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Christopher Small: Why Doesn't the Whole World Love Chamber Music?
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Frank Forman
Jun 27, 2012, 12:22:19 PM6/27/12
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Christopher Small: Why Doesn't the Whole World Love Chamber Music?
American Music, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 340-359
Christopher Small, author of Music, Society, Education (1977), Music of
the Common Tongue (1987), and Musicking (1998), all published by Wesleyan
University Press, was born in New Zealand in 1927 and educated there. He
went to England in 1961 to study composition and taught there until 1986,
when he retired to Sitges, Spain, where he still lives. He is currently
(Spring 2001) visiting professor in the Department of Musicology at UCLA.
The following is the text of an address I gave to the annual conference of
Chamber Music America in New York City, January 12, 2001. The audience
consisted of some 400 musicians, both performers and composers, as well as
chamber-music society administrators and sponsors, who received it
politely, even warmly, and showed no sign of feeling under attack. Some
readers of this journal may well feel that this shows I did not hit hard
enough at "ingrained elitist attitudes" So be it; this is what I said.
Many of you will have looked at the title I have given this talk, and
wondered what an outsider like me can possibly have to say about that
question. You yourselves will quite likely have already given the matter
some thought and have wondered why it is that all the world should not be
captivated, why all the world should not want to sit down and listen with
you, when you are offering such rich musical treasures, some of the most
refined and beautiful, most intimate and satisfying, and above all most
spiritually elevating and intellectually stimulating of all works of
music.
You would not be alone in this view. I received just the other day a
brochure for a number of chamber-music groups that are touring the smaller
towns of Catalonia in the coming months, including the one I live in. In
its preface it has this to say, in somewhat pompous Catalan: "Chamber
music is one of the most elevated manifestations of music. It is the one
which can give most satisfaction to those who
practice it and to those who listen. It is the most educative and
formative of solidarity and discipline of character, of respect for others
and the satisfaction of forming part of a collective enterprise."
Now even allowing for a certain rotundity of language, we can hear behind
this kind of assertion a deep and genuine feeling, that chamber music is
music distilled into its ultimate essence, with all the inessentials
stripped away, leaving only pure musical thought and argument, a narration
of the composer's innermost thoughts and feelings. Why, then, does not the
whole world love chamber music?
It seems to me that to find a real answer to that question we have to dig
into the nature of music itself. I'm going to have to take a massive
detour around that topic before I can approach the question directly, and
I'm going to have to ask your patience and assure you that we shall get
there in the end. We might even find something of interest on the way.
The first thing to be said about music is that its nature and its
meanings, whatever they may be, do not lie in musical works, however
beautiful and wonderful they may be, however justly we may admire and love
them. Whatever meaning music may have, whatever function it may have in
human life, lies in an action, the act of taking part in a musical
performance, whether as performer or as listener or indeed in any other
capacity. And yet that is exactly what western musicology, music history,
and criticism, not to mention concert life itself, still fail to
recognize. There is not even an entry under "Performance" in the New Grove
Dictionary.
This curious neglect stems partly from the perennial tendency in European
thought to create abstract entities from real actions and then to treat
the abstractions as if they were more real than the actions from which
they were derived. It is the trap of reification, which has been the
besetting fault of western thought ever since the time of Plato, who was
one of its earliest perpetrators.
By this process of reification the basic musical actions of performing and
listening, which won't hold still long enough for scholars to study in the
manner to which scholars are accustomed, become the abstraction, music,
which appears to be more real, more solid, than the acts of performing and
listening. Then, by a stealthy process of elision, the abstraction "music"
is taken to be equivalent to a musical text as it is to be found between
the covers of a score, and bingo! We have an object that will hold still
long enough to be studied at leisure, and it becomes assumed that it is
there that musical meaning resides. The important question, "What is the
meaning of this musical act?" becomes the more manageable, but more
limited and less useful question, "What is the meaning of this musical
work as it appears in the pages of this score?"
Each work gets to be thought of as a Platonic entity, existing prior to
and transcending any possible performance of it, an entity to which all
possible performances are only approximations, ephemeral and contingent to
the existence of the work itself. The work itself floats through history,
untouched by time and change, waiting for listeners to draw out its
meaning, by a process which Immanuel Kant called disinterested
contemplation. That meaning is permanent, possibly in cases of extreme
greatness even eternal, transcending time and space, and it was created by
a composer before anyone else laid eyes on the score. Listeners have
nothing to contribute to it other than their disinterested contemplation.
Their task is to seek out and respond to that meaning. As for performers,
those troublesome but unfortunately necessary fellows, their task is to
present the work to the listeners as best they can. They are merely the
medium, the necessarily imperfect medium, through which the work has to
pass.
I have been told that I'm out of date in presenting this schema, that
musicians and musicologists and so on don't think like that nowadays. I
wish I could believe it, but I don't. It persists as an unspoken
assumption behind most contemporary discourse on music. Pick up
practically any book on the theory, the aesthetics, or the history of
music and ask yourself what it is that the author really means by the word
"music." I read a month or so ago in a distinguished music-education
journal a review of a new book, a short introduction to music. The
reviewer tells us, with a straight face and without comment, what the
author has to say on this very matter. The schema could not be set out
more clearly or succinctly He says,
"The key personnel in musical culture are the composers, who are
generating what might be called the core product. Performers are in
essence no more than middlemen (apart from those exceptional interpreters
who acquire a kind of honorary composer's status); and listeners are
consumers, playing an essentially passive role in the cultural process
that, in economic terms, they underpin.1"
1. Bengt Olssen, review of Music: A Very Short Introduction by Nicholas
Cook, Music Education Research 1, no. 2 (1999): 253.
I thought at first the reviewer was joking, but he wasn't. An idea that
has dogged us since Plato doesn't give up that easily.
Perhaps if Immanuel Kant had ventured out of his musty study and gone down
the road as far as the nearest tavern he might have been forced to admit
that the idea of music as objects to be contemplated, disinterestedly or
not, bears little relation to music as it is actually practiced throughout
the human race. In that real world where people actually make and listen
to music, in concert halls and suburban drawing rooms, in bathrooms and at
political rallies, in supermarkets and churches, in record stores and
temples, in fields and nightclubs, discos and palaces, stadiums and
elevators, it is performance that is at the center of music. It is not
true that performance takes place in order to present a musical work.
That's the wrong way around. Musical works exist in order to give
performers something to perform.
It is, of course, true that performance is ephemeral, but it is certainly
not contingent, either to the musical process in general or to the meaning
of specific works of music. On the contrary, performance is the primary
process of all music, from which everything else flows. It can take place
without an audience and it can take place without a fixed and stable work
of music at all, and it frequently does so. Whole musical cultures get
along very well without such things. Composing begins when a performer,
liking what he or she has just done, repeats it perhaps many times, and
works to improve it so that a more or less fixed sequence crystallizes out
from the flowing stream of sounds in time. Composing evolves out of
performing and flows back into it, and makes sense as an activity only in
relation to performance. That is the purpose of composing: to facilitate
performing--and, of course, listening.
Always, when we talk about listening we have to include the performers
themselves as listeners. They are the first people to listen to the
performance, and are almost certainly the most involved and intense
listeners of all, since they perceive not only through their ears but also
through the bodily sensations of performing. And, of course, they are
often enough the only listeners, playing for themselves.
Now if there is anything that is clear about performing and listening--and
composing, too, for that matter--it is that they are actions. They're
something that people do. And if that's so, if the heart of music isn't
things but actions, then perhaps the word "music" shouldn't be a noun at
all. It ought to be a verb, the verb "to music." Not just to express the
idea of performing--we already have an adequate vocabulary for that--but
to express the broader idea of taking part in a performance. As those of
you who have read my books Music of the Common Tongue and Musicking will
know, I have taken the liberty of defining this verb, and I offer it to
you now, the verb "to music," with its present participle "musicking," not
as one of those gratuitous coinage that academics love but as a genuine
tool for the understanding of the music act.2
2. Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration
in African-American Music (reprint, Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University
Press, University Press of New England, 1998) and Christopher Small,
Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, N.H.:
Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New England, 1998). In this
essay I also draw from my earlier book, Music, Society, Education
(reprint, Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, University Press of
New England, 1995).
This is how I have defined it. It's quite simple. To "music" is to take
part, in any capacity, in a musical performance. That means not only to
perform but also to listen; to provide material for a performance--what we
call composing; to prepare for a performance--what we call practicing or
rehearsing or woodshedding; or to take part in any activity that can
affect the nature of that style of human encounter which is a musical
performance. We should certainly include dancing, if anyone is
dancing--and in some cultures if no one is dancing then no musicking is
happening--and we might even on occasion extend it to what the box-office
clerk is doing when he sells tickets, and the person who tunes the piano,
and the cleaners who clean up afterwards, since what they do certainly
affects the nature of the event which is a musical performance.
Apart from favoring the idea that music is action, the verb has other
useful implications. For one thing, it makes no distinction between what
the performers are doing and what the rest of those present are doing. It
thus reminds us that musicking--and you see how easy it is to slip into
using it--is an activity in which all those present are involved, and for
whose nature and whose success or failure all those present bear a measure
of responsibility. It isn't just a matter of composers, or even
performers, actively doing something for the passive listeners to
contemplate. Whatever it is that is being done, we are all doing it
together.
I hope you won't think that I'm so silly as to see no difference between
what the performers are doing and what the cleaners, for example, are
doing. They are obviously doing different things. But by using the verb
"to music" in this way we are kept aware that all these activities add up
to a single event, whose nature is affected by the way in which each
activity is carried out, and we have a tool for exploring the nature and
the meanings of the event as a whole.
If "musicking" is verb and not noun, action and not thing, then we should
look for its meanings not in those musical objects, those symphonies and
quartets and operas, or even those melodies and songs, that we have been
taught to think of as the repositories of musical meaning. Those do have a
potential for meaning, for a range of possible meanings in fact. But it's
only when the work is performed and the performance interacts with the
experience that the listeners bring to it, with their preconceptions and
their mode of socialization--in a word, with their values, or sense of
ideal relationships--that the potential is realized and meaning is
created.
It is not only the sounds themselves that carry meaning. The setting where
the performance is taking place will impose relationships between the
participants and create meanings even before a note of music has been
sounded. The behavior of those present, the physical gestures they
make--or don't make--as they play and listen are also an important part of
the meaning that is being created. We in the western classical-music
culture have minimized the use of bodily gesture in both performing and
listening, and we do tend to disregard this aspect of the music act that
is very important in other cultures, but even the fact that we do minimize
bodily movement is in itself significant and has something to say about
our relationship with our own bodies. Many people from other cultures feel
that the minimizing of physical gesture in our musicking brings about an
impoverishment of the musical experience for which no splendor of sound or
intellectual force can compensate.
The listeners' responses--and, as always, we include that of the
performers--and the meanings they make from what they hear depend as much
on the values and the experience that they bring to the performance as on
the objective sounds. Their concepts of ideal relationships are the
parameters within which they respond--or fail to respond--to the
sound-relationships of the musical work being played. Those concepts may
be flexible, but they are not infinitely so, and on the other hand the
potential for meaning can only come alive and make meaning to those
listeners when there is a degree of congruence between the two sets of
relationships. We don't expect to get up and boogie when Beethoven's
Heilige Danksgesang is being played.
