The Development of Musicial Abilities, by H. Gembris

This very rich chapter provides an overview of the development of musical abilities from pre-birth through late adulthood. It does this with five primary themes: (1) ‘the examination of fetal learning before and infant learning after birth,’ (2) neurobiological research, (3) expertise research (meaning general research on expert abilities), (4) life-span development of musical abilities, and (5) the emergence of developmental theories from the previous four points. Musical abilities are posited as being normally distributed. Much of the research on 0-10 years of age has been covered elsewhere in this course, but this reading brings it all together in a sequential fashion. Some interesting experimental methodologies are mentioned.

The next section discusses musical development from 10 to 20 years. Here the focus is clearly on musical preference, aesthetic values and cultural identity (which contrasts with the perception/cognition based approach to 0-10, and rightfully so, because 0-10 is a period of more rapid neural development). ‘Open-earedness’ is discussed, as it was in the North and Hargreaves text (in fact, much of this section repeats North and Hargreaves’ text on musical taste). The use of mass media is briefly discussed. Functions of music, listening styles and preferences are all given some discussion, though the discussion does not have enough depth to be very meaningful, unfortunately.

Finally, the author discusses developmental processes in those aged 20 years or more. Biological aspects of aging are discussed, as are the lives of professional musicians, including a section determining which decade of life seems to be most productive for composers (generally 35-45).

Overall, this chapter is a good overview of development, but serves more of a horizontal knowledge based rather than a vertical one.