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Autobiography

(2004; REV. 2008)

When I left school at eighteen, with a three-year university scholarship under my belt, I thought I was clear about what I was going to do with my life. I was going to be a doctor—not any old common-or-garden GP or even surgeon but a public health doctor. My father’s cousin’s husband was public health officer in Dunedin, and I had accompanied him on his rounds in that quaint Victorian city and seen some of its messy underside. I was going to get my medical degree and then study for the Diploma of Public Heath, which included topics like geology, hydrology, plumbing, economics, and even, if I remember correctly, a little seismology—all to me topics of much more interest than the messy structure of people’s insides.

At that time, music was little more than an intensely practiced avocation. It was in the family, though there was very little stimulation from the dull town in which we lived. My early memories include my mother singing me to sleep with lovely Edwardian music-hall songs, and we had a gramophone—phonograph to you—a big windup acoustic HMV console model ornamented with machine-carved curlicues, and an assortment of records, 78 rpms of course, which I had the run of from an early age. When I was ill, which was often when I was a child, I used to have the big HMV beside my bed, which would be strewn with records. I can still hear one, called Herd Girl’s Dream, played by a trio of flute, violin, and harp, which at six or seven I thought the most beautiful music in all the world. I remember every note of it, though the record disappeared, as they do, more than fifty years ago.

We had other records too, album sets proudly proclaiming the “new electrical process”: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Emperor Concerto; the New World Symphony, which at age twelve or so I prided myself on being able to whistle my way through from start to finish; The Gondoliers of Gilbert and Sullivan, which my sister and I used to sing over the washing up; Schubert’s B-flat Trio; excerpts from act 3 of Tristan und Isolde; and the suite from Swan Lake (when I hear any of those longer works today I still have a kinesthetic memory in the seat of my pants of where I had to get up to turn the record over). I liked also to play some of the jazz records that my elder brother brought home from university in the late thirties in the teeth of our parents’ disapproval: some Duke Ellington, whose sound fascinated me with its fine-drawn, plangent quality, along with Nat Gonella and his Georgians and Harry Roy and his Tiger Ragamuffins (you won’t have heard of them, but they were good musicians who were trying to establish jazz in Britain in the 1930s in the face of the indifference or hostility of the middle-class-dominated BBC and entertainment industry). Our parents wouldn’t let him desecrate the big HMV in the dining room with such terrible noises so he had to listen to them in his own room on a tinny little portable. When he was in the mood he would sometimes let me come in with him and listen in, as we used to say in those days. Later, after seeing the George Gershwin biopic with Alan Alda’s father as the composer, our parents relented somewhat and the records were allowed to be brought downstairs.

There was also Paul Whiteman making a lady out of jazz, “vocal gems” from operettas, and a lot of dance records, foxtrots and quicksteps, hits of the day now forgotten with titles like “Goodnight Sweetheart” and “In a Little Gypsy Tearoom”—the word had much more innocent connotations in those days. Or maybe it didn’t—who knows?

And we had the six-foot contralto Clara Butt belting out “Land of Hope and Glory,” Gounod’s “Serenade,” black spirituals, Layton and Johnson’s “It Was a Lover and His Lass,” a few comic monologues, and one record from a four-record set—all I knew of the piece for years—of the second movement and the start of the third of Schumann’s Piano Concerto. I played and loved them all indiscriminately, blissfully unaware at that age that there was one thing called “classical music” and another called “popular music” and that one was better than the other.

Then there was the piano, which I started learning at the age of seven. It seems that my teacher, to whom I’m eternally grateful, didn’t approve of those grade examinations of the Royal Schools of Music to which my contemporaries were put, painfully learning three set pieces a year, but instead presented me with easy pieces of Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and Palmgren along with easy arrangements of popular songs (those from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves were contemporary favorites), and later Granados, Debussy, and Bartok—all moderns in those days. I remember also in my early teens triumphantly bringing him an ancient volume of Mozart sonatas that an old lady had given me, as if I’d rediscovered them all by myself—which in a way I had—and this while my contemporaries were learning their boring exam pieces and practicing scales (never in my whole life have I practiced scales) and were being taught The Robin’s Return and Blumenlied (though I later found Blumenlied for myself and played it con amore).

