Growing into Music: a multicultural study of musical enculturation in oral traditions

Children who grow up in oral musical contexts such as the families of hereditary musical specialists commonly learn the body-language of music before they learn music itself. Throughout infancy and childhood they absorb the mannerisms of performance practice and the physical and social graces befitting of musicians. Learning music is accomplished by osmosis and imitation, largely without conscious intent. Children develop an unselfconscious musical confidence born of inherited or deeply-nurtured authority. Very little has been written about the processes of childhood music acquisition in the oral traditions of non-European cultures. There is a pressing need to study these processes before they are overwhelmed by the institutionalisation of music-teaching and globalisation.

This project will document and analyse oral music acquisition and transmission, conducting a detailed exploration of the processes by which children in diverse cultures become musicians, beginning with passive exposure in infancy and culminating in adolescent participation in public performance. We will consider our findings in the context of the belief, widely-held in such cultures, that these learning processes are intrinsic to the strength and depth of these highly-specialised traditions, which in all cases are central expressions of regional/national identity.

We are a team of five ethnomusicologists, each of whom specialises in particular geographic areas and ethnic groups. Being accomplished performers of musics from these areas will greatly facilitate our fieldwork. Each of us also has qualifications and experience in other relevant disciplines including music education, cognitive psychology, psychotherapy, film-making, popular music studies, music production, and broadcasting-perspectives which will contribute to the comprehensiveness of our study.

We will study musical childhoods amongst: Mande jeli (griot) musicians of Mali and Senegal; Langa and Manganiyar folk musicians of Rajasthan; hereditary accompanists in the art music tradition of North India; ashiq bards and classical mugam musicians of Azerbaijan; kharabatian musicians of Afghanistan; rumba musicians of Western Cuba; and the música llanera harp tradition of Venezuela, an oral tradition which both contrasts with and feeds into the more formal pedagogy of Venezuela's world-famous youth orchestras. We will observe and film the same children 'growing into music' over two years, making three fieldwork trips to each country.

These cultures have been chosen because they all have strong, relatively intact, oral traditions. They present fascinating differences with regard to the centrality of hereditary transmission, their positions on the continuum between art and folk music, the relative proportions of active transmission and passive acquisition, the balance between memorisation and improvisation, and the degree of mediation by musical literacy, institutionalisation, and globalisation.

We will produce:

1. a collection of essays for the SOAS Musicology Series examining each musical culture in detail and investigating their commonalities.

2. a series of five educational DVDs

3. a film for television (with the collaboration of an award-winning documentary film-maker)

4. a programme for BBC Radio 3's World Routes.

Workshops for schoolchildren, video-based talks and film-screenings will be hosted by the Asian Music Circuit and the October Gallery, and by institutions in our research countries, promoting awareness of these threatened oral traditions.

Our work will benefit both academics and the wider public. It will address a crucial gap in the ethnomusicological literature and be of interest to scholars in the fields of music cognition and pedagogy, developmental studies, and anthropology. It will appeal to those with interests in world music, world culture, and the education of children, and will be of particular relevance to diasporic communities in the UK.