This thesis draws on a video ethnography of music activities in a preschool setting in Sweden. It focuses on the participants’ co-construction of music activities and on their use of semiotic and material resources to constitute and sustain these activities. The videos document musicking (Small, 1998), that is, events involving a series of musical activities: work with instruments, dancing and movements, singing and listening.

The data were collected during one year and includes 24 hours of video films (altogether 30 musicking events). The participants in the study are 1-3 years old children and their music pedagogues (preschool staff members who worked in the preschool on a daily basis).

In terms of theoretical influence, the study is inspired by conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992), linguistic anthropology and work on aesthetic processes (Duranti & Black, 2012; Sawyer, 1997; 2003), as well as sociocultural theorizing (Lave, 1996; Rogoff, 1995; Wenger, 1998).

The findings show that the individual young children (2-year-olds) engage in musicking, and that they also initiative various novel activities: such as conducting, dancing, singing, and exploring instruments. In these activities, mobility in the room is essential for the children`s access to instruments and other artifacts and for their possibility to participate in specific activities. The musicking events evolve as multimodal events, where different participation strategies are allowed and creative improvisations involve both musical and extra-musical actions. But a major finding is that the music pedagogues’ responsive uptake and creative improvisations are critical for the individual children`s ability to participate in specific activities and for bringing together the individual child and the group in collaborative musicking.

Music in preschool is mostly performed as singing-events in the form of circle-time, over which children do not have much influence. This article argues that research on music education in preschool often has overlooked this lack of influence. It explores how conceptions of ‘the child’ relate to different conceptions of music, and thereby impact on how music activities are staged in preschool. The primary empirical material consists of one group interview with four music pedagogues working together with 1–3 year olds in a Swedish preschool with an alternative approach. Through the use of Critical Discursive Psychology five interpretative repertoires of ‘the child’ are distinguished, among which ‘a child with rights’ is seen as encompassing the other four. Conceptions of the child as constantly learning and epistemologically equal to adults, and therefore granted the rights to explore the world without unnecessary bodily restrictions, ‘requires’ improvisational and trans-disciplinary conceptions of music, in which the child needs to have the right to bodily self-determination. The outcome of the study shows how conceptions of the child shape our conceptions of music, consequently resulting in multiple and diverse music practices.

This article explores the possibility of conceiving preschool music activities as a way of forming spaces of participation with society’s youngest. The discussion draws on Hannah Arendt’s (1958) definition of public spheres, and the argumentation is closely linked to an empirical example from musicking events with 1–3 year olds in a non-typical, arts-focused Swedish preschool. In their promotion of equality and plurality in this preschool, the children and the music pedagogues co-construct a public sphere by using a multitude of “languages” and challenge both the hegemonic position of verbal language and other age power structures. In this promotion, other “subjects of music” come into being. Thus, it is argued that society can perceive children as legitimized citizens in the “here and now” and not only in a distant future when they have become fully educated adults. The article challenges current preschool music education and demonstrates alternative social constructions.