My mother didn’t play an instrument, although she was proud of the fact that her father, who was a printer by trade, had conducted a choral society in Wellington. I still have the baton that his choir presented to him in 1896. It’s made of polished oak and bound in silver engraved with his name and the date and weighs about half a pound. They must have been giants in those days. My father played the piano quite well and had a nice baritone voice. He loved to sing to his own accompaniment—sea songs, old popular songs, Tom Moore, and Burns; his party piece was the Cobbler’s Song from the cod-Chinese musical Chu Chin Chow, which he and my mother had seen in London in 1919 when he was there as an army dentist. He also liked to do The Holy City, although he never could quite manage the repeated triplet chords in the accompaniment. Years later, when I went to live in Catalonia, I made an arrangement of it for a friend of mine who has a magnificent tenor voice to do with the local choir. It may be an old warhorse in Anglo-Saxon countries, but it was a breathtaking novelty in Spain and for a while they couldn’t get enough of it.

As my sister and I began to get a bit good on the piano (she is still, in her eighties, a fine pianist with a string of pupils in the lovely little New Zealand country town where she has lived and brought up a family for more than fifty years), he stopped, and I never heard him sing or play in later years. I wonder if my priggish adolescent attitudes might have had something to do with it; I remember being ashamed when he played and sang in front of my intellectual school friends, and I daresay I showed it. He did, however, snap back at me once (I loved him, as did everyone, but he did have his fits of irritation) when I ridiculed a ukulele-playing British film comedian called George Formby: “I bet he practices his uke at least as hard as you practice your bloody piano.” Touché; my skills at the piano came all too easily, and at that teenaged time I was fonder of showing off to visitors (showers of wrong notes, but ah, the expression!) than I was of practicing.

My brother’s violin teacher played lunchtimes in a trio in the elegant woodpaneled restaurant of the town’s posh department store. They were scarcely audible at times over the conversations and the noise of serving and eating, but they were a treat for me (three musicians at a time were still the most that I had ever heard!), and today the sound of that despised genre, café music, all too rarely heard these days, retains a special magic, especially when heard through the noise of cutlery and plates. Years later, on my first visit to Venice, the café bands in Saint Mark’s Square brought it all back to me in a wave of intense, nostalgic joy. On occasional evenings the British Music Society would bring musicians from Wellington, and my parents and I would make our way through the darkened haberdashery department of that same department store, at four stories the tallest building in town, and up to the restaurant where the concerts were held. I haven’t the faintest recollection of what was played or sung on those occasions, but I remember the delicious feeling of being initiated at that early age into an adult society that was in some way defined by attendance at those concerts. It was around that time too that I learned the skills of sitting still and concealing boredom, during long evenings at the home of a record-collecting lecturer in the local agricultural college, while he played his records: the complete Saint Matthew Passion, it might be, or what seemed like a couple of hundred Scarlatti sonatas played by Wanda Landowska one after the other on the harpsichord, a sound I have never managed to like—all at that time as incomprehensible as music from Mars. Those record evenings resonate down the years so that, even today, to hear the Matthew Passion gives me a distinct feeling of being on the outside looking—or listening—in.

There was not much live popular music. There was an exuberant boy in high school whom we intellectuals affected to despise but whom I secretly envied for his ability to play pop tunes by ear; “Darktown Strutters Ball” was his signature tune. He later had a very good dance band. But it never occurred to me to try it for myself.

Playing by ear was a skill I acquired only years later in my first teaching job in a large country secondary school with no money to buy sheet music. Every Friday morning I had to take the whole school—750 pupils—for singing, with a huge brute of a piano missing one caster so it looked like the Titanic going down. Each pupil had a copy of the school songbook with words only of a hundred or so hearty, patriotic, and folksy songs, leaving me to make up the accompaniments. I remember the thrill when in the third line of “Santa Lucia” I discovered the V of II–II progression.

The only other live popular music I heard came from a dreary little trio of bored local musicians—piano, sax, and drums—that droned its way, Victor Sylvester style, through foxtrots, quicksteps, and waltzes at teenage dances organized by the upper-class mothers of the town. I attended these affairs under bitter protest seething with a rebellion that hadn’t yet acquired the nerve to surface.

