Abstract

This chapter discusses infants and toddlers attending group childcare settings and the opportunities for reciprocal, musical discoveries that can emerge in such environments. It focuses on the communicative infant and toddler, and the value of exploring music as a language in its own right. The main theme is the presence, across a typical day, of everyday events involving young children that can become opportunities for developing their sociable music play. Three observations of such everyday events are presented to illustrate infants, toddlers and adults engaging in musical play. These illustrations include an infant/adult dyad playing with beat and rhythm patterns, a group of toddlers participating in an infant/adult game and an educator presenting a well-known children’s song to evoke emotional engagement from the young children listening. Each of these events arose spontaneously. The ideas in this chapter are based on the use of musical elements/concepts to communicate and the value of listening to the very young to know when establishing joint attention will be pleasurable and can be sustained. The argument advanced is twofold. The first is the importance of listening to children to encourage spontaneous play with patterns and sounds that can lead to musical meaning-making. The other is that the group care environment offers a range of adults and children that have diverse interests and experiences, thus the setting has the potential to become a rich cultural space. Lindqvist’s theories of play pedagogy or ‘playworlds’ provides a linking frame for the discussion presented.