Review: Patricia Shehan Campbell (2010). Songs in their Heads. Music and its Meaning in Children's Lives

Abstract

With her publication Songs in their Heads, Patricia Campbell offers enlightening insights in the musical worlds of children and opens new perspectives to pedagogues and parents concerning a purposeful musical education of children. The author devotes herself to the following questions: What musical activities can we observe in children’s everyday life? Are these their natural musical behaviors or a combination of their musical enculturation, socialization, and schooling? How do children think about music? Answers can be found in field studies and interviews. Campbell observed children in different settings, ranging from pre-school to their home environments, and all located within a large American metropolis, with regard to self-initiated musical activities. She also conducted interviews with 20 children aged four to twelve about the meaning of music in their lives.

The essential message of the study emerges from the diversity of activities related to music: In the lives of children music plays an important role. Every sort of gainful musical education should ideally be rooted in children´s natural musical impulses. Adults need to become sensitisized to children’s musical activities; they should observe the children, listen to them, and plan a musical education sensitive to the children’s needs. Based on her observations and dialogues with children, and her own experiences as a teacher, in combination with studies in anthropology, ethnomusicology, folklore and education, Campbell masterfully communicates her ideas and practical recommendations with regard to accompanying children on their musical paths. However, Songs in their Heads is not to be understood “as a how-to methods manual of strategy-by-strategy lessonsâ€, but rather as “a collage of children in music and on music†(p. 276).