Note: I have inserted paragraph numbers for reference during discussion, and the passages in bold are ideas I’d like you to pay particular attention to. If you want to read the entire lecture text, use the URL above. This lecture was delivered in 1995. In 1998, Small published a book, Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening (which you can read large portions of at http://books.google.com/books/about/Musicking.html?id=7vS8yQwvuGcC), exploring the same ideas at greater length and at times more entertainingly. You’ll notice that he is arguing against what he finds to be a prevalent attitude among scholars, that the “meaning” of music is the meaning of a particular work of music. For Small, this overly work-focused view has limited the way in which classical musicians think about what they do as well as how they actually make music. Since he is criticizing a culture to which you have not yet been fully introduced, it might not fully resonate with you. But I think you'll get it enough to have a worthwhile conversation.
OK, here’s the excerpt:
(2) For more years than I care to think about I have been worrying away at the question, or, rather, pair of questions: What is the nature of music? and What is its function in human life? In the life, that is, of every single member of the human species? I have reached some tentative conclusions, and it's those I'd like to talk about today. I make no apology for throwing my two cents worth into a pair of questions that seem to have defeated some of the best minds in western thought, at least since the time of Plato, since I feel I do have something to contribute to the formulation of the question and even possibly to an answer.
(3) In search of that answer I have over the years read as widely as I could in the philosophy, and the esthetics, and the history, and the sociology of music, and I have done my best to make sense of Kant and of Hegel and of Schopenhauer, and I have read Adorno, and I have read Lucacs and Langer and Meyer, and I didn't find any of them of much use to me. In the first place, they were all much too abstract and complicated. I find it hard to make myself believe that so universal and so concrete a human activity as music should require such complicated and abstract explanations. It all seems terribly remote not just from my own musical experience, whether it's as performer, or as listener, or as composer, or as teacher, but even more so from the experience of the vast majority of my pupils and students.
(4) In the second place, those writers, and others like them, deal more or less exclusively with what we today would call the western high-art tradition and accept without question the assumptions of that tradition, without showing any awareness that they are just assumptions; it is rare indeed in western writings on the esthetics of music to find so much as a glance outwards to the experience of other cultures, even as far as western popular traditions.
(5) And thirdly, I have a problem with their use of the word `music'. One moment it's treated as if the art itself were a thing, with powers of growth and development and action, and then suddenly, by a stealthy process of elision, the thing `music' becomes equated with those works of music which are the pride and the glory of the western tradition. And then the assumption is quietly made that it is in those works, those music objects, that the nature and the meaning of music reside.
(6) The assumption isn't made as explicit as that, of course. But it does surface from time to time, as when Carl Dalhaus (1983) asserts quite bluntly that `The concept "work" and not "event" is the cornerstone of music history' and adds a little later that `The subject matter of music is made up, primarily, of significant works of music that have outlived the culture of their age'. Or when the critic Walter Benjamin says, in a single memorable sentence, `The supreme reality of art is the isolated, self contained work'.
(7) And so, when they talk about the effect of music--the emotions it arouses, for example--what they're really talking about is the effect of a work of music. And, further, they mean specifically the work's effect on a individual listener, not on a composer, and certainly not on a performer. This is curious when you think about it, since performers are without doubt the most active members of the composer-performer-listener triad, and one would imagine that they would be most in need of a good reason for doing what they do. It's a curious fact that performers and performance are hardly ever mentioned in writings on the meaning of music. It seems that a work of music has an ideal platonic existence over and above any possible performance of it. It's as if each work were floating through history, untouched by time and social change, waiting for an ideal listener to draw its meaning out, by a process that Kant called disinterested contemplation. Performance, if it gets thought about at all, which is seldom, is nothing more than the medium through which the work has to pass before it can reach its goal, the listener. As for performers, they are the servants of the work and of its composer, and, like servants generally, the more unobtrusively they can do their menial job the better.
(8) And so philosophers and musicologists, and sometimes even composers, who ought to know better, bury their heads in their scores, which is where the essence of the work is thought to reside -- where else could it possibly be found? -- with scarcely a glance outwards to that real world where people actually make and listen to music. Like Emmanuel Kant, sitting writing year after year in his musty study in Konigsberg -- I sometimes wonder what would have happened to his concept of disinterested contemplation if he'd ever ventured out as far as the nearest tavern. Like Brahms, who, we are told, turned down an invitation to a performance of Don Giovanni saying he'd sooner stay home and read the score. I hate to think what Mozart, the supreme practical musician, would have had to say about that. A hearty bit of Viennese scatology, I'll bet.