Different listeners at different times and under different circumstances
will bring to a performance different concepts of ideal relationships and
so they will get different meanings from a performance of the same work.
There may well come a time when a lack of congruence causes them to get no
meanings at all from it, or none that they feel concerns them, and the
work will drop from the repertory. There is nothing inherent, nothing
permanent or transcendent about the value of an artwork. Any value it may
possess is the outcome of choices made by the living. The fact that we
choose to treasure the works of art that we do treasure says as much about
us and our values as it does about the works themselves. That means that
each question about the value of a work of art is in reality a double one.
We ask not only what there is about the work of art that makes us want to
treasure it but also what there is about us that we should want to do the
treasuring. And conversely, when we reject an artwork or a performance,
the reason lies as much in ourselves as in the rejected work or action.
When any musical performance takes place there is created within the
performance space a complex web of human relationships. At the center of
the web are the sounds that the performers are bringing into existence and
the relationships that they create between them. Radiating out from these,
and feeding back to them, are the relationships among the performers,
between the performers and the listeners, among the listeners and anyone
who may be present, and even between those who are present and those who
are not. It is in those relationships, so rich and complex that they
cannot be articulated in words, that the meaning of a musical performance
lies. Those relationships within the space stand for, or model, ideal
relationships as they are imagined to be by those taking part: between
person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and
the natural and even the supernatural world. These are among the most
important concerns in human life, and whenever we engage in the act of
musicking, even the most seemingly trivial and frivolous, we incur a
responsibility toward them.
I want to make it clear what I mean. I mean that when we music, when we
take part in a musical performance, the relationships that we collectively
bring into existence model those of the cosmos as we believe they are and
as they ought to be--what we might call our universe of values. I need
hardly say that the relationships I am talking about are not those of the
inanimate world that physical scientists try to measure and explain and
control, but the relationships that all living beings from viruses to
humans to sequoia trees need at some level to comprehend and to order if
they are to survive.
When we music, we do not just learn about those ideal relationships;
nobody is telling us about them. We actually experience them in all their
marvelous complexity. The musicking empowers us to experience the actual
structure of our universe of values, and in experiencing it we learn what
our place is within it and how we ought to relate to it. Not just
intellectually but through our bodily gestures and our emotions. We
explore those ideal relationships, our values, we affirm their validity
and we celebrate them, every time we take part in a musical performance.
To borrow the words of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, when we music
the lived-in order merges with the dreamed-of order. The fact that Geertz
used the phrase, not about musicking but about ritual, puts us on the edge
of a fascinating thicket that I just don't have time to enter today: the
idea that a musical performance, any musical performance anywhere and at
any time, can be thought of as a ritual, and a ritual is a pattern of
actions in which shared values--that is, shared concepts of right
relationships--are affirmed, explored, and celebrated. The ritual order
enacts the vision of a social order. The relationships that compose that
order will be found not only in the internal relationships of the sounds
being produced by the musicians but also in the relationships between all
those taking part.
That, I could say, is the main basis of this talk: that the order we
create when we music is an enactment of our ideal social order, an order
in which we can feel most completely realized, most developed and
fulfilled. Musicking is a means by which we learn to interpret the world
and its relationships, what they are and what they should be.
But we don't all interpret the world in the same way. Each one of us
carries around our own way of making sense of it, our own values, our own
concept of what are and what are not right relationships. We all tend to
think of our own concepts, if we think about the matter at all--and most
of us don't, much--as the really real ones. Naturally, that's why we value
them. Those relationships that we consider to be good, valuable, and
treasurable in life--as well as those which we consider to be bad and
worthless--have for us overriding importance, and we value other people to
the extent that they share our values.
None of these concepts is absolute or inbuilt. They are, to use the
sociologists' term, socially constructed. We learn them as a result of an
active engagement with the world around us and our fellow beings. From the
moment of birth we learn what relationships are of value and what are not,
and in this way we learn to order our experiences of the world. We can
thus expect that members of the same social group, whose experiences are
broadly similar, will tend to order their experience in broadly similar
ways, and to hold broadly similar values, which will tend to reinforce one
another. It is, in fact, shared assumptions about relationships that make
social groups, from empires and nations to families and bonded pairs, and
holds them together.
How those values are acquired is a dialectical process between, on the one
hand, the experience and inborn temperament of the individual and, on the
other, the shared perceptions of the various social groups to which he or
she belongs. The sum of those shared perceptions is what is called a
culture.
We naturally tend to hold values that make our own existence more
meaningful and validate our feeling of our own worth. Whatever our
position in society may be, we shall espouse values that support our sense
of worth and self-esteem. If that position is elevated or privileged our
values will be those which justify that position. This is not necessarily
a conscious choice, just our sense of the proper order of things. On the
other hand, those in a lowly position may either espouse values that make
them feel just as good as the elites, or else they may accept their
position as part of the given order of things-- which is what keeps the
English, and to a lesser degree the American, class system alive.
Those who do hold social power--those who control the education system and
the media of communication, and those who hold the purse strings for what
is called cultural activity--are going to use that power in an attempt to
impose their own version of ideal relationships throughout the whole
society, to make people acknowledge that it is their version of reality,
their culture, that is the real one. I used the word, "impose," but that's
too strong a word. Once again it's not necessarily done deliberately or by
any orchestrated campaign or conspiracy. It's just the way the members of
the group perceive their reality. After all, if our values and thus our
culture are superior--and that's borne out by the fact of our elevated
social position--then it must be in everyone's interest to partake of that
culture. It's a neat circle, and it's what the sociologists call hegemony.
Where "culture" ends and "hegemony" begins is hard to establish. What is
just culture to me, and perfectly natural, may be hegemony to you.
We begin to see how it is that musicking has always functioned as a
powerful means of definition, and especially self-definition, of who we
think we are socially. For if members of different social groups have
different values, that is, different concepts of ideal relationships, then
the kinds of musical performances that enact those relationships will
differ from one another also. Each musical performance articulates the
values of the members of a social group, large or small, powerful or
powerless, dominant or oppressed, rich or poor, at a certain moment in its
history, and no style of musicking is more universal or absolute in value
than any other. I have to repeat: no way of musicking, no musical culture
or tradition, is intrinsically superior or inferior to any other. If we
ourselves do feel that some ways of musicking are superior and others
inferior, that is generally connected to our feelings about the social
groups whose values are being articulated musically.
I have to make three comments on that idea. The first is that not any old
performance will do. Quality of performance matters--of course, it
matters. I know of no musical culture in which no distinction is made
between a good and a poor performance, according to the criteria of that
culture. Only those performances will do in which all the performers are
exploring the relationships of their universe of meaningful sounds as
comprehensively and subtly and imaginatively as they are capable of
doing--a process which always demands all the skill and care they can
bring to it--and in which the listeners' response is equally imaginative
and comprehensive.
Second, all musical cultures are more or less equally complex. Linguists
assure us that there is no such thing on earth today as a primitive
language and neither is there any such phenomenon as primitive music. All
human beings are more or less equally complex in their relations to each
other and to the cosmos as a whole, and all are capable of, and in fact
need to be capable of, articulating those relationships. If we find only
simplicity or primitiveness or even crudity in, say, the sound of an
African herdsman playing his homemade flute to his beasts in the night, or
of a folksinger as she sings an old familiar song in her own way, or even
in the sound of the latest teenybopper band or rapper, that may well be
because on the one hand our ears are not attuned to the complexities of
the sounds being produced, and on the other because our minds are not
attuned to the complexities of the conceptual worlds, the values and the
relationships, or to the complexity of the mental and physical processes
that went into the making of the sounds.
And, third, if each performance articulates the values of a specific
social group, then every musical performance is inescapably to some degree
a political act. Politics, of course, is about power, and an important
element of power is the power to define oneself and maybe to define
others, to say, not only, "This is who I am," or "This is who we are," but
also to be able to say to others, "That is who you are." Much of the
historic class struggle, not to mention the struggles against racism and
sexism, consists in that struggle for the power to define oneself, to be
able to say, "This is who we are," against those who would tell you, "That
is who you are," or even, "That is what you are"--which is to say, less
than fully human. Many kinds of musical performance can be seen as sites
for contestation of that important human right. Volcanic struggles have
taken place over it, especially over the last century or so when so many
human groups have been struggling for the right to self-determination, not
just as nations in the ordinary sense but also as human beings within a
society that devalues or oppresses them. George Lipsitz's fascinating book
Dangerous Crossroads is full of examples of this musical struggle from all
over the world, from Haitians to Australian Aborigines to Native Americans
to black South Africans to Czech intellectuals under communism, to
unemployed rejects of rich industrial societies.3 He records the dangers
that musicians face who dare to challenge through their musicking the
values of those who rule them. The banning of live performance and
records, imprisonment, burning of homes, even torture and murder are some
of the threats under which thousands of musicians live today, simply
because they assert the right to perform in a way that affirms and
celebrates their ideal relationships. The right to perform is inextricably
linked to the right of self-definition, and the right to self-definition
is the first step on the long road to real political power.
3. George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and
the Poetics of Place (New York: Verso, 1994).
Not only for performers, but for their audiences too, since the power to
music in a way that articulates one's own values is the power to say,
"This is who we are," for listeners no less than for performers. And not
only under governments that fall outside the democratic pale. All dominant
groups, all ruling classes, even those that call themselves democratic,
will encourage and underwrite styles of musicking that support their
values and sense of inherent superiority and will disparage, discourage,
and even actively harass those performers and audiences whose musicking
challenges those values.
The history of black expressive culture in both the United States and
Britain shows dozens of examples of this process, from the days of
blackface minstrelsy right down to the present. Many of us will remember
the scandalized reactions of white America and Britain to the eruption of
rock 'n' roll into the public--which is to say the white--domain in the
early fifties--the radio bans, the campaigns of concerned parents, the
harassment of performers and dancers. The history of jazz also teems with
such reactions, from the earliest years of the twentieth century into the
1930s and even later. You can read some of them in Robert Walser's
excellent collection of readings in jazz history, called Keeping Time.4
4. Robert Walser, ed., Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
In Britain the history of London's great West Indian Carnival at Notting
Hill, the official attempts to suppress it, the oppressive policing, the
arbitrary spoilsport regulations imposed by local authorities and the
wildly exaggerated and even lying press reports of drugs, fights, and
robberies, is something I myself have witnessed right from its earliest
days in the mid-sixties.
Tricia Rose in her book Black Noise describes the indignities and
humiliations that she and several thousand other young African Americans
had to endure before being admitted to a big New York stadium in the early
1990s where a rap performance was taking place, including body pat-downs
and metal-detector scans and searches through pocketbooks and handbags.5
She reports also that the finding of venues for rap performances is
becoming increasingly difficult for promoters, and she comments, "The
struggle over context, meaning and access to public space is critical to
contemporary cultural politics. Power and resistance are exercised by
signs, language and institutions. Consequently popular pleasure involves
physical, ideological and territorial struggles."
5. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary
America (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New
England, 1994).
We in this room today are lucky. Context, meaning, and access to public
space are not matters that we have needed to bother ourselves with, and
certainly don't have to struggle for. We can take them for granted. This
is because the meanings and the ideal social relationships that we
articulate through our own favored way of musicking are those that bear
the stamp of approval from the sources of power and authority in the
modern state.
The context of everything we do musically is one of social approval, not
to say prestige. The access of both performers and listeners to public
space is not only assured but paid for from public funds or from the
largess of the very rich. Even listeners are taught the skills of
competent listening. They used to call it musical appreciation: I don't
know what name it goes under today. The selection and training of
performers takes places in state- and privately funded institutions, which
approve and certify their quality. They are not liable to have to pay
exorbitant insurance on their transport, or to find themselves hassled by
immigration and customs officers looking for illegal substances. As
audiences we do not find our handbags and pocketbooks being searched at
the entrance to Alice Tulley Hall, nor do security men patrol the aisles
during a performance of Beethoven's Opus 132. It cannot be politically
subversive or socially dangerous for anyone to take part in these
performances.
A classical-music performance is, in fact, no longer a site for social
contestation--if indeed it ever was. We practitioners of the music,
performers and listeners alike, can afford to take its values for granted
as lasting and universal, and our right to do so is unquestioned. This
means that classical musicking can often function as a vehicle for the
social aspirations of upwardly mobile people--"This is who I am" which can
easily slip over into "This is who I want to be," and even, "This is who I
want to be seen as being"--which gets shorthanded, often unjustly, as
snobbery and social climbing.
It seems to me, as an outsider to both Britain and the United States, that
the American class system, for the very reason that it is more permeable
than the British, generates more social tensions and resentments as people
are able to move upward very much more easily and rapidly. This
permeability, and again I have to qualify it with the phrase, "It seems to
me," is reflected in the greater hostility shown in the United States by
those from outside the classical-music culture toward those on the inside.
In Europe, generally, if people are not involved in the culture they tend
to shrug their shoulders and forget it, even if it is their tax money that
is paying for it. But in America I have seen real resentment. It's not
just that I have frequently heard expressed, often from intelligent and
sensitive people, sentiments of extreme antipathy to the whole culture of
classical music, including, of course, opera, but also that American
popular culture teems with images of that resentment, from "Roll over
Beethoven and tell Tchaikovski the news" to the Marx Brothers' hilarious
destruction of a performance of Trovatore. There's real malice there. As
for the final scene of At the Circus, with the symphony orchestra on its
floating platform disappearing out to sea still furiously playing Wagner
under the baton of its outrageously caricatured conductor, well, that's an
archetypal image if ever there was one. If chamber musicking is a
particular target of these resentments, it must be at least to some extent
for the very reasons that we its practitioners adduce to show its
superiority to other ways of musicking. Social class and social
aspirations, whether we like it or not, have a great deal to do with it.
Class, of course, is by no means the only determinant of our musical
tastes, despite what some overenthusiastic Marxists might say. Certainly
there is no one-to-one relationship. Who we are and who we want to be is
complex and often contradictory, and it is something over which we do have
a measure of control. Nevertheless who we are is constrained by our
circumstances of birth and upbringing, and by the attitudes of family and
peers. Even who we want to be, or want to be seen as being, is not
altogether unconstrained. And when it comes to choices in the field of
expressive culture, the possession of what Pierre Bourdieu calls
educational capital becomes an important factor--linked once again, of
course, to social class.
I use the term "classical music" with some diffidence. We all know the
conceptual traps it sets, and yet what other term is there to qualify that
socially elevated and subsidized way of musicking that all of us here like
to engage in? I refuse to talk about "serious" music, since all music--or,
rather, all musicking--is serious. If we think of classical music as a
style of musicking, rather than as a repertory of musical works, we can
understand a little more clearly what makes some love it and others resent
it. Paradoxically, the modern style of musicking that we call classical,
with its rituals, its customs and conventions of behavior, and even the
kind of building in which it is housed, grow to a great extent out of the
modern attitude of performers and listeners toward individual works that I
discussed earlier, as PERMANENT, TRANSCENDENT, AND AHISTORICAL. The
individual work demands the total attention of the listener to the
exclusion of all other stimuli, and it demands also a setting for its
performance which is adequate to its splendor and its elevated social
status. It was when those notions came together, over the nineteenth
century, that we began to get something like the modern concept of
classical music. And we should be sure that classical musicking as we know
it today is a modern style, even if the repertory on which it is based is
old. It is certainly not a style of musicking that Mozart or J. S. Bach
would have recognized.
[Conversion to majuscule above by me.]
Even the purpose-built concert hall is a nineteenth-century invention
which did not reach its full development until well into the twentieth
century. And audience manners have changed a lot since the delighted
Parisians burst into applause at the sudden fortissimo in the last Allegro
of Mozart's thirty-first symphony in 1778. Or even maybe since the
disturbances that accompanied the premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913.
As the style of musicking has changed, so has the meaning of performing
the works. To perform and to listen to Beethoven's mighty symphonies and
quartets may bring comfort and inspiration to modern listeners, but when
they were first performed they were an in-your-face assertion of the
values of the rising bourgeoisie of Europe and Euro-America, devoted to
crisis and change as constants in human life.
The teleological power of these performances, and of those that followed
through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as they hurtled
through time by way of crisis and climax toward a preordained resolution,
resonated strongly with the preoccupations of the bourgeoisie in the same
period. The headlong pace of events in the performance matches the
headlong pace of events in Europe from the French Revolution to 1848 and
beyond, when those who put down the proletarian rebellions were the
grandsons of those who had seized power from the aristocracy in 1789. Over
and over again, in widely different ways, these performances tell the
story of the transformation of an individual soul, creating itself through
conflict and overcoming and through a struggle that has a beginning and a
final ending. In their internal relationships we hear the supremacy of
logical and functional relationships, and above all a teleology, an
impulse toward closure and finality, which is clearly audible even in the
two-chord harmonic cell from which the whole great organism has
developed--the succession known as the perfect cadence, in which the
sounding of a triad of the dominant leads us to expect the sounding of the
tonic triad. How that expectation is played with, teased, frustrated, and
finally always satisfied is the basis of the whole temporal succession
that is a performance of a work of classical music.
The social order of the work is mirrored in the organization of the
instrument that plays it. It has been frequently pointed out that the
social order of the symphony orchestra is the very model of industrial
order, with the conductor the boss, the section leaders the foremen, and
the players the proletariat, whose skills and talents are alienated from
them and used in the service of someone else's purposes. The performance
is the product and the anonymous audience the consumers, who have no more
control over the product than they have over the cars or the breakfast
cereals they buy.
The great spectacle of the symphony concert, in all its undoubted beauty
and splendor, can be seen as a ceremony in which takes place the
exploration, the affirmation, and the celebration of certain values,
certain kinds of ideal relationships. It is the ritual enactment of the
power of certain members of industrial society to affirm, loudly and
clearly--and how loud that is!--that "This is who we are" and "This is how
we ought to relate." It is an exhibition, not only of symbolic power but
also of the splendor that only power can create, and if there is a loss of
intimacy and ordinary human engagement between the participants, well,
that as always is the price of power. The participants must feel the price
is worth paying; otherwise they wouldn't be taking part in the ceremony.
They might go off instead to a blues club, where they could feel at least
the illusion of intimacy and conviviality--they might stay home and play
string quartets with friends and family members, as Mozart, Haydn,
Ditters, and Vanhal did in Mozart's lodgings in Vienna back in 1787. What
conviviality must have been created there!
If we do consider a group of friends sitting down to play together in the
home of one of them, there is brought into existence a different kind of
social order from that of the symphony concert. It may be the same Mozart
quartet that the four friends played that night, one of the six he
dedicated to Haydn, or it might be the latest creation of a young genius
scored for harmonica, hubcaps, kazoo, and harp with prerecorded sounds of
car crashes. It doesn't make much difference. As a mode of performance it
provides rewards for the performers that orchestral playing cannot. It is
much more sociable and even intimate; it affords greater autonomy, more
self-direction, to the individual performer and the opportunity for more
spontaneous interaction with others. Up to a point it is, or can be, a
very convivial society, even an egalitarian one, that is brought into
existence for the duration of the performance.
And yet the players as they play still relate to one another, not directly
but through the composer's instructions. Their responses to one another in
that human encounter which is a musical performance are still mediated
through the written notes, which establish and maintain a distance between
them. The score provides an immutable given factor to the encounter and in
this way accords it a measure of safety and mutual comprehension while
preventing it from attaining total intimacy. The fact that they engage in
this kind of musical performance which brings into existence such a social
situation shows perhaps that that is as far as they are prepared to go in
the direction of intimacy. Such distanced relationships are characteristic
of certain social groups--let us be sweeping and call them, without too
much attempt at precision, the bourgeoisie--and the performance as a whole
can be seen as the exploration, affirmation, and celebration of the values
of that group.
When chamber musicking becomes professionalized, of course, and is removed
from the living room--people nowadays don't have chambers, and maybe it's
time to rethink the term--to the concert hall, as has been happening
increasingly since Beethoven started to compose works that are outside the
technical range of those who play for love rather than money, there is
introduced into the encounter a further distancing. Under the day-to-day
pressures of professional performance the little society can become less
and less egalitarian and may fall increasingly under the command of one
strong member of the group. As that happens, relationships with listeners
become also more distanced, and the larger the setting the more distancing
there will be, until finally, however wonderful the musical works may be
that are being played, however superb the performers, the conviviality
that gave birth in the first place to that mode of musicking has fled.
Maybe we are prepared to pay that price, in the interest of greater
refinement of playing, but we should be aware that there is a price. It's
something we might remember when we use the word "professional" as a term
of approval and "amateur" as one of abuse.
What kind of social situation is brought into existence when relationships
are not mediated by written notes? Let's consider a quartet of
instrumentalists who have come together to play jazz for themselves and
perhaps a few friends. They will agree on a tune on which to improvise and
on a tempo, and they will start to play. They are bound together, not by
written notes, but by the common idiom, the common stock of material and
by the melody and its harmonies. They are free to respond directly to one
another's playing, to imitate or to branch off in another direction, to
flatter and to criticize, to unite or to dominate the group. The striving
for greater intimacy and more direct mutual response introduces an element
of danger into the situation that is not there when all are playing from a
score--the danger of social disintegration and musical failure that cannot
take place as long as all the players follow the instructions given by a
score.
But we notice that they are still bound by the requirements of the idiom.
There are still ways in which they may respond to one another and ways in
which they may not. There are choices they may make and choices that they
may not. They are, in fact, caught in the ancient and creative paradox
that rules all human relationships, that, on the one hand, those
relationships can only be established and maintained by the mutual
acceptance of some common idiom, whether of speech or gesture, and, on the
other, that those very conventions which permit the creation of
relationships also structure them and prevent the participants from
attaining more than a certain degree of intimacy. We could say that it is
that paradox that is at the root of all artistic activity.
