Children's Natural and Necessary Musical Play: Global Contexts, Local Applications

he green papaya tree sways in the wind as five-year-old SuIn chants to the rhythms of a pebble game with her friends. Chwee loh chwee payng payng, she chants while teasing her little friends in Mandarin Chinese. Sometimes her teasing sounds are gibberish, but at other times rhythmic patterns of eighth notes and sixteenth notes can be discerned. In a ranch home, where tall pine trees grow, sandy-haired Mark and his siblings play with a new game they got for Christmas. They decide who goes when by singing eeny meeny miney moe in repeating pitch patterns of seconds and thirds. On the smooth black pavement of a city schoolyard, five African American girls play a jump rope game. Alley! Go Alley! Go girl, go! the girls call, using pats, claps, and snaps to coincide with unpitched rhythmic vocalizations while their friend skips the ropes with agility and ease. The musical play of children is a worldwide phenomenon. From the city playgrounds to the play areas of the megamalls, from the street shops of Calcutta to the affluent communities surrounding New York and London, from the Venda communities in South Africa to the villages of Venezuela and Vietnam, children play, dance, create, and sing with their peers in everyday life. They develop their own ature of children's