HANDCLAPPING SONGS AND GENDER : AN APPPROCH USING THE BAPNE METHOD

Children’s handclapping games have been present in all cultures since time immemorial and at an educational level are essential resources for teachers of music, physical education and the visual arts according to the BAPNE method. Gender differences in implementation, the age at which they are used, the basic structures that they possess, their use and functionality for the development of multitasking are the aspects covered in this research.


Introduction
Children' s coordination games and the connection between them and popular songs are found in all world cultures, and have undergone clear evolution depending on the sociocultural context around them 1 .This evolution, and the inherent changes involved, especially affect the literary content and rhythm of songs, the content of lyrics, and the psychomotor movements involved when performing them, due to changes to urban music.As pointed out by Martín and Carbajo 2 , quartets and ballads tend to slowly disappear, giving rise to rhythms of unlimited duration, structured around building up, repetition, and irregular versification.Texts are always influenced by endoculturation; we are increasingly witnessing games based around television theme music and advertisements in which, as the aforementioned authors argue, «the rhythmic context is imposed on the text, ending up incoherent and repetitive».Gainza 9 , Martín Escobar 10 and Romero Naranjo 11 establish criteria to justify the origins of these games and their use in education.Based on the work of these authors, we offer a possible taxonomy to contextualise them, and thus be able to refer to a global outline of how the games are used, by looking back over their historical use.They originate from two major sources: -Adults: Adults create these psychomotor melodies with an educational and didactic purpose in mind, aiming to transmit certain verbal, motor and melodic information.The result of this can be seen in more elaborate lyrics which are accompanied by movements to illustrate them.These lyrics are introduced by mothers and fathers, as well as by teachers, and tend to show a distinct ostinato quality at the rhythmic and motor levels.
-Children: Compositions created by children have poorer linguistic content, with varied rhythmic improvisation and, in many cases, are influenced by melodies or rhythms from the media.
By contrast, groups of children who play these games can be classified into two main groups according to Martín Escobar and Carbajo Martínez, 12 who classify them based on the level of difficulty they have: A. Receptive child.Children who are not independent in their movement.They tend to use very straightforward movements due to their use in very simple songs during the early years of their life.Normally it is the parents who take the hands of their sons or daughters and help them with psychomotor movement.B. Performing child.Children who are independent in their movement.
Songs are structured around melodies and motor movements which are slightly more complex and are linked to various themes that show increasing speed, challenges in motor coordination, continued use of mime and gesture, the importance of lyrics and prosodic stress in relation to the percussive beat.

Brief summary of the issue
Throughout history, various authors have stressed the important role of games in learning for their great educational and social value, as shown by Huizinga 13 and Parlebas 14 .By contrast, other authors such as Brailoiu 15 link games with musical traditions, considering them a stimulating element that strengthens the abilities of the pupil as much as possible.The aim of this section, therefore, is to set out a brief historical summary of works, especially those from the 20 th century, to understand how interest in handclapping games has evolved, and what lines research has followed.
In the 20th century, we can see a marked interest into children' s coordination games, as shown by conferences, journals with specific volumes dedicated to the topic, books, collections of studies and many other documents that allowed a much wider investigative corpus to be established.
From an academic perspective, the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public institution dedicated to research in the country, published excellent extended articles on motor games, children's songs and rhymes in the Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares.Important to point out are the works of Diego Cuscoy El folklore infantil y otros estudios etnográficos 16 (1943), that of Fermín Bouzas, Juegos y costumbres infantiles del Valle de Arán 17 (Barcelona, 1980) and many other authors such as Théo Brandao 18 and Vicente García de Diego 19 .
Following on from this, the work of folklorists, ethnomusicologists and specialised researchers became important.Examples include Joaquín Díaz with his publication Romances, canciones y cuentos de Castilla y León 20  All these specialists have one aspect in common, the fact that they note the immeasurable value of children' s traditions, and in this way are aesthetically closely linked to the thinking of the philosopher Montaigne, who argued that, children' s games should be considered their most serious acts. 24All of these games share the fact that they are constantly acted out primarily by girls, for ethnographic and social reasons, the justification of which will be explained below.

