Ru
EnQin Chuxuan
A conceptual approach to research children’s piano music
This article examines the most significant tendencies associated with current Russian research in the field of children’s piano music. The author notes that during the second half of the 20th century, such research was characterized by a predominantly applied focus (artistic and aesthetic education, musical enlightenment, and pre-professional music education methods), and in some cases, by issues of source studies and textual criticism. However, significant advances are currently being observed, driven by the formation and spreading of interdisciplinary research “technologies” for artistic work (at the intersection of musicology, general art history, cultural studies, the sociology of art, etc.), and the intensive development of age psychology and anthropology. Based on this, promising heuristic approaches to children’s music (particularly piano music) are being established. These approaches are shaped by a focus on a multifaceted understanding of the “phenomenon of childhood” and a consistent recreation of the original artistic picture of world captured in a given work. This concept is realized through the formation of an appropriate research “model”, based on the most important “levels (substantial foundations)” of understanding existence (“world order” – “nature” – “society” – “human”), and subsequently projected onto specific artistic works from the piano repertoire under consideration. Representative examples used for analytical elucidation typically include children’s albums from the 19th and 20th centuries, endowed with a specific genre status and characterized from the position of a certain worldview integrity. Thanks to this, the need for a certain correction of the above-mentioned “tetrad” is revealed: veiling the “natural” and “human-personal” levels, the priority role of “society”, differentiated through an in-depth demonstration of certain “substantial facets” (among them, “home”, “family”, “game”, etc. are mentioned).
Key words
children’s piano music, conceptual approach, inter-discipline methods of research, artistic picture of world, piano children’s album.
For citation
Qin Chuxuan. A conceptual approach to research children’s piano music. In: South-Russian Musical Anthology. 2026. No. 2. Pp. 118–124.
