Читать книгу Musicking - Christopher Small G. - Страница 10

There is a telling phrase in George Lipsitz’s spirited defense of American popular culture, Time Passages (1990), in which he speaks of audiences for the performance arts in Western industrial societies coming together to share “intimate and personal cultural moments with strangers.” It is an odd thing that Lipsitz reminds us of. Whether it be a play, a film or a musical that we have come to see and hear, an opera, a symphony concert or a pop concert, not to mention a professional wrestling bout, a football game or a tennis match, we accept without thinking about it that not only the performers but also most, if not all, of the audience will be strangers to us. We are prepared to laugh, to weep, to shudder, to be excited, or to be moved to the depth of our being, all in the company of people the majority of whom we have never seen before, to whom we shall probably address not a word or a gesture, and whom we shall in all probability never see again.

What we accept as the norm is, in fact, the exception among the human race as a whole. In the culture of villages, as well as of those quite small cities (by present-day standards), from ancient Athens to eighteenth- century Vienna, which up to the recent past have formed centers of urban culture, performers and audience have known one another as members of the same community. Most of the world’s population lived in villages, where if certain members specialized in instrumental music it was in addition to their agricultural activities, as others might specialize in smithing, milling or shoemaking. And if, like the smith and the miller, they were paid for their services in cash or in kind, it was as part of the system of mutually binding obligations that linked the whole community.

Those music specialists were socially necessary for the central part they played in the rituals of the community that celebrated the mythologies of birth, marriage, death, harvest and the other great events of life. Since everyone took part in the singing and the dancing, the distinction between performers and listeners was generally blurred—if indeed anyone could be called a listener pure and simple. Certainly, just sitting and silently contemplating the performance was no part of the experience. The musical performance was part of that larger dramatic enactment which we call ritual, where the members of the community acted out their relationships and their mutual responsibilities and the identity of the community as a whole was affirmed and celebrated.

In a different way, that was true among the aristocracy, for whom musicking also played its part in the social rituals that maintained their conceptual universe. Music was as much for performing as for listening to, and when musicians were employed, they were there as much to help their employers perform as to perform to them. The musicians were customarily the patron’s servants, and often doubled as gardeners, valets, footmen, and grooms—only the superrich had full-time orchestras—and the listeners were his family, his dependents, and his guests, a tight community. Many of the pieces that the composer-music director composed were not so much for the patron to listen to but for him and members of his household to perform. In addition, the patron himself might well be a composer as well as performer, sometimes of more than amateur competence, as was Henry VIII of England, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and many of the princes of the Hungarian Esterhazy family which in the late eighteenth century was Haydn’s employer.

As for the music of the medieval and Renaissance Christian church, it was a communal offering to their God, in which the choir, should there be one, sang not to but on behalf of the congregation, who approved what they sang with their response of “Amen.” And of course, as is still true today, congregational singing needed no audience.

In none of these forms of musicking did anybody pay for admission to the performance. You were there by right as part of the community, or you were not there at all. Even the first concert societies, from about 1730 onward, were essentially private affairs, limited to a circle of subscribers, who were strictly vetted for their social suitability before being admitted. The practice of selling tickets, throwing open the event to anyone who had the price of admission, originated in the emerging mercantile society of England in the late seventeenth century, but did not become the rule until well into the nineteenth.

Even in modern industrial societies, sharing with strangers some of one’s most profound and personal cultural experiences is not the invariable rule. Not only do there remain smaller communities in which the traditional intimate patterns of performance survive, but even in great cities there are pockets where they remain strong: working-class social clubs; blues and jazz clubs; local repertory theaters; ethnic communities whose ceremonies of birth, death and especially marriage provide occasions for the affirmation of community; groups of friends who meet to make music together; sports and other activities clubs; and of course churches and other religious groups. But they are islands of community among the great sea of impersonal relations of the modern city.

Those attending tonight’s symphony concert come as strangers to one another and seem content to remain so. Even those who have come with friends sit, once the performance begins, still and silent in their seats, each individual alone with his or her own experience, avoiding so much as eye contact with others. Whatever may be the nature of the performance, they experience it, and expect to experience it, in isolation, as solitary individuals.

