Acts of Musicking - Small-2001

Lecture for Taonga, July 2001 1
Christopher Small
ACTS OF MUSICKING
Christopher Small
First let me say what a good moment this is for me, to find myself in my own country
addressing a conference of this nature and importance. I feel very proud and privileged to be
here and I want to thank Chris Naughton and his colleagues for inviting me. On the other
hand I am not quite sure what kind of advice I can find to offer to those who are still
working in a field where I have been a spectator, though an interested one, for many years
and in a part of the world in which after an absence of some forty years I feel myself to some
extent a foreigner. Nevertheless, since I have spent much of the last thirty years pondering
the question of the nature of the music act and its significance in human life, I feel I do have
something to say about the assumptions on which we all, all human beings, base our practice
of music, and, by implication, music education.
Your first speaker of this conference, Keri Kaa, told me that she had prepared a fine
academic lecture, but had decided that it was boring and threw it away. Well, I think that I’m
going to give the boring lecture that she didn’t give. She said so much that was wise and
beautiful that really all that remains for me is to cross a few academic t’s and dot a few i’s.
So fasten your seat belts – it’s going to be a bumpy morning. Another thing that has
happened for me on this conference is that I have heard and seen to much that is new to me
that the script I had prepared is already out of date. I would need months to assimilate all I
have learnt in this week into a new script, so have had to tack some ideas on where I can and
if they don’t fit too well I have to ask your indulgence.
I’ve been saying for years now that there’s no such thing as music, that music isn’t a
thing at all but an activity in which we human beings engage, and I’ve been saying that those
who think that a performance takes place in order to present a musical work have got it the
wrong way around, that in fact that it’s musical works that exist in order to give performers
something to perform, and I’ve been saying that the assumptions underlying the modern
western classical-music culture are not necessarily universals of human music making and
should not be applied wholesale to all ways of making and responding to musical acts. I’m
not going to go on reiterating these and other ideas today, principally because I don’t think
such a broadly based and wide ranging assembly as this is in need of such news. So I’m
going to look to the meanings of music as an activity, as an act of performing and of
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responding to a performance, and I’ll leave the study of musical works to the musicologists,
who will no doubt go on dating them and preparing their scholarly urtext editions and
arguing over them in seminars and symposiums. I’m going to look to the real world where
people actually perform and respond to performances, and where they dance to it and maybe
get high on it.
In that real world we know that it is performance that is central to the experience of
music. We know that there can be no music apart from performance. Even a recording is
fundamentally a performance, only multiplied many times. You don’t need a fixed and
stable work of music at all – after all, many of the world’s great musical cultures get by
without any such thing – but you can’t have music unless someone is performing. You even
don’t need a listener – at least not one apart from the performers, who of course are always
the first and most deeply involved of listeners – and you certainly don’t need a composer – at
least, not one apart from those who are performing. So it seems to me self-evident that the
place to start thinking about the meaning of music and about its function in human life is
with the act of performing.
Now if there is anything that is clear about musical performance it is that it is action,
it is something that people do. While it can be solitary action, engaged in by one person
alone, it is generally an activity in which two or more people engage together. They may be
all performing, or some can be listening while others are performing, and some may be
dancing, but in all cases it is an encounter between human beings, an encounter that is
mediated by what John Blacking called humanly organized sounds. All those present,
performers, listeners and dancers and anyone else who may be present, are engaging in the
encounter, and all are contributing to the nature of the event through the relationships they
establish with one another and with the humanly organized sounds in the course of the
performance.
It occurred to me some years ago that if music is action and not thing, then perhaps
the word ‘music’ ought not to be a noun at all, but a verb. So I took the liberty of coining the
verb ‘to music’, with its present participle ‘musicking’, as a way of expressing this idea. And
having coined it I took the further liberty of giving it a definition, which I did as follows. 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, or to provide material for performance – what
we call composing – to prepare for a performance – what we call practicing, or rehearsing,
or woodshedding – or any other activity that is related to musical performance. We should
certainly include dancing, if anyone is dancing – after all, in many cultures if no-one is
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dancing then no music is happening – and we might even sometime stretch its meaning to
include what the person is doing who takes the tickets on the door, or the hefty men who
shift the piano around, or the roadies who carry out the sound checks, since all these
activities also affect the relationships within the performance space and thus the nature of the
event which is a musical performance.
