This page is dedicated to discuss past and future sessions for the AMS Childhood and Youth Study Group.

2024 AMS Session

Friday, November 15, 7:30-9:30 PM.

“Spotlight on New and Emerging Work from Early-Career Scholars “

Chair(s): Ryan Bunch (Temple University), Susan Boynton (Columbia University)

Presenter(s): Demetrius Shahmehri (Columbia University), Ala Krivov (University of Western Ontario), Trevor R. Nelson (Wichita State University), Hannah Neuhauser (University of Texas at Austin), Carrie A. Danielson (Florida State University) 

Organized by the AMS Childhood and Youth Study Group

This session will showcase the work of graduate students and early-career scholars in the field of music and childhood. The format will be non-traditional, combining reports on current research with presentations on public musicology and pedagogy relating to music for, by, about, and with children and youth. Projects presented in this session range from established methods of historical research to projects situated in schools and classrooms (including those in higher education), digital spaces for research and exhibition, and venues beyond the academy as sites of teaching, play, and collaborative learning. To illuminate both the musical construction of childhood and young people’s participation in musical meaning-making, our presenters enter into conversation with sources that include the conventional archive and musical text, material culture and ephemera, records of children’s reception of music, children’s books and literature, children’s film and media, and video games. Dissertations, postdoctoral research, first book projects, student teaching, and scholarship oriented toward public and community objectives are the wellsprings of this exciting new work in the burgeoning field of music and critical childhood studies. Through peer-mentoring and modeling, presenters will benefit from sharing work with each other, as well as with attendees in the ensuing discussion.

The featured research projects pose questions about the roles of childhood, memory, and nostalgia in national and institutional practices. Demetrius Shahmehri will examine Brahms’s “Heimweh” Lieder as representations of remembered, lost childhood space, innovatively using the concept of “unrevisitable locations” from video games to analyze their nostalgic imaginings. The musical construction of childhood in these songs symbolizes the classical tradition, for Brahms, a similarly “absent and omnipresent” memory. Ala Krivov will draw on her research in children’s music of the US in the 1950s to share how ’This Land Is Your Land’ was embraced as a patriotic children’s song despite the original sarcastic or skeptical intent. Ala argues that this way of interpreting an implicit ideological critique aligned with the longstanding American idea of progress through overcoming; an idea which was introduced by the Puritanical political sermons (jeremiads) in the seventeenth century and which was prospering in the mid-twentieth century. Trevor Nelson focuses on the teaching of British national identity via music during the decline of the British Empire, examining primary sources and evidence of reception among children to show how Britain’s place in the global order was presented through muddled messaging in a time of transition from Empire to Commonwealth.

Research into music, childhood, and institutions intersects with innovations in pedagogy and public musicology. Hannah Neuhauser will discuss her public musicology project, “The Hums of Pooh,” alongside the design and launch of the Childhood Music Database and a newly approved course, the Child in Music Spaces. These projects are aimed at promoting childhood music studies beyond academia and engaging with play for pedagogical purposes. Carrie Danielson will share the trajectory of her work on Scandinavian music and dance, discussing her book project on refugee children’s perspectives on music and arts education in Sweden, as well as her postdoctoral project on young people’s participation in Scandinavian music and dance in the Upper Midwest.

The presentations will be followed by discussion, opening the conversation to our membership of all career stages and carrying into our business meeting, which will address the ongoing activities of our group, such as a our syllabus exchange, dissertation workshop, reading group, and podcast in light of the connections made during the session.

2023 AMS Session

Retrofitting the Bandura for a Soviet Childhood: Ukraine’s National Instrument, Violent Erasures, and the Plan for a Communist Music

Maria Sonevytsky (Bard College)

Discussant(s): Anicia Timberlake (Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University), Knar Abrahamyan (Columbia University), Joy Calico (Vanderbilt University)

Organized by the AMS Childhood and Youth Study Group

Our invited speaker, Maria Sonevytsky, will present a paper entitled “Retrofitting the Bandura for a Soviet Childhood: Ukraine’s National Instrument, Violent Erasures, and the Plan for a Communist Music.” This study addresses the Soviet regime’s creation of mass bandura orchestras for children in Kyiv, just years after the Soviet regime had executed much of the older generation of bandura players in Kharkiv for supposed “anti-Soviet activities.” Anicia Timberlake (Peabody Institute- Johns Hopkins University), Knar Abrahamyan (Columbia University), and Joy Calico (Vanderbilt University) will respond to the paper, drawing on their own research on music and childhood in Communist and post-Communist societies.

For more information see the AMS-SMT 2023 Program.

2022 AMS Session: Critical Childhood Studies and Music Workshop

This session will be a colloquy in the form of a provocation and series of responses on the state of music studies and childhood. As proposed by members of the study group at last year’s meeting, Ryan Bunch will present a paper addressing the intersections of childhood studies and music studies, emerging in part from the study group’s reading group discussion which was held in February. We are calling for brief responses to this paper addressing such topics as the parameters of our field, areas of productive overlap and intervention between music studies and childhood studies, and the future of studies in music, childhood, and youth. Responses may be formal or somewhat informal. There will also be time for general discussion. If you would like to prepare a response for the session, please contact us and briefly describe your proposed response. We also encourage all who plan to attend the session to read Ryan’s paper in advance. We are working on making the session accessible for remote participation for those who can’t attend in person.

Ryan’s essay “Who Is This For? Critical Childhood Studies and Music” is available here.

2021 Childhood and Youth Study Group Session at the AMS Annual Meeting

  1. Benjamin Liberatore, Columbia University: Nothing Is Snipped Out’: Cathedral Choristers’ Reflections on Choral Worship in Pandemic Time

Respondent: Susan Boynton, Columbia University

  1. Matthew Roy, Westmont College: The Socializing Mirror: Performing Nineteenth-Century Girlhood and Boyhood

Respondent: Roe-Min Kok, McGill University

  1. Alexandra Krawetz: Yale University: “Charming Simple Songs of Children”: Negotiating Child Agency, Authority, and Authorial Voice in the Interwar Archives

Respondent: Anicia Timberlake, Peabody Institute

  1. Demetrius Shahmehri, Columbia University: “Won’t you play along?” Music, Memory, and the Voice of the Child in Undertale”

Respondent: Tyler Bickford, University of Pittsburgh

  1. Lindsay Wright, Yale University: Race to the Beginning: Musical Prodigies and the Racialization of Early Musical Achievement

Respondent: Matthew Roy

  1. Cristina R. Saltos, “Exploring How the Intersection of the Digital Humanities and Creative Learning Can Promote Equitable Scholastic Collaborations with Youth”

Respondent: Ryan Bunch, Rutgers University