The Child As Musician: A Handbook of Musical Development.

* The Child as Musician: A Handbook of Musical Development, edited by Gary E. McPherson, Oxford University Press (www.oup.com/us; [phone]), 2006. $69.50.

Questions about musical ability in childhood are intriguing and timely. More and more good scholarly work is apparently being done in this fascinating field; editor Gary McPherson terms it a research "explosion." This book has an engaging title and an attractive cover, but doesn't really seem intended for the average reader. It is a compilation of research articles by various academics mostly from the United Kingdom, United States and Australia. The quality of the submissions is variable. Most are rich with intelligent thought and interesting findings; some are skillfully written with readability in mind; some typify that passe academic style of stiff, overlong, abstract sentences that are hard to read. All offer rigorous scholarship in the form of frequent source citations throughout the text. This is serious stuff, and will certainly provide good value to doctoral students and other academics.

The subtitle calls the volume a "handbook," but I wonder. My dictionary defines a handbook as a manual or small reference book on a particular subject--something you can pick up and readily glean some clear, helpful information from, in other words. This is not a book designed for browsing or skimming, however; it has almost 500 pages of densely worded text, the font is small, the subheadings noncommittal. It's really a comprehensive summary of current research, and it deserves close, dedicated reading. So who is the book intended for? The preface lists the prime audience as music educators, with researchers listed second. If that's the case, I do hope that some of the best submissions will be re-published somewhere in the more user-friendly style of journal articles, so that many readers--busy teachers, primarily--will be able to benefit.

The range of topics is impressive, encompassing not only developmental stages from prenatal through high school, but also issues of giftedness, mental disabilities, perception, childhood in non-Western cultures and more. The researchers do a real service by bringing objective rigor to all these discussions. It is refreshing to learn, for example, their findings about the so-called "Mozart effect" (not really measurable in children just from listening to classical music, slightly measurable in those who are active musicians themselves) and about issues like whether or not it's a good developmental idea for pregnant women to strap a Mozart-playing loudspeaker to their abdomens (not so good, apparently, as it's simply going to irritate the fetus by disrupting its sleep).--Reviewed by William Westney, Lubbock, Texas 

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