Strangers they may be to one another, and yet in certain respects not strangers at all. Those taking part in any musical event are to some extent self-selected in terms of their sense of who they are or of who they feel themselves to be, and this event is no exception. Any number of surveys, taken in a number of industrialized countries, confirm that audiences for symphony concerts are overwhelmingly middle and upper class in composition, which is to say, crudely, that they are either members of a group of occupations that includes business, management, the professions and government or are in training for or aspiring to those occupations.

In terms of formal education the well-educated, which is to say those whose schooling was extended beyond adolescence, are in the majority. In terms of income they tend to be above, often well above, the average, and they tend to be older rather than younger. This composition has hardly changed at all over the years since such surveys were taken, despite generations of well-meaning attempts to widen the social base of the audience.

I mention this not to talk about elitism, which is no part of the purpose of this book (the word has in any case become so loaded that it can hardly any longer be used in rational discussion) but to suggest that in the concert hall, as at any other kind of musical event, there is an underlying kinship between the members of the audience. In a certain sense they are at ease with one another, knowing that there are certain kinds of behavior they can expect of one another and other kinds that they need not.

The members of this audience know that they can rely on one another to make the effort to arrive on time and to accept without protest their exclusion if they do not and to keep still and quiet as the musicians play. They expect to be treated with courtesy and respect by the staff of the hall and will complain if they are not so treated. But there is a wider range of behaviors also: not to overdress vulgarly or wear cheap perfume, not to belong to unacceptable racial minorities, not to take too much alcohol or other drugs before the performance or in the interval, not to go to sleep and snore, not to belch or fart or breathe garlic in people’s faces, not to make improper sexual advances, not to pick their pockets or mug them.

In a word, a concert hall is a place where middle-class white people can feel safe together. In this respect its relationships resemble those of an ideal city as imagined by the sociologist Jane Jacobs (1961), which, she says, is a place where strangers can encounter one another in safety. But Jacobs envisages the possibility of an infinite variety of human meetings. What takes place in the concert hall is a narrow range of impersonal encounters among people of more or less the same social class, where each goes his or her own private way without being impinged on to any significant extent by others. It is, we might say, an ideal Westchester or Wimbledon rather than the untidy variety of a Brixton or a Lower East Side.

I remember a tiny and seemingly insignificant happening in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall that, for me, illustrates this feeling of safety. It was during the early 1970s, at a concert of avant-garde music, where the audience was mainly student, bohemian, and intellectual. The night was cold, and I was wearing a bulky sheepskin coat. Not wanting to wait in the long line for the cloakroom, I had the momentary thought that I could hang it in the gents’ washroom, that with this audience it would be safe there. Then I checked myself, remembering that middle-class intellectuals were just as likely as anyone else to knock off a nice sheepskin coat left hanging in the gents’ if they thought they could get away with it. But the thought had come so pat, so unbidden, that it could only have originated in that feeling of being among my own kind, strangers though they may have been to me. In the event I kept the coat on my lap, causing discomfort to myself and annoyance to my neighbors.

Above all, the members of the audience expect one another to respect scrupulously their privacy in the face of the musical experiences they are all undergoing. The aloneness of the individual during the performance is felt not as a deprivation but as the necessary condition for full enjoyment and understanding of the musical works being played. It is not that people do not socialize at a concert; they do, and the socializing is an important part of the event. But we have seen that that takes place in the foyer, before and in the interval of the concert, not in the auditorium. The two halves of the event are physically separated from each other, and the experience of the musical works themselves, the center of the night’s event, is a solitary one.

Orchestra and audience, too, are strangers to one another, and there is no opportunity for them to become anything else, for they enter and leave the building by separate doors, occupy separate parts of it, and never meet during the event. This seems to be felt more as a relief than a deprivation by both parties, who apparently treasure their separation and prefer not to enter into a relationship of familiarity with members of the other group. And on the other hand, the audience is expected to sit quietly and accept the orchestra’s performance as it plays, the only response open to its members being applause at the end. To boo at the end of a performance one has particularly disliked is possible, though a bit extreme. What is not an option is to make any visible or audible response, of either approval or disapproval, during the course of the performance; there is no way in which such a response could be incorporated as an element of the event, in the way that, for example, applause at the end of a solo is incorporated into jazz performance and is a legitimate element of it, or the response of the Jamaican audience I mention below.

