Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The developmental psychology of music
- 2 Children's thinking and musical development
- 3 Musical development in the preschooler
- 4 Musical development in the schoolchild
- 5 Development of responses to music
- 6 Creativity, personality, and musical development
- 7 Social psychology and musical development
- 8 Developmental psychology and music education
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
7 - Social psychology and musical development
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The developmental psychology of music
- 2 Children's thinking and musical development
- 3 Musical development in the preschooler
- 4 Musical development in the schoolchild
- 5 Development of responses to music
- 6 Creativity, personality, and musical development
- 7 Social psychology and musical development
- 8 Developmental psychology and music education
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
The interaction between people and their social and cultural environment is at the heart of contemporary theories of development, as we saw in Chapter 1. Changes in behaviour produce changes in the environment, which in turn feed back to affect behaviour: it is thus impossible to study one without the other. This implies that one must necessarily study the ‘musical environment’ as an integral part of musical development. Some of the investigations described in Chapters 3 and 4 accomplished this in a fairly directly Piagetian manner: the research on the development of early song is a good case in point. Whereas this research is primarily concerned with the production of music, studies of its perception have tended to ignore the social context, as we saw in Chapter 5. Konečni (1982) has argued very convincingly that many studies in experimental aesthetics, for example, seem to regard music listening as taking place in a kind of social vacuum, and other authors (e.g. Arnheim, 1952; Munro, 1963) have made the same complaint about the psychology of art in general.
In this chapter I shall review the exceptions to this rule, and look at that research which deals specifically with social and cultural influences on musical behaviour.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Developmental Psychology of Music , pp. 179 - 212Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986