Nursery Rhymes

LANGUAGE IS MUSIC
MUSIC IS LANGUAGE

♫★♪ ♫★♪

t Nursery Rhymes promote Play for Healthy Development
and Reading Readiness.

Academics state the important role listening to nursery rhymes, and in many cases watching the accompanying actions, help in language acquisition.The ability to listen and discriminate between sounds in the language is an important predictor of children's later success in learning to read, and of course rhymes can play an important part in that. All cultures are hard-wired for the language of music.

Some Favorites

  1. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
  2. Round and Round the Garden
  3. Baa Baa Black Sheep
  4. The Grand Old Duke of York
  5. If You're Happy and You Know It
  6. Humpty Dumpty
  7. This Little Piggy
  8. Ring a Ring a Roses - Four White Horses, Kiss Kiss,
  9. I'm a Little Teapot
  10. Down in the river
  11. Ding Dong
  12. Nursery Rhymes Tell Stories Online Nursery Rhymes and the Oral Tradition
  13. Children's oral history - playground rhymes found in newspapers
  14. History of Nursery Rhymes - Origins of Folksongs, Nursery Rhymes, Play ... KNICKRBOCKER NUMER 9 Children's oral history - playground rhymes found in newspapers.

Skilligimink -- A Scotticism.
"Skinny malinky long legs, big banana feet
Went tae the pictures an couldnae find a seat
When the picture started
Skinny malinky farted
Skinny malinky long legs, big banana feet "

RESOURCES

  1. NATIONAL CHILDREN'S FOLKSONG REPOSITORY
    National Children's Folksong Repository PRESERVE ... jump rope chants , kiddy rhymes , circle games, play parties ... START Find the National Children's Folksong Repository of indigenous
  2. Miss Mary Mack
  3. Children's Nursery Traditions
  4. "Hoochie-Coochie" dance - Learn where the Snake Charmer Song came from.
  5. Thematic Reading
    Why the poetry of children's music is a perfect tool to use as a bridge from the home language to Standard English.
  6. Evolutionary Roots of Language
    Humans make music like many other animals do (interspecies) and the intent is to communicate with other animals.
  7. Music and Reading Poetry is the primordial transmission by human breath; the traditions of bard, minstrel, and troubadour.
  8. The bridge between Speech and Song
  9. MUSIC MAKES YOU SMARTER
  10. The evolutionary function of music is language.

Lullaby-
like songs

are Universal

Research by Dr. Sandra Trehub
Development of auditory pattern perception, development of auditory sensitivity, singing to infants, deafness.Sandra Trehub is one of the authors of a noted study on musically untutored babies , showing that they prefer harmony to dissonance.

BABIES REMEMBER MUSIC HEARD IN THE WOMB
Many features of music are universal as well as apparently innate, meaning present at birth. All societies have music, all sing lullaby-like songs to their infants, and most produce tonal music, or music composed in subsets of the 12-tone chromatic scale, such as the diatonic or pentatonic scales. Some of the earliest known musical instruments, crane bone flutes from the Jiahu site in China, occupied from 7000 to 5700 B.C., produce a tonal scale.
Dr. Sandra Trehub, of the University of Toronto, has developed methods of testing the musical preferences of infants as young as 2 to 6 months. She finds they prefer consonant sounds, like perfect fifths or perfect fourths, over dissonant ones. A reasonable conclusion is that "the rudiments of music listening are gifts of nature rather than products of culture," she wrote in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience.
The human auditory system is probably tuned to perceive the most important sounds in a person's surroundings, which are those of the human voice. Three neuroscientists at Duke University, Dr. David A. Schwartz, Dr. Catherine Q. Howe and Dr. Dale Purves, say that on the basis of this cue they may have solved the longstanding mysteries of the structure of the chromatic scale and the reason why some harmonies are more pleasing than others.
Though every human voice, and maybe each utterance, is different, a certain commonality emerges when many different voices are analyzed. The human vocal tract shapes the vibrations of the vocal cords into a set of harmonics that are more intense at some frequencies than others relative to the fundamental note. The principal peaks of intensity occur at the fifth and the octave, with lesser peaks at other intervals that correspond to most of the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. Almost identical spectra were produced by speakers of English, Mandarin, Persian and Tamil.
The Duke researchers believe the auditory system judges sounds to be pleasant the closer they approximate to this generalized power spectrum of the human voice. "A musical tone combination whose power is concentrated at the same places as a human speech sound will sound more familiar and more natural," Dr. Schwartz said.

--

The Musical Playground: Global Tradition and Change in Children's
Songs and Games. Edited by Kathryn Marsh. 2008.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 448 pages. ISBN: 9780195308976 (hard cover), 9780195308983 (soft cover).

Reviewed by Tyler Bickford, Columbia University (tb2139 -- a--t--columbia.edu).

