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INTRODUCTION

Robert Walser

I am 75 years old and I have learnt that we are on the earth to enjoy it together. Music serves to explore our identity, helps us to know who we are, and to celebrate it.

Christopher Small ¹

Christopher Small was born in New Zealand in 1927 and died in Spain in 2011 at the age of eighty-four, having spent much of his life teaching in London. I believe he was the most profound musical thinker of the twentieth century. I say that because the breadth and depth of his work, in which he drew upon his training as both a scientist and an artist, his accomplishments as a classical musician and as a devoted student of African American music, and his practical experiences as a composer, a pianist, an accompanist, and a teacher, enabled him to become the consummate insider/outsider who could empathetically challenge our assumptions about the nature of music and help us account for the pleasures that it gives us.

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote powerfully about the importance of outsiders for helping insiders understand the significance of things they had taken for granted. Chris, as a New Zealander, as a gay man, as someone without a doctoral degree who had strong opinions about higher education, and as an enthusiastic amateur musician, had forged an identity that didn’t quite fit into the contexts he inhabited during most of his life. And that helped enable him to become an original thinker. Yet it is also true that the insider brings to bear crucial intimate knowledge. The writers who are normally ranked highest in explaining the significance of the classical music tradition have been mostly quite parochial, and they usually did not even imagine that they should try to place that sort of music making in a larger context of human activity. More anthropologically oriented scholars have typically not had the familiarity with the classical tradition that would enable them to discuss its details and analyze its fundamental assumptions. And almost no one outside the official boundaries of music education has cared to question what we do and why we do it when we teach young people about music. Chris saw all of these things as part of the same web of human musicking, the understanding and elucidation of which was his lifelong passion.

Small was both personally modest and as intellectually ambitious as anyone ever has been. He was a bit self-conscious about his unimposing academic pedigree at the same time that he was keenly aware of the potentially revolutionary implications of his thinking. He was flattered that people sought him out and invited him to lecture, especially after his retirement and the gradual circulation of his books. But at the same time he never expressed any doubts about the rightness, the dignity and humaneness, of the stance he took in his writings.

As Thomas S. Kuhn argued half a century ago, paradigms don’t shift when new answers are proposed; they shift when new questions are posed. After reading Christopher Small, to study the works of prominent philosophers of music is to realize that they are proceeding entirely from premises that Small spent his life calling into question. Roger Scruton’s endorsement of the old saw that aesthetic experience involves the appreciation of something “for its own sake” presupposes that music has a “sake,” which it patently does not, being as it is, as Chris always insisted, not a thing at all but an activity that people do. Or when Peter Kivy worries about what it means for music to express emotions, he skates over the fact that music doesn’t express emotion at all—people express and experience emotions through their involvements with one another in various ways, including through the medium of musical sound. As Chris argued in response to something he had read about the effects of postmodern thought, “‘Postmodern thought’ can’t do anything. Only people can do anything! By continuing this kind of … metaphor he’s going back into the same … morass of Platonist assumptions.”² Those who wrangle about exactly how musical works are to be defined are not thinking about the fact that musical scores are only useful as parts of specific musicking situations, in which their meanings change according to the contexts in which they are utilized. The old “hypodermic” model of musical meaning, in which artists use music to inject audiences with feelings or meanings, clashes with Chris’s readings of musicking situations, in which people take part in social rituals. And it doesn’t live up to his steadfast belief that any theorizing about how music works is worthless unless it sheds some light on how all music, of all times and places, becomes a valuable thing for people to do.

In an unpublished file called “Miscellaneous Observations,” Chris wrote, “I am sometimes criticized for not having done research. But whatthehell is the use of doing all this research, a little bit of knowledge here, a little bit there, if someone doesn’t come along and (at least make an attempt to) tell us what it all means. That’s my job.”³ It depends on what you think research is, I guess. Chris’s unpublished papers include thirty-six notebooks, begun in 1969 and continuing through the last dated item, in 2003, and the last dated comments in Chris’s hand, from 2007. In those notebooks, he recorded quotations from and observations about works that comprise an astonishing array of intellectual sources.⁴ Is reading such authors and grappling with the implications of their thinking not to count as research?

Small’s three books in Wesleyan University Press’s Music Culture series, Music, Society, Education, Music of the Common Tongue, and Musicking, comprise an extraordinary legacy and resource. This fourth volume brings previously published work, some of it available in disparate locations, together with key excerpts from the three books he published and other writings that remained unpublished at his passing. It both makes available ideas that were not included in the earlier books and presents an overview of his thought over the course of his life. I hope it rewards those who already know his work and hooks those who don’t, so that they are drawn to read the other books.

