Section Commentary: Music Development Research Futures

Abstract

Abstract This commentary responds to expert authors on music development in early childhood who promote the main message that, from our earliest life, music is a fascinatingly complex and diverse dimension of how we come to be. The aim is to learn from and take forward this knowledge by expanding on the key themes in the research, such as music and their sociocultural contexts, neurocognitive development, creativity, and identity. This expansion is achieved by refreshing two familiar questions: what is music and musicality and who are music teachers? In attempting to answer these questions, the author reflects on the importance of our understandings incorporating multimodalities, more than human, decolonized, and interdisciplinary perspectives. The resulting discussion proposes how research futures in early music learning and development might take forward the frontiers of knowledge this section represents.