I have to make two things clear. First, to music is to be involved in any way in a
musical performance, to relate to it at whatever quality of level of attention, whether the
performance is live or recorded, even if it is Muzak in an elevator or supermarket, or having
your ears assaulted, as mine were last summer during the midsummer fiesta of San Juan, by
the opening chorus of Carmina Burana amplified to a volume near the threshold of pain, that
some idiot had decided would make a fitting accompaniment to a fireworks display. In other
words, the verb ‘to music’ is descriptive, not prescriptive. It concerns all participation in a
musical performance, whether active or passive, whether or not we like the way it is being
done, whether we consider it constructive or destructive, sympathetic or antipathetic,
intelligent or stupid, pleasant or unpleasant. The word remains useful only to the extent that
we keep our value judgments clear of it. Value laden uses that I have heard, such as ‘You
can’t call listening to a Walkman musicking’ or ‘Everyone ought to music’ distort its
meaning and weaken its effectiveness and plunge us back into futile arguments about what is
or is not music. There is a time for value judgments, of course, but those come later.
And second, the word does not mean simply ‘to perform’ or ‘to make music’, and
should not be used in that careless way. I’ve heard that careless usage more than once this
week, and I must ask that you use it carefully or leave it alone, otherwise you will dissipate
whatever critical force it may possess. If you mean performing, say performing, and if you
mean listening, say listening. A person who is performing is musicking, yes, but not
everybody who is musicking is performing.
Apart from favouring the idea that musicking is first and foremost action, the verb has other
useful implications. In the first place, in making no distinction between what the performers
are doing and what the rest of the present are doing, it reminds us that musicking is an
activity in which all those present are involved, and for whose success or failure as an event
all those present bear a measure of responsibility. It is thus not just action, it is social action,
and it takes place always in a social context.
It’s not just a matter of a composer, or even performers, doing something for, or to,
the passive listeners. Whatever it is we are doing, we are all doing it together – performers,
listeners, composers, ticket sellers, roadies and all, even perhaps the cleaners who clean up
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after everyone else has gone, since what they do also affects the nature of the human
encounter which is a musical performance.
I hope you won’t think I’m so silly as to make no distinction between what the
performers are doing and what the rest of those present are doing. They are obviously doing
very different things. But by subsuming them all under the verb ‘to music’ we are reminded
that all these activities add up to a single event, whose nature is affected by the ways in
which they are all carried out. Like all human encounters the event takes place in a physical
and a social setting, and those settings, too have to be taken into account when we ask what
meanings are being generated by a performance.
It’s clear then that the question that is generally asked, the question that forms the basis of
most musicological research, which is What is the meaning of this musical work? is
inadequate, since it leaves out all the meanings that are brought into existence by the act of
performance. The question we need to ask is, What does it mean when this performance
takes place at this time, in this place, with these participants? Or, to put it more simple, we
can ask of a performance, any performance of any kind, anywhere and at any time, What’s
really going on here? We notice that the question doesn’t require the existence of a fixed and
stable musical work, but that it doesn’t exclude the possibility of one either. No-one is
denying that musical works exist, or that they generate meanings in themselves when they
are performed. But those meanings form part, and only part, of the rich texture of meanings
that are being generated by the event as a whole. In other words, if we say that certain sets of
meanings are generated simply by the fact of people coming together in a concert hall to
play and to hear symphonic works, those meanings form a larger context for the meanings
that are generated by each specific work as it is performed. On the other hand, as I said, it is
not necessary to have a fixed and stable musical work in order for a performance to take
place and meanings to be generated.
So what is really going on when a musical performance takes place? What meanings
are being generated that should make people want to come together to perform and to listen
and to respond to one another’s performing and listening? The answer I propose is this.