I vividly remember hearing a symphony orchestra live for the first time. I was twenty, and it was the newly formed New Zealand National Orchestra in the fine old Wellington Town Hall, built barely sixty years after the first British settlers had landed on the foreshore. It didn’t sound at all like the records I’d been listening to. Those records gave an impression of a sonic space that was completely saturated by the sounds, but this sound was thinner, finer, and there was space around it. It didn’t completely fill the hall but left the music room to breathe. I was, and remain, enchanted by it. Later I discovered that the London Royal Festival Hall, despite all attempts to “fix” the acoustics, had something like the same sound (interestingly, it was not liked by either performers or audiences).

My medical ambitions had to be postponed, as the year in which I passed the entrance exam for what was then the only medical school in New Zealand was the year in which the soldiers came back from the Second World War, many of them already holding medical entrance certificates and wanting to get back to study. Rightly, they were given preference over youngsters like me, so there was no room in the medical school for me and a number of my contemporaries. They told us that science graduates would get preference for admission, so a dozen or so of us gritted our teeth and set out on science degrees.

To my astonishment I found the whole course fascinating: zoology, botany, organic and inorganic chemistry, and geology (geomorphology opened my eyes to the New Zealand landscape, while paleontology and stratigraphy vanquished convincingly and forever any literal interpretation of the Old Testament and with that most of its authority). Zoology in those days was mostly comparative anatomy, and I did my dissections of those unfortunate creatures with a zest and a perpetual astonishment at the unity in variety that they displayed. What I didn’t understand then was that I was learning about relationships—relationships between the parts of an individual creature, relationships between those relationships in another creature, and relationships between relationships between relationships between groups and groups and so on until the whole living world could be seen to be related. Can you imagine how I felt when, in May 1975, according to the date I wrote on the flyleaf, I read Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, picked up casually in a bookshop in London?

I remember our prof of zoology giving us a few lectures on a new science, called ecology (none of us had heard the word before), while our geology prof, one of the last of the old-style heroic Victorian naturalists, talked to us about Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift (“Most geologists think it’s rubbish, but some of you might find something in it”). I used to spend weekends at the marine biological station down by the harbor, up to my thighs in gooey mud, counting ascidians and other creatures of the tidal zone, and other weekends up the rivers of North Otago looking for, and finding, abundant creatures of the Cretaceous, and even a perfect vertebra of a moa, the two-meter-high flightless bird that was hunted to extinction by the Maori in the eighteenth century. I polished it and used it for years as a paperweight.

In the meantime my interest in music was broadening and deepening. I took piano lessons from a German Jewish refugee musician and read everything I could find about it and listened to whatever I could hear. I even composed a few little pieces including an attempt at a piano sonata, not really knowing what I was doing as I had never studied what was called “theory.” Finally, with my BS degree behind me, I confronted my parents with what I now really wanted to do, which was to practice music. They grilled me carefully and finally agreed to support me through a music degree. In March 1949 I began my studies in the newly established Department of Music at Victoria University of Wellington, with one classroom over the chemistry labs, so that there was always the faint smell of hydrogen sulfide. It doubled as concert room with the addition of a standard lamp. It had a piano and a record player, a senior lecturer and a lecturer, and that was it. The lecturer was Douglas Lilburn, New Zealand’s first professionally trained composer—he had studied at the Royal College of Music and with Vaughan Williams—and although the bachelor of music syllabus didn’t require one to play a note on an instrument, we were taught very thoroughly the rudiments of composition. In order to graduate we were required to compose a large-scale piece for chorus and orchestra. Mine was a setting of W. H. Auden’s Look, Stranger, composed in ignorance that it had formed part of Benjamin Britten’s cycle On This Island (I still like mine better). The choir of Wellington Teachers’ College did a roughish but enthusiastic performance of it with two pianos, and it turned out pretty well I think. I studied piano with a wonderful teacher who had been a pupil of Bartok in Budapest and had done a PhD in Vienna (thank you again, Adolf Hitler), and I became a competent pianist with an LRSM (Licentiate of the Royal Schools of Music) behind me.

