The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.
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it sound?
CS: Today it tells us that nothing is going to change. It tells those who are in charge: relax, everything’s going to be the same, the same order: pom pom pom poooooom!
How?
CS: Because it tranquillizes, comforts and gives them security. They think of the Fifth as going on sounding the same in these times of vertiginous change…. Do you see? The composition doesn’t exist without the act of performance.
This exchange raises a crucial point that has sometimes been missed even by some of Small’s biggest fans: he never claimed that musicking was always a good thing. Expert musicking can sometimes yield results that we might consider oppressive or destructive, and amateurish musicking—as long as, Chris always said, everyone was doing the best they could with what they had—can sometimes be a transcendent experience.
After Chris’s first two books were republished and the third was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1997–1999, he received even more invitations to speak abroad, not all of which he could accommodate, unfortunately, due to advancing age. “Creative Reunderstandings” was delivered at a conference at the University of Oslo in 2005. It is of all his writings the most explicitly political, although the moral implications of his work had always been clear enough. Chris was not very optimistic during his last decade about the state of the world, but much of the musicking he encountered continued to delight and encourage him.
“Exploring, Affirming, Celebrating—and Teaching” summarizes in three words the functions of musicking as Chris understood them. It was written for a Spanish journal of music education in 2003 and continues his tendency to become ever more provocative during the dozen or so years of writings and lectures that followed Musicking. He makes explicit here a suspicion that had grown over the course of his life, that it might be better overall not to teach music in schools at all—at a time when he was becoming more and more an intellectual hero to many music educators. This line of thought is extended in his 2009 “Afterword” for a book of essays on music education edited by Ruth Wright. “Six Aphorisms and Five Commentaries” is included here not because it breaks any new ground but because it schematizes briefly and thus handily the main tenets of Chris’s musical thought.
This collection is roughly chronological, but shorter unpublished pieces have been interleaved with the longer ones. Interspersed among the more extended pieces you will find some brief occasional writings, postdating most or all of the books, such as “Deep and Crisp and Even,” a graceful yet somewhat curmudgeonly meditation on Christmas carols that had originally been intended for Musicking. There is also “The Sardana and Its Meanings,” Chris’s warm analysis of the Catalonian circle dance that is a ubiquitous source of pride and community in the region where he resided for the latter part of his life. And we have “Rock Concert,” a brief evaluation of a Barcelona concert by an unnamed American star. I regret that I didn’t know he had written this and so never asked him who that star was. (My best guess would be Tina Turner, who performed for seventy-five thousand people at Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium on October 5, 1990.)
The Reader begins with Chris’s “Autobiography,” written in 2004 and with an addition from 2008, and ends with a lovely lyrical piece called “Pelicans,” which is not about music at all but rather about nature, which is where he started as an undergraduate student so many years earlier, and about aesthetics and human relationships, which is really what concerned him most. Susan McClary closes the book with reminiscences of Neville Braithwaite, Chris’s partner for several decades; they were finally able to marry near the end of his life. I think Neville was the person who most kept alive Chris’s faith in the power of music and dance to help us understand and live well in the world, keeping at bay the cynicism to which we are all too susceptible, and thus enabling Christopher Small to teach us so much.
NOTES
1. Christopher Small, interview in La Vanguardia, September 21, 2002, La Contra (back page). This appeared in Chris’s files in English. I don’t know if the original publication has been translated, and if so by whom.
2. Christopher Small, notebook 36, p. 68, Robert Walser private collection. Chris was a dear friend. Over the years that we knew one another, Susan McClary and I spent a dozen months visiting him and Neville in Sitges, the Catalan town to which they had retired.
