The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.
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no one outside the official boundaries of music education has cared to question what we do and why we do it when we teach young people about music. Chris saw all of these things as part of the same web of human musicking, the understanding and elucidation of which was his lifelong passion.
Small was both personally modest and as intellectually ambitious as anyone ever has been. He was a bit self-conscious about his unimposing academic pedigree at the same time that he was keenly aware of the potentially revolutionary implications of his thinking. He was flattered that people sought him out and invited him to lecture, especially after his retirement and the gradual circulation of his books. But at the same time he never expressed any doubts about the rightness, the dignity and humaneness, of the stance he took in his writings.
As Thomas S. Kuhn argued half a century ago, paradigms don’t shift when new answers are proposed; they shift when new questions are posed. After reading Christopher Small, to study the works of prominent philosophers of music is to realize that they are proceeding entirely from premises that Small spent his life calling into question. Roger Scruton’s endorsement of the old saw that aesthetic experience involves the appreciation of something “for its own sake” presupposes that music has a “sake,” which it patently does not, being as it is, as Chris always insisted, not a thing at all but an activity that people do. Or when Peter Kivy worries about what it means for music to express emotions, he skates over the fact that music doesn’t express emotion at all—people express and experience emotions through their involvements with one another in various ways, including through the medium of musical sound. As Chris argued in response to something he had read about the effects of postmodern thought, “‘Postmodern thought’ can’t do anything. Only people can do anything! By continuing this kind of … metaphor he’s going back into the same … morass of Platonist assumptions.”2 Those who wrangle about exactly how musical works are to be defined are not thinking about the fact that musical scores are only useful as parts of specific musicking situations, in which their meanings change according to the contexts in which they are utilized. The old “hypodermic” model of musical meaning, in which artists use music to inject audiences with feelings or meanings, clashes with Chris’s readings of musicking situations, in which people take part in social rituals. And it doesn’t live up to his steadfast belief that any theorizing about how music works is worthless unless it sheds some light on how all music, of all times and places, becomes a valuable thing for people to do.
In an unpublished file called “Miscellaneous Observations,” Chris wrote, “I am sometimes criticized for not having done research. But whatthehell is the use of doing all this research, a little bit of knowledge here, a little bit there, if someone doesn’t come along and (at least make an attempt to) tell us what it all means. That’s my job.”3 It depends on what you think research is, I guess. Chris’s unpublished papers include thirty-six notebooks, begun in 1969 and continuing through the last dated item, in 2003, and the last dated comments in Chris’s hand, from 2007. In those notebooks, he recorded quotations from and observations about works that comprise an astonishing array of intellectual sources.4 Is reading such authors and grappling with the implications of their thinking not to count as research?
Small’s three books in Wesleyan University Press’s Music Culture series, Music, Society, Education, Music of the Common Tongue, and Musicking, comprise an extraordinary legacy and resource. This fourth volume brings previously published work, some of it available in disparate locations, together with key excerpts from the three books he published and other writings that remained unpublished at his passing. It both makes available ideas that were not included in the earlier books and presents an overview of his thought over the course of his life. I hope it rewards those who already know his work and hooks those who don’t, so that they are drawn to read the other books.
I have included here two excerpts from each of Chris’s published books, the introductory chapter and one other, as a way of tracing concisely in this volume the progress of his thought. In the first book, the contrasts between science and art particularly occupied him—art being understood as the classical tradition and its modernist extension, in which Small was trained as a composer—as ways of understanding the world and living well in it. Science, on the other hand—he was a zoology major in college—he understood as a means of mastering the world. By the time the second volume was being written, he had partnered with Neville Braithwaite (see the afterword to this collection), and his focus was on understanding the impact of African American music, which, he had realized, nearly all twentieth-century people had experienced as the only twentieth-century music that really mattered. And in the third book he returned mostly to the classical tradition—or rather its persistence in ritualized form in our time as the only music that could in educated circles be casually referred to as simply “music.”
From Music, Society, Education I chose the chapter on the American experimental tradition, which I have always particularly admired because Chris didn’t necessarily like much of this music, yet he made the best possible case for it. That’s how I teach my students how to teach, and I learned it from him. The other piece from Music of the Common Tongue, in contrast, is a thoughtful meditation on the practice and history of jazz. The second chapter of Musicking I chose is called “A Solitary Flute Player,” and about that I have a confession. Chris begins this piece by relating that certain friends, whom he left anonymous, had tried to discourage him from including it in the book on the grounds that the flute player could all too easily be read as a stereotypical representation of the non-Western Other. Well, those friends were I, I’m afraid, and I was wrong. Chris insisted on including that flute player because that solitary musician exemplified and illuminated some crucial points about musicking—and also because Chris admired and respected the never-heard musicking that he was writing about. So I include it here as a kind of repentance.
But it’s here also because the flute player returns as a topic of discussion in Robert Christgau’s extraordinary interview with Chris, so I’ve placed that chapter immediately before the latter. I call it “extraordinary” because I regard it as simply the finest interview about music I’ve ever read. Bob came to visit Chris in Spain after having studied all three books and thought deeply about their implications. His questioning proceeded from an understanding of Chris’s work and an appreciation of its potential implications for all types of musicking that was second to no one’s. Bob gently pushed Chris beyond what he had written and shows us some hints of where he might have gone in the future.
“Whose Music Do We Teach, Anyway?” is an unpublished address that was given at the Music Educators’ National Conference in Washington, D.C., in 1990. Deliberately provocative, it summarizes his developing thoughts about “musicking,” a concept he had introduced in Music of the Common Tongue, which appeared in print in 1987. Many of these ideas would later be expanded upon in his book Musicking.
“Why Doesn’t the Whole World Love Chamber Music?” was commissioned for delivery in 2001 at an annual conference of Chamber Music America. It was later printed in the journal American Music, of which I was then editor. It builds upon his book Musicking, which had been published three years earlier, but it targets an audience that is obviously very devoted to classical music and challenges them to rethink that investment within larger historical, social, and ethical contexts.
As Chris cheekily pointed out in an interview published the following year in La Vanguardia, when those contexts change, so change the meanings of the musical sounds that occur.5 He starts the interview by asking the interviewer a question: “Do you know the Fifth?”
Of Beethoven? Yes of course: Pom Pom Pom Pooooom …
CS: OK, when Beethoven performed it for the first time, these “poms” were like the new dominant class of Europe slapping its chest to proclaim its dominance since the French Revolution. If you listen carefully, you will hear in those notes how the aggressive new bourgeoisie was flexing its muscles for the conquest of the world.
But! The Fifth! Its message is universal and eternal….
CS: On the contrary: it’s different every time. Then it was the song of a class. It was written as a fist in the face of the old order. Things were about