With jazz, however, as well as with blues and its offshoots rock 'n' roll
and rock in all its varieties, there has traditionally been another factor
that affects the relationships within the performing space, and that is
dancing. Dancing, like musicking, is a language of gesture, and gestural
language is the language in which relationships too rich and complex to be
articulated in words can be articulated clearly and easily. When people
are dancing as well as playing and listening the social order of the
performance space is immeasurably enriched. The musicians fire the dancers
and the dancers fire the musicians. The great Hollywood dancer Leon James
described Dizzy Gillespie's playing in the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in the
1940s. He said, "A lot of people had him pegged as a clown, but we loved
him. Every time he blew a crazy lick, we cut a crazy step to go with it.
And he dug us and blew even crazier stuff to see if we could dance to it,
a kind of game, with the musicians and the dancers challenging each
other." And Lester Young used to mourn the Basie band's translation from
the dance hall to the concert stage: "I wish jazz was played more often
for dancing. The rhythms of the dancers comes back to you when you're
playing." Both musicians and dancers, of course, were masters of their
idiom and within that idiom were able to bring into existence a powerful
and liberated society for the duration of the performance. There are those
that hold that it was the moment when the musicians stopped playing for
dancers and began playing concerts that jazz as a creative, living,
political force died and it became just another genre of chamber music.
So, maybe we should start boogying to the Heilige Danksgesang? Well, it's
not all that inconceivable. If we were to do so it would certainly create
a set of values and ideal relationships that was very different from that
which I dare swear most of us bring to a performance of the piece. It
might even bring into being unsuspected richnesses of relationship, which
we in our reverential relation to the work and its composer have not
imagined.
You can imagine, then, that I find it interesting that when we ask, "Why
doesn't the whole world love chamber music?" it doesn't seem to occur to
us to ask, "Why doesn't the whole world love heavy metal music?" Or "Why
doesn't the whole world love hip-hop?" Or "Why doesn't the whole world
love rock 'n' roll, or sacred harp singing, or country-and-western music?"
If you don't believe heavy metal is serious and highly skilled, read
Robert Walser's Running with the Devil in which he tells how guitarists
spend their waking hours practicing virtuoso figurations derived from the
concertos of Vivaldi and J. S. Bach.6
6. Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in
Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, University
Press of New England, 1993).
Or read Tricia Rose's Black Noise and its description of the skill and
dedication of those who sample and mix tracks, and the power of the poetic
idiom used by the rappers, even though what they have to say may be a fist
in the face of society. Or read Maria Rosa Menocal's beautiful book Shards
of Love, where she discusses Eric Clapton's Layla cycle of songs and his
conscious adoption of techniques of the medieval Provencal love lyric.7
I'm not trying to claim respectability for these styles of musicking by
linking them to respectable artistic genres. The point is that all these
ways of musicking are just as serious and demanding for their devotees as
chamber music is for us, and they are just as appropriate to their senses
of who they are and of how the relationships of the world are and should
be.
7. Rosa Maria Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).
I must confess I find it hard to understand the aura of something like
sacredness that surrounds chamber music, or chamber musicking. After all,
it's just a very convivial way of musicking that involves a small number
of performers, which is common enough the world over--gospel quartets,
polka bands, coblas, and highlife bands, for example. I've been unable to
find out when the term first started to be used to denote a separate
genre. Histories of music tend to apply it retroactively to performance as
far back as the sixteenth century to madrigals and consort music, but I
can find no evidence that the term itself was used at that time. There
would have seemed to be no need for the term as it was the only kind of
musicking there was outside of the church--all concerted music was what we
would call chamber music. The term can only have started to mean something
with the larger ensembles of concerto and opera, when a distinction began
to be made between private and public musicking, necessitating larger
performance spaces and initiating the separation of performers and
audience.
I can only conclude that the sacred aura is a legacy of people like
Immanuel Kant, who made what seems to me a silly distinction between
sensuous pleasure and real beauty and value. Only a culture hung up on a
puritan denial of the body would buy into such an idea. The idea that
austerity is somehow morally or ethically better than sensuousness finds
no resonance in my mind. And anyway, who said that chamber music is
austere? To me, as I said, it is a very convivial way of musicking.
There's no reason in the wide world why the whole world should love any
specific way of musicking. All ways of musicking, and all individual
performances, are to be judged, if judged at all, on their efficacy in
articulating, in exploring, affirming, and celebrating their participants'
sense of ideal relationships, their sense of who they are. We may not like
who they are, we may perceive who they are as antipathetic or even
threatening, but that has nothing to do with the matter. And conversely,
when we maintain, as that Catalan brochure does, that our way of musicking
is the best, that it is the one that can give most satisfaction to those
who practice it and to those who listen, that it is the most educative and
formative of solidarity and discipline of character, of respect for others
and the satisfaction of forming part of a collective enterprise, and so
on, it only serves to reveal how little we know of how musicking operates
outside our own social group. I have taken a modest part in jazz groups
and I know what solidarity and discipline it demands, precisely because
the performers do not have the social safety net of a score. If I'm
honest, it demands more, in fact, than I was able to bring to it. And I
once spent an evening watching and listening to a group of four young
musicians as they created a performance without the benefit of a single
written note. It was nothing more elevated than an old Eagles song, but I
was astonished and inspired by the solidarity and the discipline, the
respect for others, and the satisfaction of forming part of a collective
enterprise that was brought into being there. Not to mention the sheer
instrumental, harmonic, and rhythmic skills they displayed, casually and
without seeming to think anything of it.
Don't misunderstand me, please. I continue to play piano pieces of the
classical repertory with love and as well as my modest piano technique
will permit. It's my culture, and in my old age I'm happily stuck with it,
after a lifetime of exploration outside and beyond. And perhaps I love it
even more for having explored outside. I know I've never before got such
satisfaction from playing the piano as I do today.
East west, home may be best--for me--but I don't try to maintain that my
home is the finest in the world, and I don't try to wish its values on to
anyone else. I am aware that those values are not universal, and I know
that there's no reason why they should be. But, on the other hand, I don't
feel any compulsion to like all ways of musicking or all musical
performances. If I don't like the values that are being articulated by a
musical performance I feel at liberty to say so, just as I feel free to
say I don't like someone's social attitudes or their politics. As I have
tried to suggest, there is a strong link between them.
That said, I have to admit that for me the sight and sound of a group of
musicians getting together and playing to one another and to anyone who
will listen--and maybe to dance--is one of the most inspiring experiences
of this life. I don't care too much what the style or genre may be. Any
organization that like CMA [Chamber Music America] is helping to produce
that experience is doing a beautiful job. There is for me only one
experience that is more rewarding and that's when you're doing the playing
and the dancing yourself, and I commend to you the task of fostering and
encouraging that. It could be in the end even more worth while than
employing professional musicians to perform, however splendidly they may
do so. My friend Charles Keil, for one, could do with some help in his
project of getting kids in Buffalo to play salsa and dance. In the absence
of any way of getting inside the bodies and minds of others, we have to
assume that all ways of musicking are equally complex, equally demanding,
and equally satisfying for those who take part in them. To assume anything
else is to deny to others their full humanity.
American Music, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 340-359
Christopher Small, author of Music, Society, Education (1977), Music of
the Common Tongue (1987), and Musicking (1998), all published by Wesleyan
University Press, was born in New Zealand in 1927 and educated there. He
went to England in 1961 to study composition and taught there until 1986,
when he retired to Sitges, Spain, where he still lives. He is currently
(Spring 2001) visiting professor in the Department of Musicology at UCLA.
The following is the text of an address I gave to the annual conference of
Chamber Music America in New York City, January 12, 2001. The audience
consisted of some 400 musicians, both performers and composers, as well as
chamber-music society administrators and sponsors, who received it
politely, even warmly, and showed no sign of feeling under attack. Some
readers of this journal may well feel that this shows I did not hit hard
enough at "ingrained elitist attitudes" So be it; this is what I said.
Many of you will have looked at the title I have given this talk, and
wondered what an outsider like me can possibly have to say about that
question. You yourselves will quite likely have already given the matter
some thought and have wondered why it is that all the world should not be
captivated, why all the world should not want to sit down and listen with
you, when you are offering such rich musical treasures, some of the most
refined and beautiful, most intimate and satisfying, and above all most
spiritually elevating and intellectually stimulating of all works of
music.
You would not be alone in this view. I received just the other day a
brochure for a number of chamber-music groups that are touring the smaller
towns of Catalonia in the coming months, including the one I live in. In
its preface it has this to say, in somewhat pompous Catalan: "Chamber
music is one of the most elevated manifestations of music. It is the one
which can give most satisfaction to those who
practice it and to those who listen. It is the most educative and
formative of solidarity and discipline of character, of respect for others
and the satisfaction of forming part of a collective enterprise."
Now even allowing for a certain rotundity of language, we can hear behind
this kind of assertion a deep and genuine feeling, that chamber music is
music distilled into its ultimate essence, with all the inessentials
stripped away, leaving only pure musical thought and argument, a narration
of the composer's innermost thoughts and feelings. Why, then, does not the
whole world love chamber music?
It seems to me that to find a real answer to that question we have to dig
into the nature of music itself. I'm going to have to take a massive
detour around that topic before I can approach the question directly, and
I'm going to have to ask your patience and assure you that we shall get
there in the end. We might even find something of interest on the way.
The first thing to be said about music is that its nature and its
meanings, whatever they may be, do not lie in musical works, however
beautiful and wonderful they may be, however justly we may admire and love
them. Whatever meaning music may have, whatever function it may have in
human life, lies in an action, the act of taking part in a musical
performance, whether as performer or as listener or indeed in any other
capacity. And yet that is exactly what western musicology, music history,
and criticism, not to mention concert life itself, still fail to
recognize. There is not even an entry under "Performance" in the New Grove
Dictionary.
This curious neglect stems partly from the perennial tendency in European
thought to create abstract entities from real actions and then to treat
the abstractions as if they were more real than the actions from which
they were derived. It is the trap of reification, which has been the
besetting fault of western thought ever since the time of Plato, who was
one of its earliest perpetrators.
By this process of reification the basic musical actions of performing and
listening, which won't hold still long enough for scholars to study in the
manner to which scholars are accustomed, become the abstraction, music,
which appears to be more real, more solid, than the acts of performing and
listening. Then, by a stealthy process of elision, the abstraction "music"
is taken to be equivalent to a musical text as it is to be found between
the covers of a score, and bingo! We have an object that will hold still
long enough to be studied at leisure, and it becomes assumed that it is
there that musical meaning resides. The important question, "What is the
meaning of this musical act?" becomes the more manageable, but more
limited and less useful question, "What is the meaning of this musical
work as it appears in the pages of this score?"
Each work gets to be thought of as a Platonic entity, existing prior to
and transcending any possible performance of it, an entity to which all
possible performances are only approximations, ephemeral and contingent to
the existence of the work itself. The work itself floats through history,
untouched by time and change, waiting for listeners to draw out its
meaning, by a process which Immanuel Kant called disinterested
contemplation. That meaning is permanent, possibly in cases of extreme
greatness even eternal, transcending time and space, and it was created by
a composer before anyone else laid eyes on the score. Listeners have
nothing to contribute to it other than their disinterested contemplation.
