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The Childhood and Youth Study Group of the American Musicological Society is a forum for scholars interested in music and childhood, broadly conceived. While gender, race, sexuality, and disability have received increasing attention, musicology has largely overlooked the importance of children and youth in various aspects of music culture. Historically, the study of childhood has been limited in part because of the scarcity of child-related documents deemed worthy of preservation and the perception of childhood as a temporary stage of life on the way to adulthood. This limitation has held across disciplines. However, in recent decades, scholars in disciplines such as history, cultural studies, literary studies, medieval studies, sociology, and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies have turned to efforts to recover the lived experiences of children as well as the cultures that construct the category of the child. We aim to bring attention to the ways in which children and youth have played a central role in music history and institutions, shaping while being shaped by them. Because music for, by, and about children and youth has been marginalized in various canons, we believe that centering their agency as music makers, students, performers, and audiences will further our understanding of music and of its cultural as well as historical significance.

The study group will foster the many types of inquiry available for the investigation of these intersecting aspects of music, children, and childhood. Scholarly approaches to music and childhood include, but are not limited to, archival research into primary sources, the study of music composed for or about children and youth, criticism which theorizes marginalized or disenfranchised groups, and interdisciplinary and cultural studies that incorporate research from other disciplines, including ethnography, which is the core research method of contemporary childhood studies. The members of the group are broadly representative of these approaches, including scholars who engage with ethnomusicology, music theory, and music education, as well as historical musicology. These methods shed light on previously overlooked materials, performances, and performers, including young musicians and composers and vast repertoires of music created for educational purposes. It is our belief that a Music and Childhood study group is timely, necessary, and sustainable as a forum to introduce curious scholars to a new sphere of musicological inquiry while providing a formal space for scholars engaged in the study of children’s culture in music to share ideas, new research, and creative solutions to shared problems. For the Study Group’s policies on inclusion please refer to the Best Practices of the AMS. For the design and development of this website we are grateful to Jess Roy and Madeline Chun.

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