When any musical performance takes place there is created in the space where the
performance takes place a rich and complex web of human relationships. At the centre of the
web are the humanly organized sounds that are being brought into existence by the
performers and the relationships between those sounds. Radiating out from these, and
feeding back into them, are the relationships among the performers, the relationships
between performers and listeners, those among the listeners and anyone else who may be
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present, and even between those who are present and those who are not. Those relationships
may be close, intimate and highly spontaneous or they may be distant, formal and highly
mediated, or any degree in between. They are so complex that they cannot be articulated in
words, and it is in them that the real meaning of a musical performance lies. Those
relationships within the performance space stand for, or model, ideal relationships ae they
are imagined to be by those taking part, relationships between person and person, between
individual and society, between humanity and the natural and even the supernatural world.
These are surely among the most important concerns of human life, and whenever we
engage in an act of musicking, however trivial and frivolous it may appear to be, we incur a
responsibility towards them.
I want to make it clear what I mean. I mean that when we music, when we take part
in that human encounter which is a musical performance, we collectively bring into
existence within the performance space a set of relationships, and those relationships model
those of the cosmos as we believe they are and as we believe they ought to be. When we
music we do not just learn about those relationships, no-one is telling us about them. We
actually experience them in all their marvelous complexity. The musicking empowers us to
experience the actual structure of our universe of values, and in experiencing that structure
we learn what our place is in it and how we ought to relate to it. Not just intellectually, but
through our bodily gestures and sensations and our emotions. We explore those ideal
relationships, those values, we affirm their validity, and we celebrate them, every time we
music.
Those relationships, then, are not so much those which actually exist in our lives as
those which we desire to exist and long to experience. During a musical performance, any
musical performance anywhere and at any time, desired relationships are brought into virtual
existence so that those taking part are enabled to experience them as though they really did
exist. Musicking is a means by which we learn to interpret the world and its relationships,
what they are and what they should be.
There’s nothing metaphysical about this process of exploration, affirmation and
celebration, nothing mystical. It’s part of that natural process of giving and receiving
information by means of gestures both visible and audible which links together all living
creatures in a vast communication network which the great English anthropologist Gregory
Bateson has called the pattern which connects. If you are interested in the matter of giving
and receiving information I shall have to refer you to my book Musicking, as we don’t have
time to go into it here.
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Even at the simpler levels of life there is room for flexibility in the response to
information. As we ascend the scale of complexity the gestures and the possibilities of
response become more and more varied and complex. Posture and ways of moving, facial
expression – what we call body language – as well as vocal timbre and intonation, provide in
the more complex creatures a wide variety of gesture and response, and convey a great deal
of information. That information always concerns relationships: how do I relate to this
entity that I perceive, and how does it relate to me? In creatures like human beings whose
relationships with one another and with the world in general can be complex and even
contradictory, the gestures and responses can be complex and contradictory also.
But whatever form the gestures may take, whether they are visible or audible or even
tactile, as when someone strokes you or punches you on the nose, they have one thing in
common. They do not state who or what are the entities that are relating. So that if I make a
gesture that indicates that I dominate, or submit to, you, the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ are not stated
and can’t be stated. Only the relationship that unites us for that moment is stated. There are
no nouns in the language of gesture, no negatives either and no past or future tense. It can
deal only with relationships that are happening here and now.
In contrast, verbal communication, as it has developed uniquely among human
beings, has equipped us to deal with entities that are absent, with past and future events and
with abstractions and with the contexts in which they occur. But unlike the language of
gesture it can deal with matters only one at a time.
This is a strength in that it has made possible those analytic capacities, that step-by-
step reasoning and ability to compute about things that have proved powerful tools in
gaining such mastery as we have over the material world. But it is a weakness in that words
in general are less than adequate in dealing with the complexities of our relationships with
one another and with the cosmos. Relationships in all their complexity do not lend
themselves to one-thing-at-a-time articulation. We have to deal with them all in one piece,
and one thing at a time is just too slow and cumbersome for the many-layered quicksilver
nature of human relationships.
The ancient language of gesture continues to perform functions that words cannot.