The clapping games played by children around the world are an
enduring tradition, passed down through successive generations. In an
era when the global children's music industry is dramatically expanding and educational discourses and practices are increasingly globalized, games like "Miss Mary Mac," "Patacake," and "Down Down Baby" incorporate texts and tropes from the classroom and the media into a rich oral tradition. On multicultural campuses, clapping games bring traditions from various languages and cultures into interactive and competitive contact. Continually changing through performance and improvisation, these games represent a sweet spot of contemporary folklore: they combine oral tradition, mass media, education, and globalization in the dense interactivity of children's everyday expressive practices. But despite the rich interest of these performance traditions, they have been largely neglected by the last generation of folklorists and ethnomusicologists.
Music educators, on the other hand, have quietly filled this void. In The Musical Playground , Kathryn Marsh reports on a massive international study of children's playground music at schools in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Norway, and South Korea. Building on her own sustained research at a multiethnic elementary school in Sydney, in each location Marsh collaborates with scholars and educators who have long-term musical connections with communities of children. Working from an enormous body of
ethnographic data, The Musical Playground presents a comprehensive
account of the remarkable, but too often unremarked, global tradition of children's musical play.
Marsh introduces the volume by reviewing the theoretical literature in music education, focusing on the key terms of "play" and "creativity." Educators' interest in play, she argues, too often stands in for evolutionist models of children as musically deficient, leading to pedagogical approaches that strip musical materials of complexity and interest. Educational approaches to musical creativity, meanwhile, focus on the production of a final compositional "product," constructing models of musical development out of binaries -- long since critiqued by ethnomusicologists -- of composition versus improvisation. Marsh poses the complexity and innovativeness of children's musical play as a challenge to these assumptions, and points to alternative conceptions of composition and creativity in studies of oral traditions. While specifically an
argument about the norms of musical education, this literature review is a powerful ethnomusicological essay in its own right, scrutinizing the discourses of music education and critiquing the institutionalization of its unexamined expressive ideologies.
After a discussion of the ethics and pragmatics of the musical study of children and an outline of each of the research sites, the third section, on "transmission processes," begins a fine-grained analysis of children's musical play. It explores the wide variety of factors that influence children's maintenance and innovation of their musical traditions: gender, age, social status, membership in friendship
groups, and sibling relationships; interactions between minority and majority ethnic groups and the uneven status of immigrant groups from one school to another; relatively strict disciplinary regimes, the involvement of teachers and school administrators, and children's access to materials from both educational publications and popular media; and the micro-level adjustments and adaptations children make during performances to accommodate one another.
At the Sydney school, Marsh relates an example of the dense, improvisatory, and intercultural richness of children's musical play. An Anglo Australian girl had taught her friends a bilingual Greek/English game she had learned from Greek Australian students at her previous school. When Marsh elicited a performance of this game from the girl's friendship group, which included native speakers of
Cantonese, Mandarin, Romanian, and Tongan, they separated into pairs and "broke into spontaneous performances of the game by different children in their first languages." Their partners "joined in with the movements, listening to the unfamiliar text for cues," while the Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking girls "actively co-constructed the game in Cantonese, even though it was less familiar to one of them" (159). Though this example is extraordinary, it highlights a social framework common to children's musical play around the world, in which children from different backgrounds sort out their linguistic and cultural engagement through performative interaction. In parallel with such intercultural engagement, children voraciously incorporate texts and tropes from media -- pop songs, television, advertising jingles -- as material for continually refashioning and enriching traditional games.
The core of the next section, on "composition," is a chapter about agame genre Marsh calls "Sar Macka Dora," which appeared in some form in all of the research countries except Korea. In this game children sit and pass a hand clap around their circle as they sing, eliminating one participant with each round. This counting-out circle, with minor variations, is common in each of the sites, but the texts vary from "sar macka dora" and "son macaroni" that Marsh first encountered in Sydney, to the very similar "sl makaroni" in Norway, "way down south in the hanky pank" in the U.S., and "down in the jungle where nobody goes" in the U.K. Marsh provides a richly detailed analysis and comparison of the performance practices in each location in terms of text, music, and movement, but she does not address questions about how the genre traveled around the world. I wondered, for instance, why the text of the Australian versions is especially similar to the Norwegian version, despite closer historical connections to the U.S. and U.K. With "transmission" a central theme of the book, I had hoped this chapter would attempt directly to trace the genre as it circulated and changed in these geographically and culturally varied locations. Instead Marsh's close focus on the particularities of local practices may have precluded a broader historical and geographic analysis. Indeed, she comprehensively accounts for the processes within each location that move songs among children, adults, media, and books, and it is a tribute to the richness of her research that it so provocatively suggests further questions about the specific mechanics by which media, education, and migration conduct these games from location to location.
Divided between the volume and an accompanying website are ten appendixes of songlists and transcriptions, along with video clips of over forty performances, that help make Marsh's exceptional data available to the reader. The videos nicely complement Marsh's lively descriptions, but the real jewels here are the transcriptions. Marsh has developed a remarkably effective staff notation for depicting hand claps that is clearly the outcome of a lot of thought and creativity. While the low-resolution video clips can at times heighten the sense that these games are indecipherably dense, the transcriptions are surprisingly clear, easy to follow, and helpful during analyses of complicated routines.
Marsh concludes by arguing for new approaches to music education pedagogy built on ethnographic study of children's own musical practices.

She writes that "it is time for educators to peer out through the windows of the classroom and notice children's musical play. By incorporating observed manifestations of this play into the classroom, it is possible to develop a 'playful' rather than 'playlike' pedagogy, one that takes account of the cultural nuances and realities of children's musical capabilities and preferences, providing cognitive, performative, creative, and kinesthetic challenge" (318) .

Regrettably for other disciplines interested in childhood and contemporary performance traditions, Marsh does not extend her conclusions to explore the rich meaning her research has for ethnomusicology or folklore. Earlier in the book, Marsh suggests that her study's ethnomusicological interest lies mostly in its perspective on oral transmission and composition. But ethnomusicology and folklore are increasingly interested in globalization, media, and cultural policy institutions, and on these topics The Musical Playground has much more to offer than just an examination of one more oral tradition, with its comprehensive and detailed accounts of children's everyday musical play right in the thick of global networks of circulation, migration, media, and education.
http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=838