What are handclapping games?
Handclapping games are motor coordination games performed through body percussion, linked to lyrics which are recited or sung, and which are carried out by two or more people.These games tend to show a clear link between the lyrics, the gestures and beats on the body (body percussion), which vary from culture to culture.Whilst in Western cultures, the gesture is linked to the prosodic stress, in African cultures they tend to be used independently, in such a way that the prosodic stress of a word is not linked to the beat to the body, as argued by Blacking 25 .
Body percussion is the art of hitting the body in order to produce various types of sounds for didactic, therapeutic, anthropological and social purposes.Both in the field of musical cultures and in the world of shows and performances, as is the case with groups such as Stomp or Mayumana, body percussion has had different roles, which can be classified into their different uses, meanings and purposes in each culture.The body is used for these different purposes as an acoustic, rhythmic, dynamic instrument with distinct timbre because it is linked to movement 26  in the present day, the media and social networking sites play an important role in their spread, due to their high level of visual and aesthetic content, as argued by Romero Naranjo 27 .Children' s handclapping games have been addressed by various authors who have focussed on several lines of investigation, such as Nettl 28 who talks from an ethnomusicological perspective, Hemsy de Gainza 29 who looks at how the exact movements of handclapping games are copied out and transcribed, and Marsh 30 who looks at their use in education centres.Due to the wide range of topics, we have classified the most relevant lines of investigation into handclapping games into five main sections: -Ethnomusicological studies.These are studies carried out by ethnomusicologists in order to analyse the musical structure, origins, and transmission from one generation to the next from rural areas to cities, as shown primarily in the publications of Nettl 31 , Kartomi 32 and Blacking 33 .
-Corpus studies.These are focussed on collecting and transcribing handclapping games and other children' s tunes which are linked to children' s coordination games, as in the publications of Hemsy de Gainza 34 and Martín Escobar and Carbajo Martínez 35 .
-Neurological scientific studies.These look into the stimulation of physical, cognitive and mental abilities of children, proving that they can influence their levels of psychomotor, psychological, emotional, social and cognitive maturity, as seen in Thaut 41 , Kesserling & Altenmüller & Wiesendanger 42 and Sulkin & Brodsky 43 .
-Therapeutic studies.These are publications which aim to explore the impact of sound and movement in body percussion on development of communication skills, creative expression, group work and the development of a positive body image through corporeal dialogue in various illnesses such as Parkinson' s, Alzheimer' s, Down' s Syndrome, dyscalculia, dyslexia and autism etc, as shown by McIntosh 44 and Romero Naranjo 45

General structure of handclapping games
Bruno Nettl 46 has addressed this topic, concluding that handclapping games resemble each other because they are traditional in nature and are transmitted from one generation to the next orally.According to Nettl, handclapping games can be identified by their short forms, and repetitive rhythms which are interlinked at a motor, melodic and textual level.
Having studied a great number of handclapping games, 47 we can see that the usual structure consists of three basic elements: 1. Binary structures in the texts.They tend to be formed around a dialogue based on questions and answers, or alternating between a verse and chorus.2. Accumulative structures (increasing and/or decreasing numbers, lists, additional pieces, interlinking, etc.) 3. Mixed structures.
To conclude, it is important to point out that binary structure is always present at a textual, rhythmic and conceptual level, and therefore the basic form is AB, which is performed through the form and variation of verses, syllables and metre.The following example does not only fit the aforementioned metric structure, but also shows the process of endoculturation, as it uses television theme music and advertising slogans.
An example: From a musical perspective, we can see that major scales are mainly used and, rhythmically, there is a preference for 4/4 time.

Use of handclapping games
In recent years, it has been seen that handclapping songs have many benefits for attention levels, psychomotor skills and group learning, as well as other aspects.Authors such as Martín Herrero have long realised this and describe the benefits as follows: Play can be used to exercise attention levels and to discover aptitude, observation skills, judgement, imagination, technical ability; they improve affective, moral and social discipline and games are essential activities for the building of the child' s personality, allowing him or her to satisfy his or her needs for action and expression.With practice, the child soon gains psychomotor skills such as muscle control, agility, balance, precision, fast reflexes, etc.This is all accompanied by songs which enliven the rhythm of the game, set out its rules, select and limit the choice of players, etc. Play is the school of life, and through it, the basic and essential rules for any human group filter down, beyond simply establishing the boundaries for identity. 48ter on, other authors such as Hemsy de Gainza 49 and Sulkin 50 put forward numerous aspects in order to be able to classify them, though we would add others which we consider important within the framework of Howard Gardner' s Multiple Intelligences. 51.Their uses and benefits are the following: 1. Development of kinaesthetic intelligence.Through these types of activities, coordination between the upper and lower limbs is developed (on the horizontal biomechanical plane) and especially laterality through bimanual coordination (on the sagittal biomechanical plane).2. Development of the sensory system through the vestibular and proprioceptive systems.Both performing and receptive children control the quality of movement, the force they should use and how to control the start, climax and end of motor movement.there are three main ways of stabilising the body: eye contact, hands, and feet, as pointed out by Lowen 53 .These are the basic channels which are worked through movement in relation to handclapping games adapted to the BAPNE method in order to give a therapeutic foundation to each disorder.