Their task is to seek out and respond to that meaning. As for performers,
those troublesome but unfortunately necessary fellows, their task is to
present the work to the listeners as best they can. They are merely the
medium, the necessarily imperfect medium, through which the work has to
pass.
I have been told that I'm out of date in presenting this schema, that
musicians and musicologists and so on don't think like that nowadays. I
wish I could believe it, but I don't. It persists as an unspoken
assumption behind most contemporary discourse on music. Pick up
practically any book on the theory, the aesthetics, or the history of
music and ask yourself what it is that the author really means by the word
"music." I read a month or so ago in a distinguished music-education
journal a review of a new book, a short introduction to music. The
reviewer tells us, with a straight face and without comment, what the
author has to say on this very matter. The schema could not be set out
more clearly or succinctly He says,
"The key personnel in musical culture are the composers, who are
generating what might be called the core product. Performers are in
essence no more than middlemen (apart from those exceptional interpreters
who acquire a kind of honorary composer's status); and listeners are
consumers, playing an essentially passive role in the cultural process
that, in economic terms, they underpin.1"
1. Bengt Olssen, review of Music: A Very Short Introduction by Nicholas
Cook, Music Education Research 1, no. 2 (1999): 253.
I thought at first the reviewer was joking, but he wasn't. An idea that
has dogged us since Plato doesn't give up that easily.
Perhaps if Immanuel Kant had ventured out of his musty study and gone down
the road as far as the nearest tavern he might have been forced to admit
that the idea of music as objects to be contemplated, disinterestedly or
not, bears little relation to music as it is actually practiced throughout
the human race. In that real world where people actually make and listen
to music, in concert halls and suburban drawing rooms, in bathrooms and at
political rallies, in supermarkets and churches, in record stores and
temples, in fields and nightclubs, discos and palaces, stadiums and
elevators, it is performance that is at the center of music. It is not
true that performance takes place in order to present a musical work.
That's the wrong way around. Musical works exist in order to give
performers something to perform.
It is, of course, true that performance is ephemeral, but it is certainly
not contingent, either to the musical process in general or to the meaning
of specific works of music. On the contrary, performance is the primary
process of all music, from which everything else flows. It can take place
without an audience and it can take place without a fixed and stable work
of music at all, and it frequently does so. Whole musical cultures get
along very well without such things. Composing begins when a performer,
liking what he or she has just done, repeats it perhaps many times, and
works to improve it so that a more or less fixed sequence crystallizes out
from the flowing stream of sounds in time. Composing evolves out of
performing and flows back into it, and makes sense as an activity only in
relation to performance. That is the purpose of composing: to facilitate
performing--and, of course, listening.
Always, when we talk about listening we have to include the performers
themselves as listeners. They are the first people to listen to the
performance, and are almost certainly the most involved and intense
listeners of all, since they perceive not only through their ears but also
through the bodily sensations of performing. And, of course, they are
often enough the only listeners, playing for themselves.
Now if there is anything that is clear about performing and listening--and
composing, too, for that matter--it is that they are actions. They're
something that people do. And if that's so, if the heart of music isn't
things but actions, then perhaps the word "music" shouldn't be a noun at
all. It ought to be a verb, the verb "to music." Not just to express the
idea of performing--we already have an adequate vocabulary for that--but
to express the broader idea of taking part in a performance. As those of
you who have read my books Music of the Common Tongue and Musicking will
know, I have taken the liberty of defining this verb, and I offer it to
you now, the verb "to music," with its present participle "musicking," not
as one of those gratuitous coinage that academics love but as a genuine
tool for the understanding of the music act.2
2. Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration
in African-American Music (reprint, Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University
Press, University Press of New England, 1998) and Christopher Small,
Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, N.H.:
Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New England, 1998). In this
essay I also draw from my earlier book, Music, Society, Education
(reprint, Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, University Press of
New England, 1995).
This is how I have defined it. It's quite simple. To "music" is to take
part, in any capacity, in a musical performance. That means not only to
perform but also to listen; to provide material for a performance--what we
call composing; to prepare for a performance--what we call practicing or
rehearsing or woodshedding; or to take part in any activity that can
affect the nature of that style of human encounter which is a musical
performance. We should certainly include dancing, if anyone is
dancing--and in some cultures if no one is dancing then no musicking is
happening--and we might even on occasion extend it to what the box-office
clerk is doing when he sells tickets, and the person who tunes the piano,
and the cleaners who clean up afterwards, since what they do certainly
affects the nature of the event which is a musical performance.
Apart from favoring the idea that music is action, the verb has other
useful implications. For one thing, it makes no distinction between what
the performers are doing and what the rest of those present are doing. It
thus reminds us that musicking--and you see how easy it is to slip into
using it--is an activity in which all those present are involved, and for
whose nature and whose success or failure all those present bear a measure
of responsibility. It isn't just a matter of composers, or even
performers, actively doing something for the passive listeners to
contemplate. Whatever it is that is being done, we are all doing it
together.
I hope you won't think that I'm so silly as to see no difference between
what the performers are doing and what the cleaners, for example, are
doing. They are obviously doing different things. But by using the verb
"to music" in this way we are kept aware that all these activities add up
to a single event, whose nature is affected by the way in which each
activity is carried out, and we have a tool for exploring the nature and
the meanings of the event as a whole.
If "musicking" is verb and not noun, action and not thing, then we should
look for its meanings not in those musical objects, those symphonies and
quartets and operas, or even those melodies and songs, that we have been
taught to think of as the repositories of musical meaning. Those do have a
potential for meaning, for a range of possible meanings in fact. But it's
only when the work is performed and the performance interacts with the
experience that the listeners bring to it, with their preconceptions and
their mode of socialization--in a word, with their values, or sense of
ideal relationships--that the potential is realized and meaning is
created.
It is not only the sounds themselves that carry meaning. The setting where
the performance is taking place will impose relationships between the
participants and create meanings even before a note of music has been
sounded. The behavior of those present, the physical gestures they
make--or don't make--as they play and listen are also an important part of
the meaning that is being created. We in the western classical-music
culture have minimized the use of bodily gesture in both performing and
listening, and we do tend to disregard this aspect of the music act that
is very important in other cultures, but even the fact that we do minimize
bodily movement is in itself significant and has something to say about
our relationship with our own bodies. Many people from other cultures feel
that the minimizing of physical gesture in our musicking brings about an
impoverishment of the musical experience for which no splendor of sound or
intellectual force can compensate.
The listeners' responses--and, as always, we include that of the
performers--and the meanings they make from what they hear depend as much
on the values and the experience that they bring to the performance as on
the objective sounds. Their concepts of ideal relationships are the
parameters within which they respond--or fail to respond--to the
sound-relationships of the musical work being played. Those concepts may
be flexible, but they are not infinitely so, and on the other hand the
potential for meaning can only come alive and make meaning to those
listeners when there is a degree of congruence between the two sets of
relationships. We don't expect to get up and boogie when Beethoven's
Heilige Danksgesang is being played.
Different listeners at different times and under different circumstances
will bring to a performance different concepts of ideal relationships and
so they will get different meanings from a performance of the same work.
There may well come a time when a lack of congruence causes them to get no
meanings at all from it, or none that they feel concerns them, and the
work will drop from the repertory. There is nothing inherent, nothing
permanent or transcendent about the value of an artwork. Any value it may
possess is the outcome of choices made by the living. The fact that we
choose to treasure the works of art that we do treasure says as much about
us and our values as it does about the works themselves. That means that
each question about the value of a work of art is in reality a double one.
We ask not only what there is about the work of art that makes us want to
treasure it but also what there is about us that we should want to do the
treasuring. And conversely, when we reject an artwork or a performance,
the reason lies as much in ourselves as in the rejected work or action.
When any musical performance takes place there is created within the
performance space a complex web of human relationships. At the center of
the web are the sounds that the performers are bringing into existence and
the relationships that they create between them. Radiating out from these,
and feeding back to them, are the relationships among the performers,
between the performers and the listeners, among the listeners and anyone
who may be present, and even between those who are present and those who
are not. It is in those relationships, so rich and complex that they
cannot be articulated in words, that the meaning of a musical performance
lies. Those relationships within the space stand for, or model, ideal
relationships as they are imagined to be by those taking part: between
person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and
the natural and even the supernatural world. These are among the most
important concerns in human life, and whenever we engage in the act of
musicking, even the most seemingly trivial and frivolous, we incur a
responsibility toward them.
I want to make it clear what I mean. I mean that when we music, when we
take part in a musical performance, the relationships that we collectively
bring into existence model those of the cosmos as we believe they are and
as they ought to be--what we might call our universe of values. I need
hardly say that the relationships I am talking about are not those of the
inanimate world that physical scientists try to measure and explain and
control, but the relationships that all living beings from viruses to
humans to sequoia trees need at some level to comprehend and to order if
they are to survive.
When we music, we do not just learn about those ideal relationships;
nobody is telling us about them. We actually experience them in all their
marvelous complexity. The musicking empowers us to experience the actual
structure of our universe of values, and in experiencing it we learn what
our place is within it and how we ought to relate to it. Not just
intellectually but through our bodily gestures and our emotions. We
explore those ideal relationships, our values, we affirm their validity
and we celebrate them, every time we take part in a musical performance.
To borrow the words of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, when we music
the lived-in order merges with the dreamed-of order. The fact that Geertz
used the phrase, not about musicking but about ritual, puts us on the edge
of a fascinating thicket that I just don't have time to enter today: the
idea that a musical performance, any musical performance anywhere and at
any time, can be thought of as a ritual, and a ritual is a pattern of
actions in which shared values--that is, shared concepts of right
relationships--are affirmed, explored, and celebrated. The ritual order
enacts the vision of a social order. The relationships that compose that
order will be found not only in the internal relationships of the sounds
being produced by the musicians but also in the relationships between all
those taking part.
That, I could say, is the main basis of this talk: that the order we
create when we music is an enactment of our ideal social order, an order
in which we can feel most completely realized, most developed and
fulfilled. Musicking is a means by which we learn to interpret the world
and its relationships, what they are and what they should be.
But we don't all interpret the world in the same way. Each one of us
carries around our own way of making sense of it, our own values, our own
concept of what are and what are not right relationships. We all tend to
think of our own concepts, if we think about the matter at all--and most
of us don't, much--as the really real ones. Naturally, that's why we value
them. Those relationships that we consider to be good, valuable, and
treasurable in life--as well as those which we consider to be bad and
worthless--have for us overriding importance, and we value other people to
the extent that they share our values.
None of these concepts is absolute or inbuilt. They are, to use the
sociologists' term, socially constructed. We learn them as a result of an
active engagement with the world around us and our fellow beings. From the
moment of birth we learn what relationships are of value and what are not,
and in this way we learn to order our experiences of the world. We can
thus expect that members of the same social group, whose experiences are
broadly similar, will tend to order their experience in broadly similar
ways, and to hold broadly similar values, which will tend to reinforce one
another. It is, in fact, shared assumptions about relationships that make
social groups, from empires and nations to families and bonded pairs, and
holds them together.