The concert hall thus presents us in a clear and unambiguous way with a certain set of relationships, in which the autonomy and privacy of the individual is treasured, a stance of impersonal politeness and good manners is assumed, familiarity is rejected, and the performers and their performance, as long as it is going on, are not subject to the audience’s response. Because people who attend symphony concerts mostly go voluntarily, we can assume that they enjoy doing so; therefore, it is not too far-fetched to suggest that those relationships represent some kind of ideal in the minds of those taking part. I shall be discussing later the general proposition that how we relate is who we are. If that is so, then those taking part in this or any other musical event are, at some level of awareness, saying, to themselves, to one another and to anyone who may be taking notice, This is who we are.

The silence and apparent passivity of audiences at symphony concerts deserves a little more attention. Historically it is a recent practice. The eighteenth-century scene I described in the Rotunda at Ranelagh was by no means exceptional for the time. Aristocratic listeners of the time felt free to treat the musicians and the performance as background to their other activities, to listen attentively when they felt like it and to talk, eat and drink, and even make love when they did not. Why not? The musicians were their servants. In the Paris Opéra, says the historian James H. Johnson (1995), “gripping moments in the drama or especially renowned airs brought silence and genuine attention, but on the whole the Opéra in 1750 was a public setting for private salons, for which the music, dancers and machines provided an excellent backdrop.”

Mozart on his visit to Paris in July 1776, reported in a famous letter to his father his delight when the audience broke into applause during the performance of the symphony he had written for performance there and, perhaps even more significantly, said “Hush!” at the opening of the last movement, which Mozart, cocking a snook at noisy Parisian convention, had written for the violins only, pianissimo. Johnson tells us too that when, in the late 1820s, the symphonies of Beethoven attained a belated recognition with Paris audiences, spectators applauded particularly striking passages and erupted into storms of applause at the end of each movement, sometimes forcing its repetition, while at other times they “bubbled over with happy sighs and murmuring approval.” Such noises do not suggest inattention, and certainly not disrespect, but betoken rather an audience that is active rather than passive in its attention, that considers, in fact, that its own audible responses are a legitimate element of the performance.

The silence that will greet tonight’s performance while it is in progress suggests a different attitude. Those who wish perfect communion with the composer through the performance can have it, uninterrupted by any noise that may signal the presence of other spectators. On the other hand, while our attention is without doubt active, it is detached; we no longer feel ourselves to be part of the performance but listen to it as it were from the outside. Any noise we might make would not be an element of the performance, as were the sighs and murmurs of the Parisian audience, but an interruption or distraction. I have even known the minute clinks and jingles of a female listener’s charm bracelet to put its wearer’s neighbor in a rage.

Who we are, then, is spectators rather than participants, and our silence during the performance is a sign of this condition, that we have nothing to contribute but our attention to the spectacle that has been arranged for us. We might go further and say that we are spectators at a spectacle that is not ours, that our relationship with those who are responsible for the production of the spectacle—the composer, the orchestra, the conductor, and those who make the arrangements for tonight’s concert—is that of consumers to producers, and our only power is that of consumers in general, to buy or not to buy.

Other kinds of performance conjure up other kinds of behavior, other kinds of relationships. Many reveal a complex ambivalence about their ideal relationships that can tell us much about the nature of musical performances and about the function that they serve in human life.

The differences between the various kinds of performance are not clear- cut, of course. It is easy, for example, too easy in fact, to set up a simple antithesis between the relationships of a symphony concert, as a representation of the values of the contemporary industrial world, of the scientific worldview, of the bourgeoisie, or whatever, and those of other ways of musicking—rock for example, or reggae—as representing various degrees of rejection of (or as some would have it, liberation from) those relationships. That kind of neat antithesis has been the basis of a great deal of pop sociology of music, often bringing with it a cargo of unwarranted judgment, either covert or overt. Unfortunately, although there may be some truth in the antithesis, it hardly matches the untidy reality of musicking in the real world.

It is true that there is a good deal of the values of the contemporary industrial world or the scientific worldview built into the symphony concert, including, of course, the musical works that are played there; I suggested that in my first book (Small 1977), and I have seen no reason since to change my mind. But those values permeate as well, to a greater or lesser extent, all the large-scale public musicking that takes place in the Western industrial world.

All public performances, for example, are open to anyone who has the price of admission, which means that the passing of money is an important factor in whatever values are established there. In all of them the experience is shared with strangers, although the degree of intimacy that can be attained during the performance may be different, and in all of them the audience is kept apart from the performers and is to a greater or lesser extent dominated by them. All maintain a network of stars and superstars whose glamour and inaccessibility is part of the deal, and all rely for their very existence, if not as forms of artistic activity then at least as social institutions, on a highly developed technology. The existence of these and other factors in all these kinds of performances makes for a complex ambivalence to which no simple antithesis can do justice.