Handclapping games as a teaching resource following the BAPNE method
The aim of the BAPNE method is to develop the multiple intelligences through body percussion, supported by the five disciplines of biomechanics, anatomy, psychology, neuroscience and ethnomusicology.Each one of these disciplines establishes concrete parameters which help to give a systematic structure to the theoretical and practical activities, and together form the acronym BAPNE. 54Biomechanics helps us to understand how the human body moves in space, along planes and axes; anatomy shows us the exact movements of the bone structure and specific muscles; psychology helps us to use movement from a therapeutic perspective; and ethnomusicology helps us to understand how the body moves in different cultures, and how the patterns differ between different cultures and continents. 55These five disciplines help us to give a systematic structure to the methodology.However, it is the Multiple Intelligences that offer us the tools, techniques and aim of each activity, using the basis set out by Gardner. 56Therefore, the methodological focus is along eight lines in order to develop the eight multiple intelligences: musical, bodily kinaesthetic, spatio-visual, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, linguistic and mathematical.

Handclapping games and gender
Numerous authors have written about the link between gender and music, looking at it with regards to classical music, for instance, the role of women composers, performers, teachers and even musical businesswomen.Examples include Manchado Torres 57 , Green 58 and Ramos López 59 , as well as many others.However, when it comes to children' s music and especially handclapping games, research on this topic is in its early stages, hence our desire to contribute to this topic.The average age when female children begin to perform handclapping games is about four years old.Brodsky and Sulkin 60 argue that 70% of female children make use of these types of activities, and that the percentage changes as they grow older.The starting age is between four and five years, whilst peak usage is around seven and eight years of age, and the period of decline around nine to eleven years old.Women are able to carry out many things at once, Feminismo/s 21, junio 2013, pp.205-223   what is commonly known as divided attention, as argued by Sulkin 61 .One of the reasons that justifies this ability is the stimulation and development of such attention thanks to handclapping games, according to Brodsky and Sulkin 62 .In these games, they have to coordinate, dissociate, move around in space, interact as a group, add lyrics, melodies, dramatise a gesture; in one way or another, this stimulates various lobes in the brain.The reasons why this occurs are numerous: A. When carrying out this type of activity, children develop their ability to dissociate their limbs, to develop laterality, and to add a text or psychomotor melody, depending on the nature of the game.According to Armando Estévez-González 63 , this means that they activate various lobes due to the different types of attention that they are using.The parietal lobe controls gross psychomotor skills, and they also stimulate the associative motor cortex and the cingulated motor cortex that control bimanual rhythmic coordination; they also activate the left temporal lobe, which controls language when reciting a text; they also activate the right temporal lobe when singing a melody, and the occipital lobe when watching their hands and those of their classmates throughout the motor sequence.As for attention skills, one of the most stimulated areas -from a neuroanatomic and neurophysiological perspective -is found in the recticular system, in the limbic system, the basal ganglia (striatum), the posterior parietal cortex and the prefrontal cortex, according to Torre 64 .Additionally, they activate the hippocampus which is in charge of memorising games and the limbic brain, due to the emotions generated whilst carrying out the games, as well as many other areas.

B.
Rural areas condition children' s coordination games to a great extent: boys are indirectly encouraged primarily to play games which contain a great deal of strength, power and resistance. 65In these games, the upper and lower limbs are used independently, but very rarely with dissociation or the combination Feminismo/s 21, junio 2013, pp.205-223 of both simultaneously.This involves less cerebral activation and stimulation than in the case of girls, resulting in poor development of divided attention.
In traditional Spanish tunes, there are work songs, performed mainly by women, which have the same focus on inclusive and psychomotor work as handclapping songs.These work song are called panaderas ('bread-makers') and are performed through a rhythm played on a table.The rhythm of the panaderas (in the context of Castilian percussion) was used in rural Castille while making bread, in order to mechanise work between several people.Women sat in a line along a table and, with a percussive movement with their hands, gave the bread a round shape and then passed it to the next person, always in this structured way.The hand rhythms and the melody both take the form of a jota (a form of Aragonese folk song) which stems from oral tradition.We find many different melodies in different areas of Spain (in Zamora, Teruel and Segovia, for instance).Below we outline the basic rhythm of the rhythm of las panaderas 66 : Practical exercises: Learn this 'base' section of the 'panaderas'.This rhythmic base should be learnt in progressive sections, and therefore it is important to teach it gradually, as shown in square brackets.From a gender perspective, handclapping games should be used by boys as well as girls, due to the outlined benefits through stimulating divided attention or multitasking.The possibility of physically interacting with other people, and communicating both corporeally and kinaesthetically, are increasingly important in a society in which new forms of technology are encouraging communication to be primarily virtual.In the present day, we have become consumers of emotions, particularly virtual ones, in this technological society.Therefore, the physical interaction between children should be encouraged in the context of the family and the context of education by instructors using the resources offered by teaching body percussion.