3. Christopher Small, “Miscellaneous Observations,” March 10, 1996, Robert Walser private collection.
4. The following are only some of the authors whose books he excerpted: John Berger, C. G. Jung, Herbert Marcuse, Gregory Bateson, Colin McPhee, R. G. Collingwood, William P. Malm, Thomas Mann, Francis Bebey, John Storm Roberts, J. H. K. Nketia, Max Weber, Bruno Nettl, Raymond Williams, Thomas Kuhn, Daniel Bell, Timothy Leary, Herbert Read, Marshall McLuhan, Edgard Varése, Desmond Morris, Norman Mailer, Cornelius Cardew, Pierre Boulez, R. D. Lang, Carlos Castenada, Mircea Eliade, George Steiner, Charles Ives, Henri Pousseur, David Toop, Ivan Illich, Henry David Thoreau, Clifford Geertz, Colin Turnbull, Arnold van Gennep, Paul Feyerabend, Eugene Genovese, E. P. Thompson, Harry Partch, Jacques Attali, John Blacking, Lewis Mumford, Bill C. Malone, Lawrence Levine, Henry Pleasants, Alan P. Merriam, Mantle Hood, Ernest Cassirer, Simon Frith, Stuart Hall, Theodor W. Adorno, Paul Oliver, Charlie Gillett, Paul E. Willis, Albert Murray, Charles Keil, David P. McAllester, Richard Hoggart, John F. Szwed, Eileen Southern, Peter Guralnick, William Ferris Jr., Friedrich Blume, André Hodier, Val Wilmer, LeRoi Jones, Howard Zinn, Aldous Huxley, Robert Farris Thompson, Alan Lomax, Richard Waterman, Nancy Cunard, Charles Hamm, Paul Henry Lang, Andrew Tracy, William Weber, Ben Sidran, Jacques Chailley, Henry Raynor, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Janet Wolff, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Carl Dalhaus, Joseph Kerman, Gunther Schuller, Jeff Todd Titon, Robert Palmer, Greil Marcus, David Toop, Dave Laing, Christopher Ballentyne, Suzanne K. Langer, John A. Sloboda, Leonard B. Meyer, Noam Chomsky, Lucy Green, John Chernoff, Henry Kingsbury, Joseph Horowitz, Richard Middleton, George Lipsitz, Daniel K. L. Chua, Martha Feldman, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Lawrence Kramer, Paul Gilroy, Thrasybulos Georgiades, Eric R. Wolf, Mark Slobin, Gerald Edelman, Carlo Ginsberg, M. M. Bakhtin, Neal Zaslaw, Richard Taruskin, Tricia Rose, María Rosa Menocal, Richard L. Crocker, John Potter, Michel Foucault, Mark Johnson, Bruno Latour, Dave Hickey, and Marshall Berman.
5. Small, interview in La Vanguardia.
Autobiography
(2004; REV. 2008)
When I left school at eighteen, with a three-year university scholarship under my belt, I thought I was clear about what I was going to do with my life. I was going to be a doctor—not any old common-or-garden GP or even surgeon but a public health doctor. My father’s cousin’s husband was public health officer in Dunedin, and I had accompanied him on his rounds in that quaint Victorian city and seen some of its messy underside. I was going to get my medical degree and then study for the Diploma of Public Heath, which included topics like geology, hydrology, plumbing, economics, and even, if I remember correctly, a little seismology—all to me topics of much more interest than the messy structure of people’s insides.
At that time, music was little more than an intensely practiced avocation. It was in the family, though there was very little stimulation from the dull town in which we lived. My early memories include my mother singing me to sleep with lovely Edwardian music-hall songs, and we had a gramophone—phonograph to you—a big windup acoustic HMV console model ornamented with machine-carved curlicues, and an assortment of records, 78 rpms of course, which I had the run of from an early age. When I was ill, which was often when I was a child, I used to have the big HMV beside my bed, which would be strewn with records. I can still hear one, called Herd Girl’s Dream, played by a trio of flute, violin, and harp, which at six or seven I thought the most beautiful music in all the world. I remember every note of it, though the record disappeared, as they do, more than fifty years ago.
We had other records too, album sets proudly proclaiming the “new electrical process”: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Emperor Concerto; the New World Symphony, which at age twelve or so I prided myself on being able to whistle my way through from start to finish; The Gondoliers of Gilbert