We were thoroughly grounded in the history of Western music, harmony, canon, fugue, orchestration, and so on. When I look at some of the posh American universities with their millions of dollars of buildings and equipment, I don’t feel at all envious. I was taught pretty well. My one regret is that when in my second year I was offered a post as a kind of répétiteur with the Wellington Amateur Operatic Society (despite the name they did mostly musicals, pre-Oklahoma!), I asked Douglas if I should take the job. His reply was terse: “If I were you I’d keep my ears clean.” So I turned the job down and have regretted it ever since as an opportunity lost to learn essential skills on the job.

I started at Wellington Teachers’ College in 1952 but left after one year, with the blessing of the principal, to work with a small group that was trying to get an educational animated film studio started in a small town north of Wellington. It was a bad time; to keep the place alive I taught all day in the local secondary school and worked on filmmaking all night—that is, when we were not taking part in endless rows provoked by the pugnacious little Scot who had started the thing and finally destroyed it with his quarrelsomeness and touchiness. It was at the end of 1958 that I finally got up the courage to get the hell out and went back to teaching. I had written a handful of scores for short films and had learned a lot, so that when I got a letter from a dance teacher in Wellington inviting me to compose a score for the first ballet to be entirely created by New Zealanders, I jumped at it. It was in two acts, three quarters of an hour long, the biggest thing I had ever attempted. It was performed in Wellington in February 1960 with a mainly amateur cast and was reckoned a success, though today I find its treatment of Maori culture cringe making—it was based on a sentimentalized version of a Maori legend and featured Maori maidens in brown body stockings dancing on points. I don’t think anyone would dare produce it today, although it was revived and toured in 1970 by the newly formed Royal New Zealand Ballet.

I’ve never had such a high in all my life as on the night of the orchestral rehearsal, hearing my music played by twenty-five good musicians from the New Zealand National Orchestra (NZNO). A friend of mine described the music as Sibelius and water, which I took as a compliment. I was happy not to conduct. That was done by the leader of the NZNO, a fine musician who had played pre-World War II in the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Thomas Beecham and had managed to keep alive for many years a good semipro string orchestra, taking it to audiences of farmers and coal miners in the backblocks, and playing them Bach and Britten, Warlock and Tchaikovsky, as well as pieces by NZ composers who were starting to emerge. National radio later broadcast a suite from my ballet, in an arrangement I had made for full orchestra.

I applied for, and won, a New Zealand government scholarship that would give me two years’ study abroad at five hundred pounds a year, not much even in those days, but with a little copying for the BBC (sweated labor at a shilling and ninepence a page—seven and a half pence in today’s money), I managed to survive.

In those days for us colonials, “abroad” meant England, and I arrived in London in April 1961 with not much idea what I was going to do with my two years of freedom and no one to advise me. I went to the Royal College of Music, where they told me politely that they didn’t want me. I now know that I’d have done better career wise to enroll at, maybe, Cambridge or York University, where I could have done a doctorate full time in the two years, but I didn’t know that then, and so I wrote to Michael Tippett asking for lessons (I thought I might as well start at the top). He politely refused but told me that in his opinion the best teacher in England was Priaulx Rainier, so I wrote to her, made an appointment, and went to see her. She was in her sixties then, a composer of gritty and dissonant though not serial music. She looked through my precious ballet score and one or two other things, finally putting them aside and saying, “Now let’s see what you can really do.”

