ABSTRACT
Studying the processes and products of children’s music making reveals the inner workings of children’s musical thinking. Children’s complex, essential relationship with and to music makes them musical experts from an age. Children’s innate musicality, their ability to process complex musical ideas and then to articulate those ideas effectively make them ideally suited to sophisticated learning in a music classroom. Studies of children’s musical expression have focused on observations of both the processes and products of their musical creation. The body of work on invented notation and creativity examines young children’s musical expression from the perspective of music writing. Analyzing children’s musical creations to determine how they think and perceive musically may be an effective way to determine how children process ideas into music. Each music/score pairing intertwine to form a complex relationship that would be impossible to show using notated transcriptions for the children’s compositions.