(9) 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, fields and nightclubs, discos and palaces, stadiums and elevators, it is performance that is central to the experience of music. There can be no music apart from performance, whether it's live or on record. You don't need a musical work at all -- in many of the world's great musical cultures there's no such thing -- and you don't even need a listener, at least not one separate from performers. But you can't have music unless someone is performing. And when I talk of performing I don't just mean a formal public event. I mean any occasion when anyone is singing or playing, whether it's too him or herself, to a small group of family or friends or to an audience of thousands. So it seems to me self-evident that the place to start thinking about the meaning of music and its function in human life is not with musical works at all but with performing.
(10) Now if there is anything that's clear about performing it is that it is action, it's something that people do. We could call it an encounter between human beings that is mediated by nonverbal organized sounds. All those present, listeners as well as performers, are engaging in the encounter, and all are contributing to the nature of the encounter through the human relationships that together they bring into existence during the performance.
(11) As I thought about this, I realized that if music isn't a thing but an action, then 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 verbs for that -- but to express the idea of taking part in a musical performance. And, as those of you who have read my book Music of the Common Tongue (1987) will know, I have taken the liberty of redefining this verb, which does in fact have an obscure existence in some of the larger English dictionaries, to suit this purpose. I offer it to you now, the verb `to music', with its present participle `musicking' as in the title of this talk -- the added `k' is no caprice but has historical antecedents -- not as verbal cutesiness but as a genuine tool for the understanding of the act of music and of its function in human life.
(12) This is how I have redefined 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 any other activity which can affect the nature of the human encounter. We should certainly include dancing, should anyone be dancing, and we might even stretch the meaning on occasion to include what the lady is doing who takes the tickets on the door, or the hefty men who shift the piano around or the cleaners who clean up afterwards, since their activities all affect the nature of the event which is a musical performance.
(13) It will become clear as we go along how useful this verb can be, and I shall use it from now on as if it were the proper English-language verb I hope it will become.
(14) Apart from favoring the idea that music is action, the verb has other useful implications. In the first place, 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 which all those present bear a responsibility. It isn't just a matter of composers, or even performers, actively doing something for the passive rest of us to contemplate. Whatever it is that is being done, we are all doing it together.
(15) When we use the verb we take into account the whole event, not just what the performers are doing, and certainly not just the work that is being played. We acknowledge that a musical performance is an encounter between human beings in which meanings are being generated. As with all human encounters it takes place in a physical and a social space, and that space also has to be taken into account as well when we ask what meanings are being generated in a performance.
(16) And if musicking is action and not thing, a verb and not a noun, then we should look for its meaning not in those musical objects, those symphonies and concertos and operas, or even those melodies and songs, that we have been taught to regard as the repositories of musical meaning. You will understand that I'm not trying to deny the existence of those objects, which would be silly, or even to deny that they have meanings in themselves. What I am saying is that the fundamental nature, and thus the meaning, of music lies not in those objects but in the act of musicking. It lies in what people do. Musical objects have meaning only in so far as they contribute to the human activity which is musicking. Only by thinking in that manner can we hope to gain an understanding of its nature and of its function in human life.
(17) That being so, the question which is most useful to us is not, What is the meaning of this musical work? which is the question that is asked by philosophers and musicologists alike. No: the really useful question is, What does it mean when this performance takes place at this time, in this place, with these people taking part?
(18) You will notice, on the one hand, that by framing the question in this way we don't have to assume the existence of a musical work at all. After all, in many of the world's musical cultures there's no such thing, so that the musicologists' question has no meaning. But on the other hand, it doesn't exclude the possibility of a stable musical work. It just removes the musical work from centre stage, and subsumes its meanings into a larger meaning, that of the total event which is the performance.
(19) The question then arises, In what does the meaning of this human encounter that is a musical performance consist? The answer I am going to propose is this. The act of musicking brings into existence among those present a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act of musicking lies. It lies not only in the relationships between the humanly organized sounds that are conventionally thought of as the stuff of music, but also in the relationships that are established between person and person within the performance space. These sets of relationships stand in turn for relationships in the larger world outside the performance space, relationships between person and person, between individual and society, humanity and the natural world and even the supernatural world, as they are imagined to be by those taking part in the performance. Those are important matters, perhaps the most important in human life.
(20) 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 together we bring into existence model those of the cosmos as we believe that they are and that they ought to be. We do not just learn about those relationships, but we actually experience them in all their beautiful complexity. The musicking empowers us to experience the actual structure of our universe, and in experiencing it we learn, not just intellectually, but in the very depths of our existence, what our place is within it and how we relate, and ought to relate, to it. We explore those relationships, we affirm them and we celebrate them, every time we take part in a musical performance.