I have included here two excerpts from each of Chris’s published books, the introductory chapter and one other, as a way of tracing concisely in this volume the progress of his thought. In the first book, the contrasts between science and art particularly occupied him—art being understood as the classical tradition and its modernist extension, in which Small was trained as a composer—as ways of understanding the world and living well in it. Science, on the other hand—he was a zoology major in college—he understood as a means of mastering the world. By the time the second volume was being written, he had partnered with Neville Braithwaite (see the afterword to this collection), and his focus was on understanding the impact of African American music, which, he had realized, nearly all twentieth-century people had experienced as the only twentieth-century music that really mattered. And in the third book he returned mostly to the classical tradition—or rather its persistence in ritualized form in our time as the only music that could in educated circles be casually referred to as simply “music.”

From Music, Society, Education I chose the chapter on the American experimental tradition, which I have always particularly admired because Chris didn’t necessarily like much of this music, yet he made the best possible case for it. That’s how I teach my students how to teach, and I learned it from him. The other piece from Music of the Common Tongue, in contrast, is a thoughtful meditation on the practice and history of jazz. The second chapter of Musicking I chose is called “A Solitary Flute Player,” and about that I have a confession. Chris begins this piece by relating that certain friends, whom he left anonymous, had tried to discourage him from including it in the book on the grounds that the flute player could all too easily be read as a stereotypical representation of the non-Western Other. Well, those friends were I, I’m afraid, and I was wrong. Chris insisted on including that flute player because that solitary musician exemplified and illuminated some crucial points about musicking—and also because Chris admired and respected the never-heard musicking that he was writing about. So I include it here as a kind of repentance.

But it’s here also because the flute player returns as a topic of discussion in Robert Christgau’s extraordinary interview with Chris, so I’ve placed that chapter immediately before the latter. I call it “extraordinary” because I regard it as simply the finest interview about music I’ve ever read. Bob came to visit Chris in Spain after having studied all three books and thought deeply about their implications. His questioning proceeded from an understanding of Chris’s work and an appreciation of its potential implications for all types of musicking that was second to no one’s. Bob gently pushed Chris beyond what he had written and shows us some hints of where he might have gone in the future.

“Whose Music Do We Teach, Anyway?” is an unpublished address that was given at the Music Educators’ National Conference in Washington, D.C., in 1990. Deliberately provocative, it summarizes his developing thoughts about “musicking,” a concept he had introduced in Music of the Common Tongue, which appeared in print in 1987. Many of these ideas would later be expanded upon in his book Musicking.

“Why Doesn’t the Whole World Love Chamber Music?” was commissioned for delivery in 2001 at an annual conference of Chamber Music America. It was later printed in the journal American Music, of which I was then editor. It builds upon his book Musicking, which had been published three years earlier, but it targets an audience that is obviously very devoted to classical music and challenges them to rethink that investment within larger historical, social, and ethical contexts.

As Chris cheekily pointed out in an interview published the following year in La Vanguardia, when those contexts change, so change the meanings of the musical sounds that occur.⁵ He starts the interview by asking the interviewer a question: “Do you know the Fifth?”

Of Beethoven? Yes of course: Pom Pom Pom Pooooom …

CS: OK, when Beethoven performed it for the first time, these “poms” were like the new dominant class of Europe slapping its chest to proclaim its dominance since the French Revolution. If you listen carefully, you will hear in those notes how the aggressive new bourgeoisie was flexing its muscles for the conquest of the world.

But! The Fifth! Its message is universal and eternal….

CS: On the contrary: it’s different every time. Then it was the song of a class. It was written as a fist in the face of the old order. Things were about to change: pom pom pom pom!

And today how does it sound?

CS: Today it tells us that nothing is going to change. It tells those who are in charge: relax, everything’s going to be the same, the same order: pom pom pom poooooom!

How?

CS: Because it tranquillizes, comforts and gives them security. They think of the Fifth as going on sounding the same in these times of vertiginous change…. Do you see? The composition doesn’t exist without the act of performance.

This exchange raises a crucial point that has sometimes been missed even by some of Small’s biggest fans: he never claimed that musicking was always a good thing. Expert musicking can sometimes yield results that we might consider oppressive or destructive, and amateurish musicking—as long as, Chris always said, everyone was doing the best they could with what they had—can sometimes be a transcendent experience.

After Chris’s first two books were republished and the third was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1997–1999, he received even more invitations to speak abroad, not all of which he could accommodate, unfortunately, due to advancing age. “Creative Reunderstandings” was delivered at a conference at the University of Oslo in 2005. It is of all his writings the most explicitly political, although the moral implications of his work had always been clear enough. Chris was not very optimistic during his last decade about the state of the world, but much of the musicking he encountered continued to delight and encourage him.

“Exploring, Affirming, Celebrating—and Teaching” summarizes in three words the functions of musicking as Chris understood them. It was written for a Spanish journal of music education in 2003 and continues his tendency to become ever more provocative during the dozen or so years of writings and lectures that followed Musicking. He makes explicit here a suspicion that had grown over the course of his life, that it might be better overall not to teach music in schools at all—at a time when he was becoming more and more an intellectual hero to many music educators. This line of thought is extended in his 2009 “Afterword” for a book of essays on music education edited by Ruth Wright. “Six Aphorisms and Five Commentaries” is included here not because it breaks any new ground but because it schematizes briefly and thus handily the main tenets of Chris’s musical thought.

