Music, children, and the ambiguities of music materials

Norwegian research on the quality of Early Childhood Education has revealed a lack of available music materials in children’s environments (Vist & Os, 2019). While the revelation is sound, the following conclusion of poor quality in music practice is problematic. I argue that music is founded in embodied and enacted practices that do not necessarily rely on tools or socio-material artefacts (Elliot & Silverman, 2015). Furthermore, when they do, distinctions between them are ambiguous and rely on what musical actions they afford for a capable agent. This ambiguity is also reflected in children’s meetings with such artefacts without conventions of their instrumental use for music making. Such a perspective entails a non-dualistic ontology that challenges empirical research practices in what seems a necessary material-turn in education. While challenging anthropocentric assumptions is overdue in music education, there is a relapse into essentialism and determinism looming on the horizon. I apply Gibson’s (1986) term affordances and an emergent understanding of musical agency (Priestly et.al., 2015), to show how the materials lose qualitative value without the presence of practical know-how. Although it might remedy some naïve approaches, the following complexities become challenging for empirical and praxeological research.