Cultural and ethical practices and cognitive abilities of children in the first years of school may be transferred, assimilated and transformed through their discourses or resources for representing existing knowledge. Children enact agency and voice during interactions and responses in classroom music by replicating play in engaging activities. Cross-cultural discourses in music learning can be negotiated mutually between teacher and children through imaginative, joyful interaction in music, particularly in reconstruction of texts through creative improvisation. Transformations are motivated by the interests represented in a child's discourse, and made through substitutions of specific concrete actions by abstractions such as sounds, or by selecting elements and foregrounding them, reordering them or excluding some. Young children may also be able to demonstrate abstract modalities by recognising general underlying patterns in their music-making, and communicate cognitive processes and structures in their text-making as they communicate underlying truths and discoveries. This paper examines relevant literature leading to a framework for exploring the validity of these ideas, expressing the view that children are active transmitters of music culture and that situated cultural practices enacted in the music classroom provide rich sources for communicating meaning, transforming dispositions and developing higher thinking.