The great rock festivals of the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were famous as events where strangers came together for a few days in tens and even hundreds of thousands to share not just a musical but a total social experience. They were experienced by those who took part in them as a liberation from the day-to-day social constraints of their lives, where strangers were free to encounter one another, even perhaps to become lovers, where no style of dress (including none at all) or behavior was too outrageous to be tolerated so long as it did not interfere with the enjoyment of others. The musical performances came in an endless stream, sometimes in the foreground and sometimes in the background (whether foreground or background at any moment was an individual matter), but always a magical presence acting as catalyst for whatever human encounters were desired. The sociability was not separate from the performances but an important element of the total musical experience.

During those two or three days it was as if a new society had been brought into existence—loose, tolerant, intimate, unconstrained, and loving—the Age of Aquarius it was called. It was, of course, to a large extent a cleverly stage-managed illusion. But even to the extent that it was genuine, it was not just, as many commentators hastened to point out, that it depended on the very technological culture from which the participants thought themselves to be escaping; it was also, as was pointed out by only a few crotchety critics, that no society, no sociability, not even in the Age of Aquarius, can exist without constraints on behavior.

At rock festivals, as at any other kind of musical event, there were, and are, right and wrong ways to behave, right and wrong ways to dress, to speak and to respond, both to one another and of course to the musical performances. To dress or behave there in ways that come naturally in Symphony Hall would be to invite ridicule, if not downright hostility. There are even right and wrong drugs to get high on; I remember some hash-smoking friends at one rock festival registering fierce disapproval of a nearby group who were drinking alcohol—cider, for god’s sake!

What was extraordinary was the speed with which these norms of behavior became established. Virtually nonexistent at the beginning of the 1960s, they were firmly in place, and even too conventional for some, by the end of that decade. A whole generation of young people was aware of them, even those who did not subscribe to them.

That they were felt by those present not as constraints but as liberation only goes to show how lightly norms fall on those for whom they represent ideal social relationships. But then, that is true of behavior, including dress, at all musical performances, symphony concerts not excepted. The fact that those who enjoy the event do not feel constrained but feel rather that they are behaving in a way that is natural and normal suggests once again that a musical performance, while it lasts, brings into existence relationships that model in metaphoric form those which they would like to see in the wider society of their everyday lives.

It looks as if the relationships that are established in a symphony concert mirror those which we might call the official relationships of our society. At any rate, to take part in a symphony concert, as in other classical music performances, is an activity that earns complete approval from those authorities who provide and attempt to enforce the norms of our social and political lives. As I have already suggested, we behave there according to the canons of middle-class good manners, and we police ourselves for signs of deviance from them. No policemen or security guards are needed to enforce them, no one searches us for weapons or drugs, and we expect to be treated by the hall staff with courtesy and respect.

The further performance behavior deviates from these middle-class norms, the heavier becomes the enforcing presence; even today it is quite common to see security guards patrolling rock concerts. I remember, too, a performance in a London cinema in the late 1970s by a group of Jamaican actors and musicians headed by the distinguished vernacular poet Louise Bennett. Naturally, Jamaicans came in hundreds to see and hear them. It was a happy crowd, mainly middle-aged, with a strong residual sense of their Jamaican roots; there were a few whites, and we all waited good- naturedly in the cold outside the cinema until we were admitted, only a few minutes before the performance was due to start. Finally, we were admitted in single file through the only one of the half dozen entrance doors that was open. Each face was scanned, as its owner passed, by tense and anxious uniformed staff clearly expecting trouble.

As one of the few whites present, I found their attitude offensive, but my black friends shrugged it off, not wanting to spoil their evening by showing resentment too overtly and being refused admittance. During the performance the audience was hardly ever quiet; the buzz of comment and laughter rose and fell with the music, the jokes, the sketches in Jamaican patois, the recitations by Miss Bennett herself, who would probably have wondered what she was doing wrong had this audible reaction not come back to her. It was an essential element of the performance, the audience’s contribution, and without it the performance would have been a sad affair indeed.