I was working entirely on my own, living in a bedsitter, with no opportunities for performance, not even a piano, and no acquaintance among musicians in London. It was really more or less hopeless, but I persevered and composed a number of instrumental pieces and songs under Priaulx’s supervision and a large orchestral piece, rather in the manner of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces Opus 16. In August 1962 she sent me to the summer school of music at Dartington in Devon. There I found myself in a new world, the young lions of the avant-garde, whose talk was all about aleatoricism and total serialism, whose heroes were Boulez and Stockhausen, Berio and Cage, none of whom I had then heard of. I enrolled in the composition class, with Luigi Nono as tutor. The young lions (I was thirty-five at that time) excluded me, were deaf to my pleas to tell me what it was they were talking about, made it clear they thought Priaulx Rainier was something out of the ark, and generally treated me and my idols with contempt. Sibelius? What’s that? One bright spot was that I got an eminent clarinetist to look at some duos for clarinets I had written for Priaulx. He liked them and got two of his pupils to play them at an informal afternoon concert. Another was meeting Bernard Rands, fresh from study in Florence with Luciano Berio, and currently a lecturer in the University of North Wales in Bangor. He spent a whole afternoon with me with pencil and manuscript paper explaining the principles of serial composition and other concepts. I shall always be grateful to him for that. We become good friends, and in subsequent years I spent a lot of time at his home in Bangor, and later at York, and through him met Berio and Cathy Berberian and a number of other luminaries of the time. It was also Bernard who introduced me to the idea of music as gesture, though I really didn’t understand it at the time, and in any case he was thinking more in terms of a musical work than of performance. Berio’s series of pieces for solo instrument, called Sequenzas, I found interesting, especially the one for trombone, which I heard at the Queen Elizabeth Hall played by the marvelous jazz trombonist Paul Rutherford. It was wildly applauded and praised by the critics, until Rutherford admitted that he’d played the first measures of the score and improvised the rest. The avant-gardists never forgave him, but Berio didn’t seem to mind too much.

But for all Bernard’s help I never got on with serial composition, Schoenbergian, Webernian, or Boulezian. I just couldn’t make myself believe that what I had written sounded like music. I went to every avant-garde concert I could find in London and enjoyed many of them, while others I couldn’t make head or tail of. I kept writing pieces in the hope that someday they might get performed, but I found myself drifting back into my old tonal habits. When the scholarship ran out I found myself faced with the task of finding a way of making a living. I drifted for a couple of years, doing supply teaching and working for a couple of years for a cheapjack publisher that made pirated versions of Soviet publications on science and technology. They paid quite good money, but I realized one day that this wasn’t what I wanted or ought to be doing with my life, and applied for a teaching post. I had to go right back to a rookie’s job, but that was good for me, and in April 1967 I found myself appointed to a wonderful secondary modern girls’ school in north London.

The first thing I saw when I walked in the place was a play rehearsal going on in the school hall. What were they rehearsing? My god, the Antigone of Sophocles, with a tall, hugely intelligent black girl as the blind seer Tiresias. These were supposed to be the dumb kids! I got stuck in, went to any number of teachers’ courses, and started developing some ideas on how to get the kids composing. All my ideas were of course based on the avant-garde, but I did have some successes, including a twenty-minute Christmas cantata based on New Testament texts, with each class in the school’s first year contributing a section. They did it at the school’s pre-Christmas concert, and it went over like a bomb. The idea that I worked on had come to me fully formed: that all children have the potential to be composers as well as performers. Another idea that came to me very quickly when I attempted to teach recorder to the kids is that recorders are not instruments that children ought to be required to play. They are very difficult, and especially difficult to keep in tune, which makes them very unrewarding for young children. The fact that an instrument is technologically simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy to play. Quite the opposite in fact—the complexities of modern wind instruments come from the need to make them easier, not harder, to play. (I have long suspected that the ubiquity of recorders in schools originated in a very skillful commercial ploy by the Dolmetsch family, playing on the snobbery of the “early music” movement). The other thing about them is the (to me at least) horrible sound they make. After a few months of persevering I bought a set of despised penny whistles and handed them out to one class—instant improvement! They were easier to keep in tune, provided a much pleasanter sound, and gained much more enthusiastic participation from the class.

I didn’t get far with these developments, as I was appointed in 1968 to a teachers’ college in Birmingham, a small (about two hundred students) women’s physical education college. I had hoped to do a lot of music for dance, but to my surprise I received no encouragement from the dance staff. I had so little to do in fact that I offered myself to a local primary school and spent Friday afternoons teaching there. That was a lot of fun, but my superiors didn’t think I ought to be working outside the college and it ended after a term. I also worked weekends with the Schools Outreach section of the Belgrade Theater in nearby Coventry and spent an exhilarating fourteen hours one Saturday with the actors creating and recording music for a play they were touring in schools. It later won a prize. Then there was an adults’ Saturday-afternoon music workshop in the Birmingham and Midland Institute that I ran for a couple of years. I also started getting invitations to talk about and demonstrate my ideas on pupils’ composition around the English Midlands and beyond.