How those values are acquired is a dialectical process between, on the one
hand, the experience and inborn temperament of the individual and, on the
other, the shared perceptions of the various social groups to which he or
she belongs. The sum of those shared perceptions is what is called a
culture.
We naturally tend to hold values that make our own existence more
meaningful and validate our feeling of our own worth. Whatever our
position in society may be, we shall espouse values that support our sense
of worth and self-esteem. If that position is elevated or privileged our
values will be those which justify that position. This is not necessarily
a conscious choice, just our sense of the proper order of things. On the
other hand, those in a lowly position may either espouse values that make
them feel just as good as the elites, or else they may accept their
position as part of the given order of things-- which is what keeps the
English, and to a lesser degree the American, class system alive.
Those who do hold social power--those who control the education system and
the media of communication, and those who hold the purse strings for what
is called cultural activity--are going to use that power in an attempt to
impose their own version of ideal relationships throughout the whole
society, to make people acknowledge that it is their version of reality,
their culture, that is the real one. I used the word, "impose," but that's
too strong a word. Once again it's not necessarily done deliberately or by
any orchestrated campaign or conspiracy. It's just the way the members of
the group perceive their reality. After all, if our values and thus our
culture are superior--and that's borne out by the fact of our elevated
social position--then it must be in everyone's interest to partake of that
culture. It's a neat circle, and it's what the sociologists call hegemony.
Where "culture" ends and "hegemony" begins is hard to establish. What is
just culture to me, and perfectly natural, may be hegemony to you.
We begin to see how it is that musicking has always functioned as a
powerful means of definition, and especially self-definition, of who we
think we are socially. For if members of different social groups have
different values, that is, different concepts of ideal relationships, then
the kinds of musical performances that enact those relationships will
differ from one another also. Each musical performance articulates the
values of the members of a social group, large or small, powerful or
powerless, dominant or oppressed, rich or poor, at a certain moment in its
history, and no style of musicking is more universal or absolute in value
than any other. I have to repeat: no way of musicking, no musical culture
or tradition, is intrinsically superior or inferior to any other. If we
ourselves do feel that some ways of musicking are superior and others
inferior, that is generally connected to our feelings about the social
groups whose values are being articulated musically.
I have to make three comments on that idea. The first is that not any old
performance will do. Quality of performance matters--of course, it
matters. I know of no musical culture in which no distinction is made
between a good and a poor performance, according to the criteria of that
culture. Only those performances will do in which all the performers are
exploring the relationships of their universe of meaningful sounds as
comprehensively and subtly and imaginatively as they are capable of
doing--a process which always demands all the skill and care they can
bring to it--and in which the listeners' response is equally imaginative
and comprehensive.
Second, all musical cultures are more or less equally complex. Linguists
assure us that there is no such thing on earth today as a primitive
language and neither is there any such phenomenon as primitive music. All
human beings are more or less equally complex in their relations to each
other and to the cosmos as a whole, and all are capable of, and in fact
need to be capable of, articulating those relationships. If we find only
simplicity or primitiveness or even crudity in, say, the sound of an
African herdsman playing his homemade flute to his beasts in the night, or
of a folksinger as she sings an old familiar song in her own way, or even
in the sound of the latest teenybopper band or rapper, that may well be
because on the one hand our ears are not attuned to the complexities of
the sounds being produced, and on the other because our minds are not
attuned to the complexities of the conceptual worlds, the values and the
relationships, or to the complexity of the mental and physical processes
that went into the making of the sounds.
And, third, if each performance articulates the values of a specific
social group, then every musical performance is inescapably to some degree
a political act. Politics, of course, is about power, and an important
element of power is the power to define oneself and maybe to define
others, to say, not only, "This is who I am," or "This is who we are," but
also to be able to say to others, "That is who you are." Much of the
historic class struggle, not to mention the struggles against racism and
sexism, consists in that struggle for the power to define oneself, to be
able to say, "This is who we are," against those who would tell you, "That
is who you are," or even, "That is what you are"--which is to say, less
than fully human. Many kinds of musical performance can be seen as sites
for contestation of that important human right. Volcanic struggles have
taken place over it, especially over the last century or so when so many
human groups have been struggling for the right to self-determination, not
just as nations in the ordinary sense but also as human beings within a
society that devalues or oppresses them. George Lipsitz's fascinating book
Dangerous Crossroads is full of examples of this musical struggle from all
over the world, from Haitians to Australian Aborigines to Native Americans
to black South Africans to Czech intellectuals under communism, to
unemployed rejects of rich industrial societies.3 He records the dangers
that musicians face who dare to challenge through their musicking the
values of those who rule them. The banning of live performance and
records, imprisonment, burning of homes, even torture and murder are some
of the threats under which thousands of musicians live today, simply
because they assert the right to perform in a way that affirms and
celebrates their ideal relationships. The right to perform is inextricably
linked to the right of self-definition, and the right to self-definition
is the first step on the long road to real political power.
3. George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and
the Poetics of Place (New York: Verso, 1994).
Not only for performers, but for their audiences too, since the power to
music in a way that articulates one's own values is the power to say,
"This is who we are," for listeners no less than for performers. And not
only under governments that fall outside the democratic pale. All dominant
groups, all ruling classes, even those that call themselves democratic,
will encourage and underwrite styles of musicking that support their
values and sense of inherent superiority and will disparage, discourage,
and even actively harass those performers and audiences whose musicking
challenges those values.
The history of black expressive culture in both the United States and
Britain shows dozens of examples of this process, from the days of
blackface minstrelsy right down to the present. Many of us will remember
the scandalized reactions of white America and Britain to the eruption of
rock 'n' roll into the public--which is to say the white--domain in the
early fifties--the radio bans, the campaigns of concerned parents, the
harassment of performers and dancers. The history of jazz also teems with
such reactions, from the earliest years of the twentieth century into the
1930s and even later. You can read some of them in Robert Walser's
excellent collection of readings in jazz history, called Keeping Time.4
4. Robert Walser, ed., Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
In Britain the history of London's great West Indian Carnival at Notting
Hill, the official attempts to suppress it, the oppressive policing, the
arbitrary spoilsport regulations imposed by local authorities and the
wildly exaggerated and even lying press reports of drugs, fights, and
robberies, is something I myself have witnessed right from its earliest
days in the mid-sixties.
Tricia Rose in her book Black Noise describes the indignities and
humiliations that she and several thousand other young African Americans
had to endure before being admitted to a big New York stadium in the early
1990s where a rap performance was taking place, including body pat-downs
and metal-detector scans and searches through pocketbooks and handbags.5
She reports also that the finding of venues for rap performances is
becoming increasingly difficult for promoters, and she comments, "The
struggle over context, meaning and access to public space is critical to
contemporary cultural politics. Power and resistance are exercised by
signs, language and institutions. Consequently popular pleasure involves
physical, ideological and territorial struggles."
5. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary
America (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New
England, 1994).
We in this room today are lucky. Context, meaning, and access to public
space are not matters that we have needed to bother ourselves with, and
certainly don't have to struggle for. We can take them for granted. This
is because the meanings and the ideal social relationships that we
articulate through our own favored way of musicking are those that bear
the stamp of approval from the sources of power and authority in the
modern state.
The context of everything we do musically is one of social approval, not
to say prestige. The access of both performers and listeners to public
space is not only assured but paid for from public funds or from the
largess of the very rich. Even listeners are taught the skills of
competent listening. They used to call it musical appreciation: I don't
know what name it goes under today. The selection and training of
performers takes places in state- and privately funded institutions, which
approve and certify their quality. They are not liable to have to pay
exorbitant insurance on their transport, or to find themselves hassled by
immigration and customs officers looking for illegal substances. As
audiences we do not find our handbags and pocketbooks being searched at
the entrance to Alice Tulley Hall, nor do security men patrol the aisles
during a performance of Beethoven's Opus 132. It cannot be politically
subversive or socially dangerous for anyone to take part in these
performances.
A classical-music performance is, in fact, no longer a site for social
contestation--if indeed it ever was. We practitioners of the music,
performers and listeners alike, can afford to take its values for granted
as lasting and universal, and our right to do so is unquestioned. This
means that classical musicking can often function as a vehicle for the
social aspirations of upwardly mobile people--"This is who I am" which can
easily slip over into "This is who I want to be," and even, "This is who I
want to be seen as being"--which gets shorthanded, often unjustly, as
snobbery and social climbing.
It seems to me, as an outsider to both Britain and the United States, that
the American class system, for the very reason that it is more permeable
than the British, generates more social tensions and resentments as people
are able to move upward very much more easily and rapidly. This
permeability, and again I have to qualify it with the phrase, "It seems to
me," is reflected in the greater hostility shown in the United States by
those from outside the classical-music culture toward those on the inside.
In Europe, generally, if people are not involved in the culture they tend
to shrug their shoulders and forget it, even if it is their tax money that
is paying for it. But in America I have seen real resentment. It's not
just that I have frequently heard expressed, often from intelligent and
sensitive people, sentiments of extreme antipathy to the whole culture of
classical music, including, of course, opera, but also that American
popular culture teems with images of that resentment, from "Roll over
Beethoven and tell Tchaikovski the news" to the Marx Brothers' hilarious
destruction of a performance of Trovatore. There's real malice there. As
for the final scene of At the Circus, with the symphony orchestra on its
floating platform disappearing out to sea still furiously playing Wagner
under the baton of its outrageously caricatured conductor, well, that's an
archetypal image if ever there was one. If chamber musicking is a
particular target of these resentments, it must be at least to some extent
for the very reasons that we its practitioners adduce to show its
superiority to other ways of musicking. Social class and social
aspirations, whether we like it or not, have a great deal to do with it.
Class, of course, is by no means the only determinant of our musical
tastes, despite what some overenthusiastic Marxists might say. Certainly
there is no one-to-one relationship. Who we are and who we want to be is
complex and often contradictory, and it is something over which we do have
a measure of control. Nevertheless who we are is constrained by our
circumstances of birth and upbringing, and by the attitudes of family and
peers. Even who we want to be, or want to be seen as being, is not
altogether unconstrained. And when it comes to choices in the field of
expressive culture, the possession of what Pierre Bourdieu calls
educational capital becomes an important factor--linked once again, of
course, to social class.
I use the term "classical music" with some diffidence. We all know the
conceptual traps it sets, and yet what other term is there to qualify that
socially elevated and subsidized way of musicking that all of us here like
to engage in? I refuse to talk about "serious" music, since all music--or,
rather, all musicking--is serious. If we think of classical music as a
style of musicking, rather than as a repertory of musical works, we can
understand a little more clearly what makes some love it and others resent
it. Paradoxically, the modern style of musicking that we call classical,
with its rituals, its customs and conventions of behavior, and even the
kind of building in which it is housed, grow to a great extent out of the
modern attitude of performers and listeners toward individual works that I
discussed earlier, as PERMANENT, TRANSCENDENT, AND AHISTORICAL. The
individual work demands the total attention of the listener to the
exclusion of all other stimuli, and it demands also a setting for its
performance which is adequate to its splendor and its elevated social
status. It was when those notions came together, over the nineteenth
century, that we began to get something like the modern concept of
classical music. And we should be sure that classical musicking as we know
it today is a modern style, even if the repertory on which it is based is
old. It is certainly not a style of musicking that Mozart or J. S. Bach
would have recognized.
