ABSTRACT
A Russian Dolls type model (Fig. 14.1, cf. Hargreaves & North, 1997; BERA, 2001; Welch & Hallam, 2004) has been adopted to conceptualize and make sense of key sources within the early childhood music literature and as a way of illustrating the discrete, yet integrated, nature of the various influences that shape musical development. The model is designed to indicate that musical behavior is a product of each learner’s basic neuropsychobiological design (Greenough & Juraska, 1986-being related to the hard-wired integration of nervous, psychological, and biological processes) that has its function shaped by musical enculturation and through the acquisition and development of generative (creative) musical skills (cf. Sloboda, 1988). Both enculturated behavior and skill development arise from interactions within particular sociocultural environments that arise from membership of social groups (such as family, peers, gender, social class, age, ethnicity, musical genre) and the effects of education (formal and informal) within a wider (musical) community, which provide encounters with a diversity of musical forms and processes.
