Anglo-American musicology is having a childhood moment. The foundation of the American Musicological Society’s Music and Childhood Study Group marked this moment most clearly, together with the launch in 2021 of an accompanying website maintained by Susan Boynton and Ryan Bunch.1 Not that children and childhood are anything new as a topic of enquiry in music studies: since the mid- to late twentieth century, children’s musical cultures have formed a steadily expanding subject for ethnomusicologists, to some extent predating the institutionalization of the study of childhood in anthropology generally.2 Since Boynton and Roe-Min Kok published an early state-of-the-field collection in 2006 (as the outgrowth of an International Musicological Society conference), studies of music and childhood have burgeoned principally at the intersection of ethnomusicology and other fields – notably popular music, as in Kyra D. Gaunt’s The Games Black Girls Play, as well as music education and technology studies, both of which intertwine in Tyler Bickford’s Schooling New Media.3 At present, the relation between popular music, mass media and youth culture forms the most prominent subject of musicological debate about childhood.4 Contrary, then, to the implications of this article’s title, we might say as music scholars that children have always been around, but that large parts of the discipline have not paid them much attention.

英美音乐学正处于童年时期。美国音乐学会音乐与童年研究小组的成立，以及由 Susan Boynton 和 Ryan Bunch 维护的配套网站于 2021 年的推出，最清楚地标志着这一时刻。1儿童和童年作为音乐研究的一个探究主题并不是什么新鲜事：自二十世纪中后期以来，儿童音乐文化已成为民族音乐学家的一个稳步扩展的主题，在某种程度上早于儿童研究的制度化一般而言，在人类学中。2自从博因顿和 Roe-Min Kok 于 2006 年出版了早期的最新研究集（作为国际音乐学会会议的成果）以来，音乐和童年的研究主要在民族音乐学和其他领域的交叉领域蓬勃发展 –尤其是流行音乐，如凯拉·D·冈特的《黑人女孩玩的游戏》，以及音乐教育和技术研究，这两者在泰勒·比克福德的《学校教育新媒体》中交织在一起。3目前，流行音乐、大众媒体和青年文化之间的关系构成了有关童年的音乐学辩论中最突出的主题。4那么，与本文标题的含义相反，作为音乐学者，我们可以说儿童一直存在，但该学科的大部分人并没有给予他们太多关注。