[Conversion to majuscule above by me.]
Even the purpose-built concert hall is a nineteenth-century invention
which did not reach its full development until well into the twentieth
century. And audience manners have changed a lot since the delighted
Parisians burst into applause at the sudden fortissimo in the last Allegro
of Mozart's thirty-first symphony in 1778. Or even maybe since the
disturbances that accompanied the premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913.
As the style of musicking has changed, so has the meaning of performing
the works. To perform and to listen to Beethoven's mighty symphonies and
quartets may bring comfort and inspiration to modern listeners, but when
they were first performed they were an in-your-face assertion of the
values of the rising bourgeoisie of Europe and Euro-America, devoted to
crisis and change as constants in human life.
The teleological power of these performances, and of those that followed
through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as they hurtled
through time by way of crisis and climax toward a preordained resolution,
resonated strongly with the preoccupations of the bourgeoisie in the same
period. The headlong pace of events in the performance matches the
headlong pace of events in Europe from the French Revolution to 1848 and
beyond, when those who put down the proletarian rebellions were the
grandsons of those who had seized power from the aristocracy in 1789. Over
and over again, in widely different ways, these performances tell the
story of the transformation of an individual soul, creating itself through
conflict and overcoming and through a struggle that has a beginning and a
final ending. In their internal relationships we hear the supremacy of
logical and functional relationships, and above all a teleology, an
impulse toward closure and finality, which is clearly audible even in the
two-chord harmonic cell from which the whole great organism has
developed--the succession known as the perfect cadence, in which the
sounding of a triad of the dominant leads us to expect the sounding of the
tonic triad. How that expectation is played with, teased, frustrated, and
finally always satisfied is the basis of the whole temporal succession
that is a performance of a work of classical music.
The social order of the work is mirrored in the organization of the
instrument that plays it. It has been frequently pointed out that the
social order of the symphony orchestra is the very model of industrial
order, with the conductor the boss, the section leaders the foremen, and
the players the proletariat, whose skills and talents are alienated from
them and used in the service of someone else's purposes. The performance
is the product and the anonymous audience the consumers, who have no more
control over the product than they have over the cars or the breakfast
cereals they buy.
The great spectacle of the symphony concert, in all its undoubted beauty
and splendor, can be seen as a ceremony in which takes place the
exploration, the affirmation, and the celebration of certain values,
certain kinds of ideal relationships. It is the ritual enactment of the
power of certain members of industrial society to affirm, loudly and
clearly--and how loud that is!--that "This is who we are" and "This is how
we ought to relate." It is an exhibition, not only of symbolic power but
also of the splendor that only power can create, and if there is a loss of
intimacy and ordinary human engagement between the participants, well,
that as always is the price of power. The participants must feel the price
is worth paying; otherwise they wouldn't be taking part in the ceremony.
They might go off instead to a blues club, where they could feel at least
the illusion of intimacy and conviviality--they might stay home and play
string quartets with friends and family members, as Mozart, Haydn,
Ditters, and Vanhal did in Mozart's lodgings in Vienna back in 1787. What
conviviality must have been created there!
If we do consider a group of friends sitting down to play together in the
home of one of them, there is brought into existence a different kind of
social order from that of the symphony concert. It may be the same Mozart
quartet that the four friends played that night, one of the six he
dedicated to Haydn, or it might be the latest creation of a young genius
scored for harmonica, hubcaps, kazoo, and harp with prerecorded sounds of
car crashes. It doesn't make much difference. As a mode of performance it
provides rewards for the performers that orchestral playing cannot. It is
much more sociable and even intimate; it affords greater autonomy, more
self-direction, to the individual performer and the opportunity for more
spontaneous interaction with others. Up to a point it is, or can be, a
very convivial society, even an egalitarian one, that is brought into
existence for the duration of the performance.
And yet the players as they play still relate to one another, not directly
but through the composer's instructions. Their responses to one another in
that human encounter which is a musical performance are still mediated
through the written notes, which establish and maintain a distance between
them. The score provides an immutable given factor to the encounter and in
this way accords it a measure of safety and mutual comprehension while
preventing it from attaining total intimacy. The fact that they engage in
this kind of musical performance which brings into existence such a social
situation shows perhaps that that is as far as they are prepared to go in
the direction of intimacy. Such distanced relationships are characteristic
of certain social groups--let us be sweeping and call them, without too
much attempt at precision, the bourgeoisie--and the performance as a whole
can be seen as the exploration, affirmation, and celebration of the values
of that group.
When chamber musicking becomes professionalized, of course, and is removed
from the living room--people nowadays don't have chambers, and maybe it's
time to rethink the term--to the concert hall, as has been happening
increasingly since Beethoven started to compose works that are outside the
technical range of those who play for love rather than money, there is
introduced into the encounter a further distancing. Under the day-to-day
pressures of professional performance the little society can become less
and less egalitarian and may fall increasingly under the command of one
strong member of the group. As that happens, relationships with listeners
become also more distanced, and the larger the setting the more distancing
there will be, until finally, however wonderful the musical works may be
that are being played, however superb the performers, the conviviality
that gave birth in the first place to that mode of musicking has fled.
Maybe we are prepared to pay that price, in the interest of greater
refinement of playing, but we should be aware that there is a price. It's
something we might remember when we use the word "professional" as a term
of approval and "amateur" as one of abuse.
What kind of social situation is brought into existence when relationships
are not mediated by written notes? Let's consider a quartet of
instrumentalists who have come together to play jazz for themselves and
perhaps a few friends. They will agree on a tune on which to improvise and
on a tempo, and they will start to play. They are bound together, not by
written notes, but by the common idiom, the common stock of material and
by the melody and its harmonies. They are free to respond directly to one
another's playing, to imitate or to branch off in another direction, to
flatter and to criticize, to unite or to dominate the group. The striving
for greater intimacy and more direct mutual response introduces an element
of danger into the situation that is not there when all are playing from a
score--the danger of social disintegration and musical failure that cannot
take place as long as all the players follow the instructions given by a
score.
But we notice that they are still bound by the requirements of the idiom.
There are still ways in which they may respond to one another and ways in
which they may not. There are choices they may make and choices that they
may not. They are, in fact, caught in the ancient and creative paradox
that rules all human relationships, that, on the one hand, those
relationships can only be established and maintained by the mutual
acceptance of some common idiom, whether of speech or gesture, and, on the
other, that those very conventions which permit the creation of
relationships also structure them and prevent the participants from
attaining more than a certain degree of intimacy. We could say that it is
that paradox that is at the root of all artistic activity.
With jazz, however, as well as with blues and its offshoots rock 'n' roll
and rock in all its varieties, there has traditionally been another factor
that affects the relationships within the performing space, and that is
dancing. Dancing, like musicking, is a language of gesture, and gestural
language is the language in which relationships too rich and complex to be
articulated in words can be articulated clearly and easily. When people
are dancing as well as playing and listening the social order of the
performance space is immeasurably enriched. The musicians fire the dancers
and the dancers fire the musicians. The great Hollywood dancer Leon James
described Dizzy Gillespie's playing in the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in the
1940s. He said, "A lot of people had him pegged as a clown, but we loved
him. Every time he blew a crazy lick, we cut a crazy step to go with it.
And he dug us and blew even crazier stuff to see if we could dance to it,
a kind of game, with the musicians and the dancers challenging each
other." And Lester Young used to mourn the Basie band's translation from
the dance hall to the concert stage: "I wish jazz was played more often
for dancing. The rhythms of the dancers comes back to you when you're
playing." Both musicians and dancers, of course, were masters of their
idiom and within that idiom were able to bring into existence a powerful
and liberated society for the duration of the performance. There are those
that hold that it was the moment when the musicians stopped playing for
dancers and began playing concerts that jazz as a creative, living,
political force died and it became just another genre of chamber music.
So, maybe we should start boogying to the Heilige Danksgesang? Well, it's
not all that inconceivable. If we were to do so it would certainly create
a set of values and ideal relationships that was very different from that
which I dare swear most of us bring to a performance of the piece. It
might even bring into being unsuspected richnesses of relationship, which
we in our reverential relation to the work and its composer have not
imagined.
You can imagine, then, that I find it interesting that when we ask, "Why
doesn't the whole world love chamber music?" it doesn't seem to occur to
us to ask, "Why doesn't the whole world love heavy metal music?" Or "Why
doesn't the whole world love hip-hop?" Or "Why doesn't the whole world
love rock 'n' roll, or sacred harp singing, or country-and-western music?"
If you don't believe heavy metal is serious and highly skilled, read
Robert Walser's Running with the Devil in which he tells how guitarists
spend their waking hours practicing virtuoso figurations derived from the
concertos of Vivaldi and J. S. Bach.6
6. Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in
Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, University
Press of New England, 1993).
Or read Tricia Rose's Black Noise and its description of the skill and
dedication of those who sample and mix tracks, and the power of the poetic
idiom used by the rappers, even though what they have to say may be a fist
in the face of society. Or read Maria Rosa Menocal's beautiful book Shards
of Love, where she discusses Eric Clapton's Layla cycle of songs and his
conscious adoption of techniques of the medieval Provencal love lyric.7
I'm not trying to claim respectability for these styles of musicking by
linking them to respectable artistic genres. The point is that all these
ways of musicking are just as serious and demanding for their devotees as
chamber music is for us, and they are just as appropriate to their senses
of who they are and of how the relationships of the world are and should
be.
7. Rosa Maria Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).
I must confess I find it hard to understand the aura of something like
sacredness that surrounds chamber music, or chamber musicking. After all,
it's just a very convivial way of musicking that involves a small number
of performers, which is common enough the world over--gospel quartets,
polka bands, coblas, and highlife bands, for example. I've been unable to
find out when the term first started to be used to denote a separate
genre. Histories of music tend to apply it retroactively to performance as
far back as the sixteenth century to madrigals and consort music, but I
can find no evidence that the term itself was used at that time. There
would have seemed to be no need for the term as it was the only kind of
musicking there was outside of the church--all concerted music was what we
would call chamber music. The term can only have started to mean something
with the larger ensembles of concerto and opera, when a distinction began
to be made between private and public musicking, necessitating larger
performance spaces and initiating the separation of performers and
audience.
I can only conclude that the sacred aura is a legacy of people like
Immanuel Kant, who made what seems to me a silly distinction between
sensuous pleasure and real beauty and value. Only a culture hung up on a
puritan denial of the body would buy into such an idea. The idea that
austerity is somehow morally or ethically better than sensuousness finds
no resonance in my mind. And anyway, who said that chamber music is
austere? To me, as I said, it is a very convivial way of musicking.