Gesture like relationships is continuous. There is no vocabulary of separate gestures as there
of words. It is seamless, without gaps, and depends not on the accumulation of units of
meaning such as words and numbers but on shapes, forms and textures – patterns in fact –
and patterns themselves are built of relationships. One set of relationships comes to stand for
another.
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The function of gesture in human life lies specifically in the articulation of relationships, and
in this function they are at least as precise as are words in this field. In addition to the
innumerable gestures that we made and interpret every day, much of it without even being
aware that we are doing it, we human beings have elaborated them over our million-year
history into those complex patterns of gesture we call ritual.
Ritual is a kind of organized behaviour in which humans use the language of gesture
to explore, affirm and celebrate their ideas of how the relationships of the cosmos operate
and how they themselves should relate to it and to one another. In the concentrated and
heightened time of ritual, relationships are brought into existence between the participants
which model ideal relationships as they imagine them to be. As with music, they not only
learn about the relationships but actually experience them. In the memorable phrase of the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in the ritual act ‘the lived-in order merges with the dreamed-
of order’.
And since it is relationships between human beings that constitute what we call social
order, the performance of ritual acts is a powerful means of creating and maintaining social
cohesion and stability. We need therefore not be surprised to find that ritual acts are
commonly used by those who rule as a means of maintaining the consent of those over
whom they rule – coronations, for example, law court rituals, saluting the flag, even
elections. But it is not only a tool for those who would preserve the social order as it is.
Those who would change society also invent their own rituals. We could say that getting
people to accept your rituals and with them the social relationships which they dramatize is
a key element in the getting and retaining of social and political power. And on the other
hand, the powerless and those who live on the margins of society also invent their rituals in
order to keep alive that precious sense of who they are and where they belong, and of what
the relationships of the world ought to be as opposed to what they are, without which no
human being feels it worth while going on living. For all these reasons ritual is a powerful
social and political force.
In a ritual act, as we know, there are brought together and orchestrated a wide variety
of what we call artistic genres: acting, miming, dancing, musicking, designing and building,
painting, sculpting, making and wearing costumes, decorating the body, masking, cooking
and of course eating. A ritual act can bring together all those activities we call the arts. But I
think it’s better saying it the other way around. It’s not so much that in ritual acts we bring
together all the arts, but rather that it’s that each of the activities we call the arts is a
fragment of the one great unitary and universal performance art we call ritual. It is certain
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that it is in ritual that the arts have their origin. Ritual is the mother of all the arts. That is to
say, each of the arts is a mode of using the language of gesture to explore, affirm and
celebrate our concepts of how we relate, and should relate, to ourselves, to one another and
to the world.
In ritual, doing is believing. We notice that the way the arts issue from and r return to
ritual is as action, as performance. In the enactment of ritual it is the making, the building,
the wearing, the exhibiting , the viewing, the dancing, the musicking, in short the
performing, that is valued, not the objects that are made, or exhibited, or viewed or worn or
performed, however skilfully and lovingly they may have been made. In the little Catalan
town where I live, on the eve of the festival of Corpus Cristi, men, women and children sit
up all night laying down elaborate and beautiful carpets of flowers to line the narrow streets
of the old town. The carpets remain for a day, and then in the evening of the saint’s day the
townspeople process through the streets with music and dancing, kicking the patterns to bits
as they go. It’s not the carpets that are important, though people come a long way to see
them, but the act of making, and the act of destruction, and the act of destruction is every bit
as sacred and as reverent as the act of making.
It’s only the tourists that wonder why the carpets aren’t preserved. The people who
created them know that the created objects are of value only so long as they serve the ritual
purpose. And we see, further, that if every living creature is able, needs to be able, to
understand and to articulate the gestures that constitute the language of information
concerning relationships, then the ability to take part in the activity we call art is not
confined to a few gifted people but is part of the evolutionary inheritance of every normally
endowed member of the human race.
It could be that we have what we call the arts only when we cease to be aware of the
ritual function of the activity and try to divorce it from its ritual purposes. I say we try to
divorce it because I believe we never can do so. No matter how secular or how frivolous or
even trivial it may seem, however primitive or crude or even incompetent it may appear, the
ritual function of art is always there for those who are alert to it. All art is concerned with
the way in which we believe we ought to relate to one another and to the world.