At an even further remove from the norms of and the social approval accorded to the symphony concert, there is a description in Tricia Rose’s book on rap, Black Noise (1994), of the indignities that thousands of young black Americans had to endure before being admitted to a rap performance in a big New York stadium. She describes how the initially very good-humored crowd was divided by aggressive security guards into male and female lines, how each individual was separated from others and subjected to a humiliating body pat-down and scan with a metal detector and even a search through handbags and pocketbooks, and how the cheerful, expectant atmosphere rapidly soured. Such procedures not only serve to exacerbate the very attitudes that they purport to control, but they also indicate how heavily the enforcing presence falls upon those whose style of musicking does not fit the approved social norms.

It is not, of course, just the behavior itself that produces anxiety in the authorities—that is for them merely the sign and signal of the identity of those taking part—it is the identity itself that is disturbing. The mere presence of a few hundred middle-aged Jamaicans at a London cinema was enough to inspire fear in the staff and that of thousands of young African Americans coming to enjoy a performance in a New York stadium seems to have caused something approaching panic.

This leads us to an idea that I shall be developing later: that the way people relate to one another as they music is linked not only with the sound relationships that are created by the performers, not only with the participants’ relation to one another, but also with the participants’ relationships to the world outside the performance space, in a complex spiral of relationships, and it is those relationships, and the relationships between relationships, that are the meaning of the performance.

An unsympathetic observer might even find a certain hypocrisy in some popular music situations. Consider, for example, the relation of performers to audience. Many popular artists make a great show of their unity and their solidarity with their listeners; I remember an aging and justly famous star of country music sitting on the edge of the stage with his feet dangling over, thus symbolically breaking through the barrier between himself and the audience, and announcing, “We’re gonna be here all night!” We all cheered, even though we knew no such thing was gonna happen; neither the theater management nor the star’s own handlers would allow the performance to run much over its allotted two hours or so. But we appreciated the gesture, and—who knows?—perhaps he was wishing as sincerely as ourselves that it might be true. I doubt if sensitive artists enjoy the conditions under which they have to perform any more than do sensitive members of the audience.

Again, some popular artists go the the point of behavior onstage that under other circumstances could be interpreted as an invitation to sex. But woe betide any deluded member of the audience who takes the invitation seriously and tries to join the performer onstage. There will be a team of heavies, hired for the purpose, waiting to bundle him or her off, and not too gently either. The nearest anyone not in the performers’ charmed circle will get to them will be in the line for an autograph at the end of the show.

Such pretenses are, of course, absent from symphony concerts. Performers, however glamorous, do not issue sexual invitations, not onstage at any rate, and so do not need a team of heavies to keep people off the platform, and no one feels the need to pretend that the performance is going to go on all night. No hypocrisy there, if hypocrisy it is. But hypocrisy has been called the tribute that vice pays to virtue, and the pretenses that are made in these situations show what it is that those taking part, performers perhaps as well as audience, are looking for in the performance. We might read it as the quest for an ideal of community and conviviality as an antidote for the loneliness of our age.

A festival of folk music shows a similar quest more coherently, through a deliberate informality of presentation that goes beyond that of the usual rock concert. There is a studious avoidance of glamour. Stages are generally small and unpretentious, and amplification, if it is used at all (some folk artists righteously eschew amplification altogether) is discreet. Performers are expected to avoid the kind of forceful self-presentation and domination of the audience that characterizes the rock star and, in a different way, the concert soloist, and to fraternize with the audience when not performing.

This is of course as carefully cultivated a set of behaviors as that which is exhibited in any other musicking. Stars remain stars, even if they shine less ostentatiously than some of their pop or classical colleagues, and a paying public remains a paying public. That the experience is more of the desire for than of the actuality of community is part of my point; the relationships created during a musical performance of any kind are more the ideal, as imagined by the participants, than the present reality.

So if the community of the rock or even the folk concert is nothing more than a carefully orchestrated set of theatrical tricks played in collusion by performers, their handlers and the audience together, we cannot blame them if the participants feel that counterfeit community is better than none at all. In any case, people are on the whole not so silly as not to recognize the gap between desire and reality. What we need to keep in mind is that those taking part in performances of different kinds are looking for different kinds of relationships, and we should not project the ideals of one kind of performance onto another. Any performance, and that includes a symphony concert, should be judged finally on its success in bringing into existence for as long as it lasts a set of relationships that those taking part feel to be ideal and in enabling those taking part to explore, affirm, and celebrate those relationships. Only those taking part will know for sure what is their nature.