There's no reason in the wide world why the whole world should love any
specific way of musicking. All ways of musicking, and all individual
performances, are to be judged, if judged at all, on their efficacy in
articulating, in exploring, affirming, and celebrating their participants'
sense of ideal relationships, their sense of who they are. We may not like
who they are, we may perceive who they are as antipathetic or even
threatening, but that has nothing to do with the matter. And conversely,
when we maintain, as that Catalan brochure does, that our way of musicking
is the best, that it is the one that can give most satisfaction to those
who practice it and to those who listen, that it is the most educative and
formative of solidarity and discipline of character, of respect for others
and the satisfaction of forming part of a collective enterprise, and so
on, it only serves to reveal how little we know of how musicking operates
outside our own social group. I have taken a modest part in jazz groups
and I know what solidarity and discipline it demands, precisely because
the performers do not have the social safety net of a score. If I'm
honest, it demands more, in fact, than I was able to bring to it. And I
once spent an evening watching and listening to a group of four young
musicians as they created a performance without the benefit of a single
written note. It was nothing more elevated than an old Eagles song, but I
was astonished and inspired by the solidarity and the discipline, the
respect for others, and the satisfaction of forming part of a collective
enterprise that was brought into being there. Not to mention the sheer
instrumental, harmonic, and rhythmic skills they displayed, casually and
without seeming to think anything of it.
Don't misunderstand me, please. I continue to play piano pieces of the
classical repertory with love and as well as my modest piano technique
will permit. It's my culture, and in my old age I'm happily stuck with it,
after a lifetime of exploration outside and beyond. And perhaps I love it
even more for having explored outside. I know I've never before got such
satisfaction from playing the piano as I do today.
East west, home may be best--for me--but I don't try to maintain that my
home is the finest in the world, and I don't try to wish its values on to
anyone else. I am aware that those values are not universal, and I know
that there's no reason why they should be. But, on the other hand, I don't
feel any compulsion to like all ways of musicking or all musical
performances. If I don't like the values that are being articulated by a
musical performance I feel at liberty to say so, just as I feel free to
say I don't like someone's social attitudes or their politics. As I have
tried to suggest, there is a strong link between them.
That said, I have to admit that for me the sight and sound of a group of
musicians getting together and playing to one another and to anyone who
will listen--and maybe to dance--is one of the most inspiring experiences
of this life. I don't care too much what the style or genre may be. Any
organization that like CMA [Chamber Music America] is helping to produce
that experience is doing a beautiful job. There is for me only one
experience that is more rewarding and that's when you're doing the playing
and the dancing yourself, and I commend to you the task of fostering and
encouraging that. It could be in the end even more worth while than
employing professional musicians to perform, however splendidly they may
do so. My friend Charles Keil, for one, could do with some help in his
project of getting kids in Buffalo to play salsa and dance. In the absence
of any way of getting inside the bodies and minds of others, we have to
assume that all ways of musicking are equally complex, equally demanding,
and equally satisfying for those who take part in them. To assume anything
else is to deny to others their full humanity.
Peter T. Daniels
Jun 27, 2012, 1:11:19 PM6/27/12
to
On Jun 27, 12:22 pm, Frank Forman <chec...@panix.com> wrote:
> Christopher Small: Why Doesn't the Whole World Love Chamber Music?
> American Music, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 340-359
My god, he's pirating an entire decade-plus-old 20-page article!
> Christopher Small: Why Doesn't the Whole World Love Chamber Music?
> American Music, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 340-359
John Wiser
Jun 27, 2012, 1:44:29 PM6/27/12
to
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:2ff5c491-3a8b-49ad...@m3g2000vbl.googlegroups.com...
The horror! The horror!
jdw
news:2ff5c491-3a8b-49ad...@m3g2000vbl.googlegroups.com...
jdw
OW
Jun 27, 2012, 5:04:58 PM6/27/12
to
Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it elsewhere,
though.
though.
Peter T. Daniels
Jun 27, 2012, 5:47:24 PM6/27/12
to
On Jun 27, 5:04 pm, OW <bjm...@aol.com> wrote:
> Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it elsewhere,
> though.
You must have a really quiet car.
> Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it elsewhere,
> though.
John Wiser
Jun 27, 2012, 7:24:39 PM6/27/12
to
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:0eb91a17-6828-4341...@m3g2000vbl.googlegroups.com...
JDW
OW
Jun 27, 2012, 11:09:20 PM6/27/12
to
Peter T. Daniels
Jun 27, 2012, 11:46:34 PM6/27/12
to
OW
Jun 28, 2012, 12:37:32 AM6/28/12
to
>
>
> > > > Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it elsewhere,
> > > > though.
>
> > > You must have a really quiet car.
>
> > No, I just turn it up loud enough to at least cut through the noise.
>
> Cognitive dissonance with _chamber_ music ...
Exactly. The latter mitigates the former.
>
> > > > Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it elsewhere,
> > > > though.
>
> > > You must have a really quiet car.
>
> > No, I just turn it up loud enough to at least cut through the noise.
>
> Cognitive dissonance with _chamber_ music ...
Alan Dawes
Jun 28, 2012, 8:01:51 AM6/28/12
to
In article
<0eb91a17-6828-4341...@m3g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
and it must be large to leave enough bowing room around the musicians. Do
you have special seat belts that don't get in the way of the violins and
viola? Is there enough space for a piano and double bass for "the Trout"?
:-)
Alan
--
alan....@argonet.co.uk
alan....@riscos.org
Using an Acorn RiscPC
<0eb91a17-6828-4341...@m3g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
you have special seat belts that don't get in the way of the violins and
viola? Is there enough space for a piano and double bass for "the Trout"?
:-)
Alan
--
alan....@argonet.co.uk
alan....@riscos.org
Using an Acorn RiscPC
Gerard
Jun 28, 2012, 8:45:00 AM6/28/12
to
Alan Dawes <alan....@argonet.co.uk> typed:
and a bassoon.
> In article
> <0eb91a17-6828-4341...@m3g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
> Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > On Jun 27, 5:04 pm, OW <bjm...@aol.com> wrote:
> > > Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it
> > > elsewhere, though.
>
> > You must have a really quiet car.
>
> and it must be large to leave enough bowing room around the
> musicians. Do you have special seat belts that don't get in the way
> of the violins and viola? Is there enough space for a piano and
> double bass for "the Trout"?
>
There's no need for much room for duos for bassoons, or for duos for a clarinet
> <0eb91a17-6828-4341...@m3g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
> Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > On Jun 27, 5:04 pm, OW <bjm...@aol.com> wrote:
> > > Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it
> > > elsewhere, though.
>
> > You must have a really quiet car.
>
> and it must be large to leave enough bowing room around the
> musicians. Do you have special seat belts that don't get in the way
> of the violins and viola? Is there enough space for a piano and
> double bass for "the Trout"?
>
and a bassoon.
Peter T. Daniels
Jun 28, 2012, 11:20:04 AM6/28/12
to
On Jun 28, 8:45 am, "Gerard" <ghend-nospam_rik...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Alan Dawes <alan.da...@argonet.co.uk> typed:
>
> > In article
> > <0eb91a17-6828-4341-abe3-be498d644...@m3g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
Even in an SUV, it seems iffy.
> Alan Dawes <alan.da...@argonet.co.uk> typed:
>
> > In article
> > <0eb91a17-6828-4341-abe3-be498d644...@m3g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
> > Peter T. Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > > On Jun 27, 5:04 pm, OW <bjm...@aol.com> wrote:
> > > > Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it
> > > > elsewhere, though.
>
> > > You must have a really quiet car.
>
> > and it must be large to leave enough bowing room around the
> > musicians. Do you have special seat belts that don't get in the way
> > of the violins and viola? Is there enough space for a piano and
> > double bass for "the Trout"?
>
> There's no need for much room for duos for bassoons, or for duos for a clarinet
> and a bassoon.
Bassoons? In a car???
> > > On Jun 27, 5:04 pm, OW <bjm...@aol.com> wrote:
> > > > Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it
> > > > elsewhere, though.
>
> > > You must have a really quiet car.
>
> > and it must be large to leave enough bowing room around the
> > musicians. Do you have special seat belts that don't get in the way
> > of the violins and viola? Is there enough space for a piano and
> > double bass for "the Trout"?
>
> There's no need for much room for duos for bassoons, or for duos for a clarinet
> and a bassoon.
Even in an SUV, it seems iffy.
Joe Roberts
Jun 28, 2012, 11:27:04 AM6/28/12
to
"Peter T. Daniels" wrote:
> Bassoons? In a car???
>
> Even in an SUV, it seems iffy.
Joe Roberts
Jun 28, 2012, 11:40:38 AM6/28/12
to
OW wrote:
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Then I realized I was missing the whole point about the soulful harmony of composer's intent combined with musicians and audience in a chamber setting. So I went into a Steinway shop and stared at a piano for 4'33" and went out satisfied that I'd had music.
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>> OW wrote:
>>
>> > Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it
>> > elsewhere, though.
>>
>> You must have a really quiet car.
>
> No, I just turn it up loud enough to at least cut through the noise.
I tried that with 4'33" but it didn't work. I had to park the car to hear the piece.
>>
>> > Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it
>> > elsewhere, though.
>>
>> You must have a really quiet car.
>
> No, I just turn it up loud enough to at least cut through the noise.
Then I realized I was missing the whole point about the soulful harmony of composer's intent combined with musicians and audience in a chamber setting. So I went into a Steinway shop and stared at a piano for 4'33" and went out satisfied that I'd had music.
John Wiser
Jun 28, 2012, 1:05:11 PM6/28/12
to
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:633c09af-1a84-403d...@n16g2000vbn.googlegroups.com...
JDW
news:633c09af-1a84-403d...@n16g2000vbn.googlegroups.com...
On Jun 28, 8:45 am, "Gerard" <ghend-nospam_rik...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Alan Dawes <alan.da...@argonet.co.uk> typed:
>
> > In article
> > <0eb91a17-6828-4341-abe3-be498d644...@m3g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
> > Peter T. Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > > On Jun 27, 5:04 pm, OW <bjm...@aol.com> wrote:
> > > > Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it
[snip]>
> Alan Dawes <alan.da...@argonet.co.uk> typed:
>
> > In article
> > <0eb91a17-6828-4341-abe3-be498d644...@m3g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
> > Peter T. Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > > On Jun 27, 5:04 pm, OW <bjm...@aol.com> wrote:
> > > > Chamber music sounds great in the car. I don't care for it
>> There's no need for much room for duos for bassoons, or for duos for a
>> clarinet
>> and a bassoon.
> Bassoons? In a car???
Bassoons anywhere?
>> clarinet
>> and a bassoon.
> Bassoons? In a car???
JDW
OW
Jun 28, 2012, 2:18:04 PM6/28/12
to
>
>
> > No, I just turn it up loud enough to at least cut through the noise.
>
> I tried that with 4'33" but it didn't work. I had to park the car to hear the piece.
>
> Then I realized I was missing the whole point about the soulful harmony of composer's intent combined with musicians and audience in a chamber setting. So I went into a Steinway shop and stared at a piano for 4'33" and went out satisfied that I'd had music.
Don't tell me, let me guess: you're a music professor?
>
> > No, I just turn it up loud enough to at least cut through the noise.
>
> I tried that with 4'33" but it didn't work. I had to park the car to hear the piece.
>
> Then I realized I was missing the whole point about the soulful harmony of composer's intent combined with musicians and audience in a chamber setting. So I went into a Steinway shop and stared at a piano for 4'33" and went out satisfied that I'd had music.
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