Transformative music invention: interpretive redesign through music dialogue in classroom practices

Abstract

This is part of a larger study of children's music redesign in home and school contexts, and in rural and urban settings, where data was collected over six months. A major contribution to the field was my conceptual framework of the space of music dialogue. Based on a review of the academic literature, this framework was designed to facilitate the identification of the ever-changing relationships of modes (music, speech, gesture, proxemics and gaze), classroom resources, and the conceptual elements of music (rhythm, timbre, dynamics, melody and phrasing) occurring as children co-constructed meaning by redesign of modes during interaction. It incorporated prior influences of home and cultural practices impacting on children's music learning. This framework contained and fixed the elements of change occurring during classroom interactions to allow for analysis of videotaped and coded examples of transformative and transmodal music redesign. Diverse cultural orientations, musical preferences and skills of children were found to be malleable or changeable in examples transcribed, for multimodal redesign was viewed holistically. During these moments of shift and change, where children used transmodal redesign to move across modes from speech to music, new conceptual understanding of the elements of music was realised by dissonance or disjunctive and disruptive elements during interaction (Transcript 4, p.22). Preliminary results should be useful for informing educational policy and practice at local, national and global levels, of multimodal programs that are inclusive of and sensitive to material and embodied musical representations of knowledge, and how they enrich young children's learning, particularly their conceptual understanding in music. Awareness of the space of music dialogue (interaction between modes and resources), when planning and assessing classroom music invention, is shown in these examples to promote inclusiveness and transformation of learning, and to allow for a deeper insight in children's capacity for music redesign.