En musikers møte med de yngste barna i barnehagen

The purpose of the study presented in this article is to explore how a musician, two Early Childhood Education teachers and an arts educational tutor and researcher in an Early Childhood and Care setting understand the musician’s encounters in music with the youngest children, the toddlers. The research and development project is practice led, and the intervention embraces six improvised musical encounters. The teachers, the tutor and the musician reflect upon the encounters in order to find out characteristics of the encounters, and to learn from the toddlers about what might produce musical experiences. Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics, and Valberg’s development of the concept as relational music aesthetics inform the interpretive analysis. The characteristics observed by the research participants regarding the musical encounters in this study can be summed as improvisation and creative participation. It is not granted that a musician can reach out to the toddlers in ‘musicking’. In the light of a relational music aesthetics the importance of the dialogue within the professional learning community and the toddlers was of decisive importance in this study.