Researching children's music. Prologue

Even Ruud
2017 InFormation: Nordic Journal of Art and Research  
Can you put on Gems Boin? We are going downstairs to dance," quipped my three-and-a-half-yearold grandson who just came home from kindergarten school. He had brought home with him his best friend, a girl who lives next door. Barely able to speak Norwegian, he had already picked up how James Brown afforded a good soundtrack for a sort of movement practice called dance, which he often enjoyed doing and which, sometimes, drove his grandfather to exhaustion. Children today, similar to their
more » ... may live in an environment saturated with music, especially in their daily consumption of children's television. Often, they are a captive audience of their parents' musical preferences of popular music from the 1980s and 1990s. My grandson, for instance, has probably heard more Duran Duran and Tom Waits than I have. Furthermore, his daily hour(s) of children's television watching may have most likely exposed him to a dozen of different musical genres, as well as tons of animated cartoons scored with "mickey mousing" music and episodes with scary synthesizers, birds, and happy animals singing and dancing. He is familiar with the rules of musical expectancy, how to increase the suspense, color actions, and create fascinating moods with sounds and music.
doi:10.7577/information.v6i2.2273 fatcat:wbzilvmc2rbcjoxdrn3tbx7doy