Musicking. Christopher Small G.
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of music form an important part of the musical economy of the modern world, from the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven to “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.”
But they are not the whole of musicking and in fact are not even necessary for it to take place, as can be seen from the large number of human musical cultures in which there is no such thing as a musical work, in which there are only the activities of singing, playing, listening—and most probably, dancing.
Thus we see that the second question does not exclude the first but rather subsumes it, into a larger and more comprehensive question. In addition, if the definition of musicking I have offered takes in all the activities that affect the nature of that event which is a performance, then that must include preparing for it. That means that composing, practicing and rehearsing, performing, and listening are not separate processes but are all aspects of the one great human activity that is called musicking. And if the meaning of the work is part of the meaning of the event, then the opposition between “work” and “event” expressed by Carl Dalhaus does not exist.
By expanding our questioning to the total performance we can escape from the assumptions of the Western concert tradition as it exists today, which continue to dominate the ways in which we think about music; and we can see that tradition, as it were from the outside, as a small and these days (it was not always so) tranquil (some might even say stagnant) lagoon of the great restless ocean of human musicking. We may see also that, when viewed from outside, it is less isolated from that great ocean than those who look only from inside may think and perhaps also that whatever vitality we can continue to find in it today is, as it always has been, produced by the quickening effect of the life-giving water of that great ocean.
Any theory of musicking, which is to say any attempt to explain its meaning and its function in human life, that cannot be used to account for all human musicking, no matter how strange, primitive or even antipathetic it may seem to our perceptions, is not worth the paper it is written on. It is not just a question of why the Saint Matthew Passion of J. S. Bach and the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven are great works—which they undoubtedly are, once we accept the premises on which they were composed. It is not even just a question of why people like to sing and to hear “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” or “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Over Night?” or why drunken ol’ pals like to gather around the piano and sing bawdy songs together in rustic harmony. It must also explain why it is that taking part in a performance of the Saint Matthew Passion or the Ninth Symphony or “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” arouses in some a powerful and joyful emotional response while in others it induces only boredom and irritation.
But the theory must go further, and be able to explain why Indonesians enjoy taking part in performances of gamelan music, why the Ewe of Ghana like to play, sing and dance to Afro-Cuban popular music as well as the adzida dance, and why many, but by no means all, African Americans like to sing and to hear gospel songs. It must also be able to explain why so many white people go for African American blues, some of them even becoming successful and admired practitioners, why rap has become an important and influential way of musicking on both sides of the American color barrier, and how it is that reggae got big in Japan.
It must be able to explain, in fact, not just why members of one social and cultural group differ in their ways of musicking from members of another group but how it is that members of one culture can come to understand and to enjoy, and perhaps creatively misunderstand, the musicking of others. It must explain also how some musical cultures become dominant, sometimes across the whole world, while others remain confined to the social group within which they originated. And of course it must be able to explain why people like to music at all.
There is no dearth of studies, many of them brilliant and illuminating, of musicking’s social function, that show the ways in which musicking functions as a social and even a political act. Nor do we lack for studies of the dazzling series of interactions, fusions, crossovers and hybridizations that are taking place today between musicians the world over. In this book there is no way in which I could possibly deal with all these phenomena even if I had the knowledge and experience to do so. Nor am I trying to give an account of what musicking has become in our time or of how it got to be that way; I shall have little to say about recording, broadcasting or what has become known as the music industry.
My purpose here is different—at the same time more modest and more ambitious. It is to propose a framework for understanding all musicking as a human activity, to understand not just how but why taking part in a musical performance acts in such complex ways on our existence as individual, social and political beings. What I am proposing is a way of interpreting what we already know about human musicking, a theory of musicking if you like.
Who needs a theory of musicking? Surely, such a thing is too academic to be of either interest or use to ordinary people?
Everyone, whether aware of it or not, has what we can loosely call a theory of musicking, which is to say, an idea of what musicking is, of what it is not, and of the part it plays in our lives. As long as that theory remains unconscious and unthought about, it not only controls people and their musical activities, limiting and circumscribing their capabilities, but also renders them vulnerable to manipulation by those those who have an interest in doing so for purposes of power, status, or profit. It is one of my aims in this book to make readers more aware of the the nature of their “theories” of musicking and thus be in a better position to take control of their musical lives. A theory of musicking, like the act itself, is not just an affair for intellectuals and “cultured” people but an important component of our understanding of ourselves and of our relationships with other people and the other creatures with which we share our planet. It is a political matter in the widest sense.
If everyone is born musical, then everyone’s musical experience is valid. That being so, a theory of musicking, if it is to have any basis in real life, must stand up to being tested against the musical experience of every human being, no matter who he or she may be or how the experience was acquired. For that reason I shall write in terms that are as closely tied to concrete musical experience as I can make them, and I ask in turn that every reader test everything that I have to say against his or her own experience.
So if the meaning of music lies not just in musical works but in the totality of a musical performance, where do we start to look for insights that will unite the work and the event and allow us to understand it?
The answer I propose is this. The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world. These are important matters, perhaps the most important in human life, and how we learn about them through musicking is what this book is about.
As we shall see, the relationships of a musical performance are enormously complex, too complex, ultimately, to be expressed in words. But that does not mean that they are too complex for our minds to encompass. The act of musicking, in its totality, itself provides us with a language by means of which we can come to understand and articulate those relationships and through them to understand the relationships of our lives.
That being so, we need to look as well as listen around us during a performance, to find out what relationships are being generated in the performance space. To show the kind of questions we might ask of a performance, I shall be examining carefully an important event in Western musical culture, namely, a symphony concert as it might take place in a concert hall anywhere in the industrialized world. I am going to try to deconstruct it, which is to say, to decipher the signals that are everywhere being given and received, and to learn the meaning not just of the musical works that are being played there but of the total event that is a symphony concert. I have three reasons for taking this event as an example.
The first is that it is likely to be an