What I am trying to say is this: that to take part in a musical performance, to music,
is to take part in a ritual whose relationships empower us to explore, affirm and celebrate the
relationships of the world as we imagine they are and ought to be. It is thus an act which has
not only personal and individual significance but also carries considerable social and even
political power.
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I have said that musicking, like all ritual acts, is a way of learning to interpret the
world and its relationships. But we don’t all interpret the world in the same way. Each of us
carries around in us our own way of interpreting the world and making sense of it, our own
sense of what are right relationships. We all tend to think about our own concepts, if we
think about the matter at all – and most of us don’t, much – as the really real ones.
Naturally, that’s why we value them – it’s a kind of self-validating system – and we will
fight furiously to preserve them and we’ll feel distress and even pain when people try to
detach us from them. Those relationships we consider to be good, valuable and treasurable in
life – as well as those which we consider to be bad or worthless – have for us overriding
importance in guiding our actions, and we value other people to the extent that they share
our values.
None of these values, these concepts of ideal relationships, is absolute or inbuilt. We
are not born with them. They are, to use the sociologists’ term, socially constructed. We
learn them as a result of an active engagement with the world around us and with our fellow
beings. From the moment of birth we learn what relationships are of value for us and what
are not, and in this way we learn to order our experiences of the world. Much of this
learning, of course, comes from our parents, our family and peers as well as from those
formal media of education whose purpose has always been the inculcation of the approved
values of the polity or nation state.
We can expect that members of the same social group, whose values are broadly
similar, will tend to order their experiences in broadly similar ways and to hold broadly
shared values which will tend to reinforce one another. It is in fact shared assumptions about
relationships that makes social groups, from empires and nations to families and bonded
pairs, and holds them together. And on the other hand, different social groups, whether they
be social classes or nations or religious affiliations or interest groups of various kinds, may
hold values that are mutually contradictory or opposed to one another, or perhaps overlap
and interpenetrate. And since most people belong to more than one social group at the same
time it is quite possible that each individual will have internalized different and even
mutually contradictory sets of v values that will manifest themselves at different times and in
different situations.
How these values are acquired is a dialectical process between, on the one hand, the
experience and inborn temperament of the individual, and on the other, the shared
perceptions of the members of the various social groups to which he or she belongs. The sum
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of these shared perceptions is what we call a culture. I shall more to say about culture in a
minute.
We naturally tend to hold values that make our existence more meaningful for
ourselves and that validate our sense of our own worth. Whatever may be our position in
society the sets of values we espouse will be those that support our sense of personal worth
and self esteem. If our position is elevated or privileged our values will be those which
justify that position. This is not necessarily a conscious choice, just our sense of the proper
order of things. On the other hand, those in a lowly position may either espouse values that
make them feel they are as good as the elites, or else they may accept their position as part of
the given order – which is what keeps social classes in their places.
Those who do hold social power – those who control the education system and the
media or communication, and those who hold the purse strings for what is called cultural
activity – are going to use that power to impose their own values on the whole society, to
make the rest acknowledge that it is their version of reality, their culture, that is the real one.
I said ‘impose’ but that is perhaps too strong a word. Once again it’s not done by any
orchestrated campaign or conspiracy, at any rate not usually. It’s just the way the members
of the group perceive the relationships of their world. After all, if our values and thus our
culture are superior – and that’s borne out by our elevated position in society – then it must
be in everyone’s interest to partake of that culture. It’s a neat circle, and the sociologists call
it hegemony. Where ’culture’ ends and ‘hegemony’ begins is hard to establish. What is just
culture to me, and perfectly natural, may be hegemony to you.