All these engagements helped me in two ways. First was that I got to do work that I never managed to do in London, and the second was that it all helped me little by little to evolve my ideas, which include (1) music is basically performance and (2) all normally endowed human beings are capable of taking an active part in a musical performance. The idea of “musicking” itself came later, around the time when I was writing Music of the Common Tongue in the mideighties.

A landmark in my musical experience was going to the last of the great Isle of Wight rock festivals in July 1970. I could find no one of my age to go with me, so I bought a backpack and a sleeping bag and off I went on my own. I was taken up by a group of young U.S. Air Force conscripts and their wives/girlfriends, who found the old man (I was forty-two) amusing and were nice to me and kept me happily stoned the entire weekend. The experience of sitting out in the (mostly) beautiful weather in the midst of this vast crowd and being immersed in music for nearly twenty-four hours a day for three days was for me staggering—The Who, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Chicago, Donovan, Miles Davis, and Jimi Hendrix. Oh yes, and Tiny Tim … I remember my American friends’ disgust at the tasteless behavior of a group near us, who were drinking alcohol—not just that but cider for god’s sake! I arrived back in Birmingham exhausted, saturated with music and marijuana and generally mindblown, and took about a week to come back to earth. What the experience did to my senses and my feeling for the order of things is something I am still coming to terms with.

I returned to London in 1981, having been appointed senior lecturer in music at Ealing Technical College, later Ealing College of Higher Education, later Ealing Polytechnic, and currently Thames Valley University. Still the same grotty dump that we loved back in ’71, the only difference is that the standard of teaching and general adventurousness have gone down in proportion as the status of the place has gone up. For me it was, at least initially, a great experience. The head of the Music Division was a straight-up-and-down Royal College of Music musician, a fine organist and choral conductor of the most traditional kind. But he used to say to me, “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, Chris, but if you think it’s music, go ahead and do it.” We got on well for the fifteen years I spent there until I retired in 1986.

In the early seventies we constructed a new BA in humanities degree under the aegis of the Council for National Academic Awards, and I was entrusted with the design of the first-year music course. I insisted that it be accessible to anyone interested, regardless of his or her level of musical expertise or previous musical experience. I included a three-hour practical composition workshop each week, which proved popular and useful.

We attracted some very offbeat students, one of whom introduced me to one of the finest musicians and teachers I have ever met: the jazz drummer John Stevens. His drumming was beautiful, and I could listen to him alone for hours—always different, always wonderfully fluid, and yet you never had the slightest doubt where the beat was (unless he wanted you to be unsure, of course). He had a group called the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, which included everyone from the best British jazzmen to tyros like me. I remember we did a BBC gig with two pianists in the group. When the other pianist arrived, it was the great Stan Tracey, doyen of British jazz pianists! I went through John’s “Search and Reflect” process with him, a very liberating experience, and we spent many hours talking and listening to music. He loved Anton Webern’s works and could explicate them better than any PhD. Like so many of the best British jazzmen (Americans seem to know little and care less about the very beautiful and lively British jazz scene of that time, which was enlivened by a number of superb, exiled, black South African musicians—your loss), John had come through the Royal Air Force Band at Uxbridge, not far from Ealing. He also helped me in my first tremulous attempts to play jazz, and though I never got good at it I did gain more understanding of the complexity of the art. One of my students, a good R&B saxophonist, who wanted to use the performance option in the degree to improve his jazz skills, asked me to act as pianist for his lessons. That was a steep learning curve if ever I got onto one.

In 1980, when I was on a year’s secondment to Dartington College of Arts in Devon, I got John down to give a workshop to the students. The workshop, predictably I’m afraid, attracted more students of drama than of music. John, clearly nervous of being in such posh surroundings, had put on his best Italian suit, very sharp, with white shirt and narrow black tie. He was an enormous success. One fledgling theater director said to me afterward, “Here comes this dude looking like everyone’s idea of a used-car salesman and just manages to blow everyone’s mind.”

John died of a heart attack in 2000, aged only fifty-three.

