Lennart Reimers:

Children's songs and new source materials. Thoughts on an educational potential.

This paper describes hitherto unknown materials (from 1981-92) related to the origins of Swedish "classical" children's songs and documentation of vocal inventions by children, registeres in 1915-17 in Vienna, which have long been regarded as "disappeared".

The first sources show that the genesis of Swedish classical children's songs springs from different backgrounds: folk music, art music, popular dance music, expressions of chilren's own creativity - and that their wide distribution and acceptance were connected with informal music pedagogical activities outside the official "scholarized" methods.

The second complex of sources shows that the interpretations of the earliest acoustic registration of chilren's own vocal productions were interpreted by researchers as being components of specific psychological and pedagogical backgrounds, which are today not "self-evident".

The conclusion is that experimental research in these fields can not be separated from the historical context. Both are empirical realities.