This collection is roughly chronological, but shorter unpublished pieces have been interleaved with the longer ones. Interspersed among the more extended pieces you will find some brief occasional writings, postdating most or all of the books, such as “Deep and Crisp and Even,” a graceful yet somewhat curmudgeonly meditation on Christmas carols that had originally been intended for Musicking. There is also “The Sardana and Its Meanings,” Chris’s warm analysis of the Catalonian circle dance that is a ubiquitous source of pride and community in the region where he resided for the latter part of his life. And we have “Rock Concert,” a brief evaluation of a Barcelona concert by an unnamed American star. I regret that I didn’t know he had written this and so never asked him who that star was. (My best guess would be Tina Turner, who performed for seventy-five thousand people at Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium on October 5, 1990.)

The Reader begins with Chris’s “Autobiography,” written in 2004 and with an addition from 2008, and ends with a lovely lyrical piece called “Pelicans,” which is not about music at all but rather about nature, which is where he started as an undergraduate student so many years earlier, and about aesthetics and human relationships, which is really what concerned him most. Susan McClary closes the book with reminiscences of Neville Braithwaite, Chris’s partner for several decades; they were finally able to marry near the end of his life. I think Neville was the person who most kept alive Chris’s faith in the power of music and dance to help us understand and live well in the world, keeping at bay the cynicism to which we are all too susceptible, and thus enabling Christopher Small to teach us so much.

NOTES

1. Christopher Small, interview in La Vanguardia, September 21, 2002, La Contra (back page). This appeared in Chris’s files in English. I don’t know if the original publication has been translated, and if so by whom.

2. Christopher Small, notebook 36, p. 68, Robert Walser private collection. Chris was a dear friend. Over the years that we knew one another, Susan McClary and I spent a dozen months visiting him and Neville in Sitges, the Catalan town to which they had retired.

3. Christopher Small, “Miscellaneous Observations,” March 10, 1996, Robert Walser private collection.

4. The following are only some of the authors whose books he excerpted: John Berger, C. G. Jung, Herbert Marcuse, Gregory Bateson, Colin McPhee, R. G. Collingwood, William P. Malm, Thomas Mann, Francis Bebey, John Storm Roberts, J. H. K. Nketia, Max Weber, Bruno Nettl, Raymond Williams, Thomas Kuhn, Daniel Bell, Timothy Leary, Herbert Read, Marshall McLuhan, Edgard Varése, Desmond Morris, Norman Mailer, Cornelius Cardew, Pierre Boulez, R. D. Lang, Carlos Castenada, Mircea Eliade, George Steiner, Charles Ives, Henri Pousseur, David Toop, Ivan Illich, Henry David Thoreau, Clifford Geertz, Colin Turnbull, Arnold van Gennep, Paul Feyerabend, Eugene Genovese, E. P. Thompson, Harry Partch, Jacques Attali, John Blacking, Lewis Mumford, Bill C. Malone, Lawrence Levine, Henry Pleasants, Alan P. Merriam, Mantle Hood, Ernest Cassirer, Simon Frith, Stuart Hall, Theodor W. Adorno, Paul Oliver, Charlie Gillett, Paul E. Willis, Albert Murray, Charles Keil, David P. McAllester, Richard Hoggart, John F. Szwed, Eileen Southern, Peter Guralnick, William Ferris Jr., Friedrich Blume, André Hodier, Val Wilmer, LeRoi Jones, Howard Zinn, Aldous Huxley, Robert Farris Thompson, Alan Lomax, Richard Waterman, Nancy Cunard, Charles Hamm, Paul Henry Lang, Andrew Tracy, William Weber, Ben Sidran, Jacques Chailley, Henry Raynor, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Janet Wolff, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Carl Dalhaus, Joseph Kerman, Gunther Schuller, Jeff Todd Titon, Robert Palmer, Greil Marcus, David Toop, Dave Laing, Christopher Ballentyne, Suzanne K. Langer, John A. Sloboda, Leonard B. Meyer, Noam Chomsky, Lucy Green, John Chernoff, Henry Kingsbury, Joseph Horowitz, Richard Middleton, George Lipsitz, Daniel K. L. Chua, Martha Feldman, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Lawrence Kramer, Paul Gilroy, Thrasybulos Georgiades, Eric R. Wolf, Mark Slobin, Gerald Edelman, Carlo Ginsberg, M. M. Bakhtin, Neal Zaslaw, Richard Taruskin, Tricia Rose, María Rosa Menocal, Richard L. Crocker, John Potter, Michel Foucault, Mark Johnson, Bruno Latour, Dave Hickey, and Marshall Berman.

5. Small, interview in La Vanguardia.