Reasons for Rhythm: Multimodal Perspectives on Musical Play

This chapter describes and analyses aspects of musical play at the two primary schools involved in the research. We are concerned not only with sound but also with other modes of communication, especially sight, gesture and touch, in musical play. There has long been recognition that music’s essentially sonic nature is closely allied to speech, gesture and movement (Tagg 2002) and there is a growing literature on music and gesture as well as music and language (Gritten & King 2006; Godøy & Leman 2010; Gritten & King 2011).