished by small groups of performers and the roles played by the various modes in this process.