Hannah Neuhauser, 2025 PhD in Musicology, Butler School of Music

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“Illuminating Explorations” – This series of digital exhibits is designed to promote and celebrate UT Libraries collections in small-scale form. The exhibits will highlight unique materials to elevate awareness of a broad range of content. “Illuminating Explorations” will be created and released over time, with the intent of encouraging use of featured and related items, both digital and analog, in support of new inquiries, discoveries, enjoyment and further exploration.

Music is a portal and can unlock a door to a fantastical sonic landscape, brimmed with mystic, melodic magic. We turn a page and open ourselves to discovering an entirely different realm, full of magic and mystery. Dangers may lurk around each corner, giants may want to gobble us up for lunch, and at times, the path may be so utterly twisted that we almost lose ourselves. Suddenly, the darkness becomes light, and in silence, we find ourselves back in the safety of our childhood bedrooms. The lion’s roar – a radiator. The pitter pattering of tiny Wild Things – the rain outside. Yet within a small, singular space, we traveled to another world and returned on the other side changed. In Throw the Book Away (2013), Anne Doughty remarks that regardless of how much a child reads, it is the experience of self-reliance and youthful agency that will ensure a protagonist’s survival in an unknown labyrinth. They must hear the warnings, read the signs, and act on their own. 

This exhibit recreates these aural portals. However, instead of reading a book, we invite you to immerse yourself in the experience of children’s music. The Music and Childhood Culture Spotlight Exhibit seeks to inform scholars of the rich history of children’s music by highlighting hidden gems from the UT Austin library collections. Did you know A.A. Milne commissioned his own songbook for Winnie the Pooh in 1929? Or that Carole King wrote a children’s television special called Really Rosie in 1975? It was a huge hit and we have the score, which you can check out to sing to your younger friends! Selections also range from audio recordings like Danny Kaye’s narration of Tubby the Tuba (1947) to Oliver Knussen’s operatic score of Where the Wild Things Are (1982) and a wealth of interdisciplinary scholarship from Mozart’s influence on childhood labor (Mueller) to the rise of Young People’s Records (Bonner). 

Music is a psychological tool to study emotional regulation “without rules or limitations, it is pure assimilation” and media can stimulate fantasy for children to pretend “as if” they are something else (Gotz et, all, 2005 p.13). Numerous scholars discuss the sentimentality and destruction of child development due to media dependency, but children will always make their own ideas of media to understand, transgress, rebel, and connect with their surroundings (Parry, 2013). Here, in this exhibit, we seek to highlight the positive attributes of musical media that allow children (and our inner child) to enact their own creative cultures through their imaginations and identify the “traces” of media that we value. 

I hope you enjoy these discoveries as much as I did. 

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Works Cited 

• Doughty, Amie A. Throw the Book Away: Reading versus Experience in Children’s Fantasy. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2013. 
• Gotz, Maya, Dafna Lemish, Hyesung Moon, and Amy Aidman. Media and the Make-Believe Worlds of Children. Routledge, 2005. 
• Parry, Becky. Children, Film, and Literacy. London: Palgave Macmillan, 2013.