We begin to see how it is that musicking has long functioned as a means of self
definition, who we are or think we are socially. For if members of different social groups
have different values, that is, different concepts of ideal relationships, then the kinds of
musical performances that enact those relationships will differ from one another also. We
must be careful not to be too categorical about this. If there is a degree of overlap between
the values of different social groups – and it is rare to find no overlap at all, even in the most
seemingly opposed groups – then we can expect to find an degree of overlap between their
ways of musicking. We remember of course that musicking takes in not just the sounds and
their relationships but all the various activities that constitute a musical performance as a
whole. And if we take into account the interest and even sympathy that can exist between
members of different social groups, not to mention the attempts of many people to take on
the attributes of members of more elevated groups, then we see that ways of musicking are
not by any means watertight, but constantly interpermeate and play off one another.
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All that said, each style of musical performance nevertheless articulates the values of
a social group, rich or poor, large or small, powerful or powerless, dominant or oppressed
and all degrees in between, at a certain point in its history, and no way of musicking is more
universal or more absolute in value than any other. I repeat; no way of musicking, no
musical style or culture or tradition, is intrinsically superior or inferior to any other. Each
and every musical performance has to be judged on its efficacy in articulating the values of
those taking part, and only those taking part will be able to make that judgment.
I have three comments to make on that idea. The first is that not any old
performance will do. Quality of performance matters, of course it matters, and so does
quality of response. I know of no musical culture in which no distinction is made between a
good and a poor performance, according to the criteria of that culture. Those criteria may not
be the same as those which we who have been trained in the western tradition to recognize
and admire. There are many kinds of excellence, and the individual technical dexterity that
we prize so much is only one of them. My own formula for excellence is to do the best you
can with what you have. It is by doing the best you can with what you have that you are
empowered to explore, affirm and celebrate those relationships you value, and to say, to
yourself and to anyone who may be paying attention, This is who we are.
Second, all musical cultures are about equally complex. Linguists assure us that there
is no such thing on earth as a primitive language, and neither is there any such phenomenon
as primitive music. I repeat, all human beings are about equally complex in their relations to
one another and to the cosmos as a whole, and all are capable, in fact need to be capable of,
articulating those relationships. If we find only primitiveness or crudity in, say, the sound of
an African herdsman playing his home-made pipe to his beasts, or of a folk singer as she
sings an old song in her own way, or even in the sound of the latest rapper, that may well be
because on the one hand our ears are not attuned to the complexities of the sounds being
produced and on the other because our minds are not attuned to the complexities of the
mental and physical processes that went into the making of the performance. Anyone who
thinks that those beautiful Maori instruments that Richard (Nunns) and Hirini (Melbourne)
have shown and played to us are primitive, or that the musicking in which they are used is
primitive, ought to made to stay after school and write out five hundred times ‘I must not
confuse simplicity with primitiveness.’
And thirdly, if each performance articulates the values of the members of a social
group, then every musical performance is inescapably to some extent a political act. Politics
of course is about power, and an important element of power is the power to define oneself
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rather than be defined, and maybe to be able to define others, to say, This is who I am, or
This is who we are, as against those who would say, That is who you are, or even, That is
what you are, which is to say, less than fully human. Much of the historical class struggle,
not to mention the struggles against racism and sexism, consists in that struggle for the
power to define oneself rather than be defined by others.
Many kinds of musical performance can be seen as sites for the contestation of that
important human right. Volcanic struggles have taken place over it, especially over the last
century or so when so many human groups have been struggling for the right to self
definition and self-determination, not just as nations in the ordinary sense but also as human
beings within a society that devalues or oppresses them. George Lipsitz’s fascinating book
Dangerous Crossroads is full of examples of this kind of musical struggle from all over the
world, from Haitians to Australian Aborigines to black South Africans to Native Americans
to Czech intellectuals under communism, to unemployed rejects of rich industrial societies.
He records the dangers that musicians face who dare to challenge through their musicking
the values of those who rule them. The banning of live and recorded performances,
imprisonment and exile, burning of homes, even torture and murder are some of the threats
under which thousands of musicians live today, simply because they assert their right to
music in a way that affirms and celebrates their ideal relationships. The right to perform is
inextricably linked to the right to self definition, and the right to self definition is the first
step on the long road to real political power.
