ABSTRACT
Ethnomusicologists working within this paradigm have analysed musical performance as an expressive activity that communicates social meanings, and as a realm within which a community's fundamental values are evoked and confirmed. This differentiation also reflects a symbolic structuring and division of space, and articulates the role of context in musical identity construction while allowing for different kinds of musical enculturation. Music provides the means by which children's social musical space has been created and transformed. The collection of sounds that were part of the children's musical cultures was also documented, since transcriptions of collected musical performances were methodologically important. In tandem with the other research tools, they helped me to gradually build up vivid, multiple and holistic pictures of these children's musical identities, their negotiation, construction, reconstruction and maintenance, and the ways in which they incorporated their own perspectives, knowledge and understandings.
