Creating bridges: music, play and well-being in the lives of refugee and immigrant children and young people

ABSTRACT

In contemporary society, global population movements, global conflict and ensuing migration have resulted in the presence of bicultural children in many nations, with multiple possibilities for musical engagement emerging within their home and host cultures. For these children, issues of social integration, identity construction, and cultural maintenance and change must be negotiated on a continual basis. This paper explores some of the ways in which music participation, and more specifically, participation in musical play, contributes to the well-being of bicultural children. In particular, the paper addresses the contribution of musical activities to the well-being of newly arrived refugee and voluntary migrant children and the ways in which these musical activities provide new musical and social beginnings for these children and young people. Drawing on research from the fields of music education, ethnomusicology, evolutionary musicology, anthropology, psychology and refugee studies, this paper focuses on my current research involving newly arrived forced and voluntary migrant children in Australia, but also on my previous cross-cultural study of musical play in a number of countries. Specific reference is made to Iraqi, South Sudanese and Sierra Leonean refugee children and young people in Australia, Punjabi children in the UK and newly arrived Central and South American immigrants in the USA.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee music
• music and immigrants
• musical play
• refugee children
• forced migration
• music and well-being

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the Sierra Leonean youth group and the staff and students of all field schools for their warm welcome and for allowing the research team ongoing access to their activities for extended periods of time. I also wish to thank my research assistants, Samantha Dieckmann and Laura Corney, whose contributions to the current project have been invaluable. The insights and contextual information provided by translators Clarita Derwent (Spanish texts) and Dr Faiq Issa (Arabic and Assyrian texts) have also been of significant benefit to this study. Earlier fieldwork discussed in this article was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP0211601.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Refugee migration patterns may entail the traversing of, and residence within, more than one country en route to the final host country. For this reason, in addition to the malleability of culture itself, the culturally diverse nature of many host countries and their musics, and access to a limitless range of music from multiple countries on the Internet, musical forms encountered by bicultural children and young people may be highly varied.

2 For ethical reasons, all names of people and institutions in this paper are pseudonyms.

3 Descriptions of this game, its possible origins and variants found in the UK, can be found in Opie and Opie 1985.

4 The latter part of the song is commonly found throughout the Americas, in Venezuela the landmark being a river, in other places a bridge (C. Derwent, personal communication, 31 January, 2005). Thanks to my Spanish translator Clarita Derwent, for her insights into meanings of texts in these games.

5 This game also has an equivalent in English, What’s the time Mr Wolf. It was recorded at Ellington in the UK and is played in Australia (though not recorded in my Australian field schools). In the Australian version, children stand in a line and gradually creep up towards the ‘wolf’ who is facing in the opposite direction. The text is spoken and relates to time rather than activity.

6 ‘Culture dances’ was the term used by the Sierra Leonean young people to denote dances deemed to be more traditional in nature, even though some of these dances had movements derived from multiple traditions, especially as the dancers came from different parts of Sierra Leone and had differing tribal affiliations.

Additional information

Funding

Earlier fieldwork discussed in this article was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant [DP0211601]. The Refugee project was supported by two Sydney Conservatorium of Music Research Grants and a University of Sydney Bridging Support Grant.

Notes on contributors

Kathryn Marsh

Kathryn Marsh is Associate Professor of Music Education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. Her research interests include children’s musical play, children’s creativity, and cultural diversity in music education, most recently exploring the role of music in the lives of refugee children. She is editor of Research Studies in Music Education and has written numerous scholarly publications, including The Musical Playground: Global Tradition and Change in Children’s Songs and Games, published by Oxford University Press and winner of the Folklore Society’s Katherine Briggs Award and American Folklore Society’s Opie Award.