When she was invited to present a keynote address at the Exeter Conference, the author was asked to offer "a particular perspective on a field of research within music education or a related domain". Given her interest in the related disciplines of sociology and ethnomusicology, and acknowledging the centrality of children's music making in the practices of music education, she was drawn to the topic of researching children's musical cultures. For the purposes of this paper, the author is looking in a holistic way at the musical activities children participate in outside the classroom, the social and cultural contexts in which they occur, and she is also considering how school music education can interact with and inform those cultures, and vice versa. (Contains 3 notes.)