Also around that time I got involved in a sound poetry and music group around the sound poet Bob Cobbing. There was a young woman singer who wove marvelous lines of sound around Bob’s voice; a flutist, David Toop, who played some beautiful, big Andean flutes he had made; a percussionist, Paul Burwell, who had the biggest collection of hubcaps I have ever seen; a trombonist, and me at the piano. I loved it. We even did a BBC Radio 3 gig.

I had been working for some years on a translation of Henri Pousseur’s Fragments théoriques sur la musique expérimentale, a massive task, and had been trying to get a publisher to look at it. It was only when I offered it to Calder and Boyars, who had been the British publishers of a number of interesting music books, including the Cage books and Ives’s Essays before a Sonata, that I received any response, in the form of an invitation to talk with the great man, John Calder, himself. He looked at my manuscript, and we talked for a while about music (he is a great opera buff), and then he offered me a contract to write a book for him, just like that. That was the origin of Music, Society, Education, which I wrote more or less off the top of my head from my lectures and classes. I expected it just to sink from sight like dozens of other academic music books (every academic thinks he has a book in him), and no one was more surprised than I was when it started to get good and even rave reviews—and some bitchy ones. I had been in doubt as I wrote it whether I was just mouthing platitudes (after all, it all seemed to me so obvious) or making wild, unsupported, and maybe unsupportable, assertions. I certainly had no idea that I was writing an “important” book. I remember meeting the U.S. cultural attaché at a conference a few months after it was published, and when he asked me over lunch if I was “the” Christopher Small I had no idea how to answer.

I shall always be grateful to John Calder for giving me the chance to write and be published, but he did rip me off rotten, and still owes me a lot of money that I shall never see. I finally told him in a letter that I was grateful to him but that I had run out of gratitude. But I was frightened to take the rights back from him, although he was flagrantly in breach of our contract, thinking that I would never get another publisher and that a dud publisher was better than no publisher.

The breakthrough came when Rob Walser, whom I had met at the 1988 meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology at MIT, contacted me in Sitges and asked if he and his wife Susan McClary could stay with us for a couple of nights. Sitting out on the terrace of our apartment one evening, I told them about my woes with Calder, and they said that, as two-thirds of the music editorial committee of Wesleyan University Press, they could guarantee that if I could get the rights off Calder they would reprint my (then) two books. It took a while, but we managed it. Later Wesleyan published the third book, Musicking, so all three are now under the same imprint.

The other big influence on my feelings and ideas about music was knowing Neville Braithwaite, my friend and companion of thirty years. When I dedicated Music of the Common Tongue to him “for showing me what it was all about,” I meant it—not only for himself but also for so many West Indian friends (he is Jamaican by birth) whom I met through him and through his profession of youth worker, and from his wonderful welcoming family, scattered around the world, who view life from a viewpoint intriguingly different from my own, and who have enriched my life and especially my understanding of the act of musicking. Alas, he died of a brain tumor in October 2006, and I shall miss him forever.

People like to label me a musicologist, but I feel that the label puts me in a nice, safe pigeonhole and makes me innocuous. If I have always tried, not always successfully, to refuse it, it is not out of modesty, real or assumed, although it is true that I have no formal musicological training. Rather, it is because my ideas, such as they are, have grown more out of my musical experiences than out of any theory, which for me has always come after the musical fact. I consider myself, therefore, simply as a musician who thinks about his art.

SITGES, JULY 2004

I am also starting to realize that I have been lassoed into the music education corral, where I don’t feel I really belong either. True, I have been a teacher of music most of my professional life and have theorized some about my job, but being a teacher of music is not necessarily the same thing as being a music educator, although it is to be hoped that the latter category is always to be subsumed into the former. I have always tried to put my performing money where my theorizing mouth is.

I have a sneaky feeling that both these “disciplines” are some kind of—no, not scams, which implies a degree of deliberate deception that I don’t intend—but that neither is really necessary for the universal practice of musicking. Perhaps I oversimplify (a sin of which I have been accused), but I cannot help feeling that these great intellectual (and career) structures have been erected around what are really two very simple propositions—that all normally endowed human beings are born with the capacity to music and that everyone wants to have the power to music just as they want to have the power to speak.

POSTSCRIPT, 2008