And if we remember that musicking is not only performing but also listening and
responding, we need not be surprised to know that the struggle for self definition involves
audiences as well as performers. For listeners as well as performers are saying This is who
we are, and their power to do so is often at stake as well. And not only under governments
that fall outside the democratic pale either. All dominant groups, all ruling classes, even
those that call themselves democratic, will encourage and underwrite ways of musicking that
support their values and sense of inherent superiority, and will disparage, discourage and
even actively harass not only performers but also listeners whose musicking challenges those
values.
The history of black expressive culture in both the United States and Britain shows
endless examples of this process, from the days of slavery right down to the present. Many
of us will remember the scandalized reactions of white America and Britain to the eruption
of rock’n’roll into the public – which is to say, the white – domain in the early fifties – the
radio bans, the campaigns of concerned parents, the harassment of musicians and of those
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who wanted to dance to the music. The history of jazz also teems with such reactions from
the early years of the twentieth century into the nineteen thirties and even later. You can read
some of them in Robert Walser’s excellent collection of readings in jazz history called
Keeping Time.
In Britain the history of London’s great West Indian carnival at Notting Hill, the
official attempts to suppress it, the oppressive policing, the arbitrary spoilsport regulations
imposed by local authorities, and the wildly exaggerated and even lying press reports of
drugs, fights and robberies, is something which I myself remember from its earliest days in
the sixties. It show clearly the fear that is evoked among white authorities when black people
come into the streets and use musicking – and dancing and other ritual arts, of costume and
especially of deliciously cooking and eating – to tell the world, loudly and clearly, This is
who we are.
Tricia Rose in her book Black Noise describes the indignities and humiliations that
she and several thousand other mainly black young Americans had to endure before being
admitted to a New York stadium in the early nineties where a rap performance was taking
place, including body pat-downs and metal detector scans and searches of handbags and
pocket books. She lost a nailfile to the security guards. She reports also on the difficulties
that rap promoters have in finding venues and she comments: ‘The struggle over context,
meaning and access to public space is critical to contemporary cultural politics. Power and
resistance are exercised by signs, language and institutions. Consequently black popular
pleasure involves physical, ideological and territorial struggles.’
Those young black men and women were in the front line of the struggle for
meanings, which is to say for the right to affirm, explore and celebrate their own conception
of who they were rather than submit to those who would tell them, forcefully and even
brutally, That is who you are. Struggling for the right to say, This is what our musicking
means, against those who would say, with all the emphasis that the combined media of
communication can bring to it, That is what you musicking means, and it is not acceptable.
So does all this point to an unbridgeable gap between musical cultures, with those
that celebrate the values of the powerful in the modern world in irreconcilable opposition to
those of the powerless or of those who contest that power? I don’t think so, and neither do
you, otherwise you wouldn’t be here this week.
I said just now that the audience for that rap concert in New York was ‘mainly
black’, because today’s rap audience is not by any means defined along racial lines, as the
success, however dubious you might find it, of Eminem demonstrates. As Robert Walser
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points out in his discussion of the rapper Public Enemy, ‘Declining expectations, the
injuries of deindustrialization, the growing disparity of wealth, the disruption of
communities, and the dismantling of social support programs are not limited to black
communities, although they have been hit hardest. Rap has both achieved popularity among
white fans and “Africanized” many of them because the values it embodies have been found
so attractive by many.’
These young people are not affirming or defending a culture as such. There is no
reason why such a thought should enter their heads. What they are doing, it seems to me, is
struggling to affirm their own context for their musicking, against the context that has been
fabricated for them, which is that their musicking is undermining if not destroying accepted
musical as well as social values. They are struggling for the right of access to public space to
use it to explore, affirm and celebrate their own values, to define and represent themselves,
rather than being defined and represented by frequently hostile others. Context, meaning
and access to public space, then, are matters of everyday struggle for those musicians, and
their audiences, as they have been for generations for those whose way of musicking, whose
musical culture, articulates values that do not conform to the majority-accepted values of he
society. They are affirming what Rose calls popular pleasure, coming together to enjoy their
favored way of musicking. As Walser says, ‘Despite the history of injustice that fuels their
anger ... what rappers, and their audiences, between them create is more important than what
they criticize.’
