This study is an exploratory observation of the strategies employed by a group of musically naive and preliterate kindergarten children to notate familiar canonic songs, and original compositions for voice and/or instrument. This study was undertaken to ascertain if a tentative typology of young children 's invented notations proposed in a previous study (Barrett, 1997) transferred across another group of musically naive kindergarteners, and to extend the previous study by including the notation of known and original song material. Whilst the notations generated through the recording of original instrumental works in this study were largely representative of the typology suggested in the previous study, when young children generated notations for known and original songs, a 'modal dissonance ' could be discerned in the strategies they employed. The findings of this study suggest that whilst musically naive and pre-literate children are able to record musical dimensions of their instrumental compositions such as instrumentation, dynamics, patterning, and pitch direction, when the element of text is introduced through the use of lyrics (canonic or original), young children's notational focus is primarily concerned with lyric content with little or no reference to musical dimensions. It is suggested that the imposition of text masks children's capacity to represent their musical understanding.
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