ABSTRACT
It was towards the end of June 2003 when I began to be concerned that I still hadn’t located any form of playground games such as the rhymes and chants that children perform from the ages of about five to 12, for example counting-out games and handclapping games, played either in pairs or in rings (Marsh 2003a, 2003b, Campbell 1998). I was interested in these games in order to see how children acquire such expressive practices in their heteroglossic environment, and how these practices are linked to the issues of identities, power inequalities and ideologies discussed in this book. I was concerned whether the abundance of music consumption, together with the intense and forceful penetration of the images and ideologies of modernization and globalization, might have suppressed and marginalized such musical practices, since it had become clear to me that global products and processes enter the Cypriot playground as an authoritative language (Bakhtin 1981, 1986). Opie and Opie had already claimed that from the mid-1950s singing games were in their ‘final flowering’ (1985, p. 29) due to television and the media in general. In addition, as most of the urban children claimed, their social play time was significantly reduced. I had to walk through urban neighbourhoods and wait in the rural park for hours for the children to come to play. Most of them had various obligations during the afternoon, such as language classes, physical activities and tuition in musical instruments or school subjects. Furthermore, Harwood (1994) has emphasized that such factors are a greater threat to folk culture than the media (p. 193). Children’s play time is usually filled with watching television, playing computer games under the supervision of an adult, or listening to a recording in the living room, their bedroom, or the backyard. It is in these relatively private environments that children imitate professional music performances.