Conclusions
The aim of handclapping games is thus not to learn them and imitate them as tradition has maintained them, but to adapt them specifically so that group learning can be positive.This modification consists of involving the whole class as a community, so that they feel completely engaged in the development of the activity.Their creativity is always useful for learning, so new lyrics, gestures or percussive beats can be added.Thus children are encouraged to perform handclapping games, in order to stimulate divided attention and bimanual coordination. 67For this reason, in practical sessions it is suggested to boys that they perform each activity with a girl (and never with a boy) since girls are more practised and able, and have been since childhood due to their constant practice of these types of activities.
It can be explained from a neurological perspective why these patterns occur.Numerous studies show that neurocognitive plasticity between both hemispheres is at its peak during childhood between the ages of three and eleven. 68This means that brains are much more susceptible to modification and manipulation at these ages than when adult. 69For this reason, at a didactic level, it is beneficial to use these slightly modified types of activities in order to correctly stimulate children, and also so they can be used inclusively in Feminismo/s 21, junio 2013, pp.205-223 a group.This form of stimulation brings with it the following aspects, which act as a conclusion to this short contribution to the topic.
In a society where it is increasingly rare for children to play together in the street, to carry out group activities and to interact with their environment, it is important to stimulate their bodies.The body is the basic source of sound and their first musical and motor instrument, and it should be stimulated through percussive beats in order to develop skills of control and organisation of movement.
Through children' s coordination games, stimulation is achieved through use of the sounds produced by the body which lead to development of divided attention and thus the complete dynamisation of the individual.By doing so, we encourage development of a positive body image, we stimulate creative expression and we particularly support the bodily assimilation of emotions, forms of behaviour and social interaction.
Children should develop awareness and bodily perception to learn how to carry out movements according to various rhythmic patterns in order to develop adequate psychomotor skills.
Knowledge of children' s coordination games and of collective experience is something we must never neglect, and which we must therefore keep transmitting and preserving.There is no doubt that children are the best channel of transmission, since they begin their multiple learning through play, their motor skills closely linked to lyrics and melodies.
For this reason, when considering gender, it is important to bear in mind that coordination games played by girls ought to be used and developed in various social contexts, due to the great neurological advantages, as has been shown by the bibliography.
Difficulties and disorders involving movement also bring with them other added disadvantages, such as dyslexia, ADHD, lack of concentration and impulsiveness, for instance.The importance of feeling oneself, looking at oneself, and facing small psychomotor challenges through play cannot be ignored in early childhood lest emotional and cognitive maturity suffer.This social interaction, which brings with it cooperation, attention and visualisation, contains a means of non-verbal communication which is vital for inclusive work and cooperative learning. .

in 1982, García Matos with his extensive study Magna antología del folklore musical en España 21 published by Unesco in 1979, the fantastic work of M. Feminismo/s 21, junio
2013, pp.205-223 Manzano, in particular his Cancionero popular de Castilla y León 22 in 1989 and Carbajo Martínez with the important Cancionero infantil de Murcia 23 in 2010.
48. martín-Herrero, José Antonio.Manual de antropología… Op. cit.p. 178.49.Hemsy de gainza, Violeta.75 rimas y canciones tradicionales… Op. cit.Development of attention skills.Thanks to handclapping songs, children learn to develop various types of attention skills, which depend on the type of game they are playing, and contribute primarily to the development of divided, selective, sustained and alternating attention skills.4. Development of memory.These types of game involve development of memory skills, as performing children make use of mnemonics associated with the text, movement and gesture.In order to do so, they use both declarative and procedural memory, since once they have internalised games, they can perform them automatically, with the body thinking for itself.It is important to mention that muscular, auditory, visual, rhythmic and emotive memory skills are also developed, as outlined by Barbacci 52 . 5. Development of musical intelligence.Children sing, move, coordinate, perform beats within a musical structure, adapt to the set beat, and interact with the rest of their classmates.All of these actions favour basic musical aspects of inclusive learning.6. Development of interpersonal intelligence.These types of activities are performed by a minimum or two people or more, and so cooperative, inclusive work without hierarchies is fundamental.7. Transmission of cultural values.Through their melodies and lyrics, they transmit cultural values that the instructor can skilfully use to put across specific messages.8. Development of therapeutic aspects.From a bioenergetic perspective, 50. brodsky, Warren, y sulkin, Idit.«Handclapping songs… Op. cit.51.gardner, Howard.Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences.Basic Books (AZ), 1985.Feminismo/s 21, junio 2013, pp.205-223 3.