And so we need to consider exactly what we do mean by ‘culture’. Raymond
Williams has called it ‘one of the two or three most complex words in the English language’,
and it certainly is a slippery and even treacherous concept to grasp. We don’t have to bother
ourselves with the vulgar meaning of the word, as referring to someone who is said to be a
cultured person, that is, they are versed in the high arts and literature and other intellectual
pursuits. Rather, I suggest as a rough and ready definition that culture is a learned
predisposition to perceive the world and its relationships, including human relationships, in a
certain way. Culture is not a thing or an entity that one can circumscribe or define, but rather
it is the sum of those attitudes and values that I was talking about earlier, by means of which
a person or a group of people is able to find meanings in, or give meaning to, not only the
objects and events of the environment but also inner experiences, and to construct from
them a consistent and unable picture of the world and its relationships. It can be seen as a
process, an active process, perhaps an extension of that mysterious process by means of
which all creatures convert raw stimuli into usable information.
Christopher Small
In this sense every human being is cultured, since to be cultured is part of our
essential human equipment that enables us to function in the world. It is by means of the
choices governed by culture that he or she is able to find some kind of order in the seemingly
limitless variety of experience. Culture mediates between human potentialities and the
realization of that potential in life as it is actually lived.
If an individual’s culture is not a thing or an entity, neither is it static or unchanging,
but changes and develops as his or her ways of perceiving the world and its relationships
develop. At the same time there remains always a hard core of perpetually self-validating
perceptions and interpretations that do not change over the live of an individual. Nor it is a
purely individual matter. As we know, people tend to form groups of like-minded, or like-
feeling, individuals. Each member of the group looks to the others for the validation of his or
her sense of self and self-esteem, and all of us belong at the same time to a number of
groups: families, economic interest groups, professional and occupational groups, religious
and ethnic groups and so on. Each will have its own culture, its own way of perceiving the
world, and these ways may overlap and interact and even make conflicting claims on a
person that are difficult to reconcile.
Which brings us to the fact that the word ‘culture’ actually has two meanings beside
the vulgar meaning I referred to just now, and that these meanings often get confused. One is
the meaning I have already discussed in terms of the individual and his or her learned
dispositions. But we have noted that individuals do not function alone. Indeed, to consider
an individual’s culture without reference to the other people in their life would be an
absurdity. So the other meaning refers to a group of people who are united by the same or
similar predispositions, so that we talk about ‘the classical-music culture’, or ‘the jazz
culture’, or ‘Chinese culture’ or ‘an immigrant culture’ . When we do this we tend to think of
those cultures as stable entities that are to be variously valued, or to be thought of as
authentic or inauthentic, or pure or hybrid, or to be preserBut in fact this idea of a ‘culture’
as a stable entity consisting of a number of people who share specific characteristics of mind
is also very slippery. Like the landscape of our country, which despite its appearance of
stability is always on the move, the attitudes and perceptions that unite such groups are
constantly changing and being contested even within the group through the effect of the
varied experiences of those who comprise them. Change is constant simply as a consequence
of the group’s internal dynamics. People are forever reinventing their culture, sometimes
under the force of changing circumstance, sometimes just for the fun of it. The spread of
literacy may act as a brake on this process, but it continues nonetheless, especially in such
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areas as popular musicking and children’s culture that do not require literacy for their
transmission.
But, perhaps more importantly, with every movement of people, every conquest,
every enslavement, every absorption of one group by another, the culture is transformed and
may even appear to be lost. This process has gone on throughout human history, and is
happening at an accelerated rate in our own time. But nothing human is ever completely lost.
No culture ever quite disappears but is transformed over and over again, so that each one of
us carries within us shards and fragments of who knows what culture, passed down from
grandparents to grandchildren, older children to younger, in books and movies, snatches of
old songs, garbled tales, odd words and expressions, proverbs and superstitions, little rituals
and even repertories of gestures. There is no such thing as a pure culture, either within a
group of people or in a single individual. All are hybrid, and all are very old, as old as the
human race itself.
I wrote this before seeing and hearing Richard and Hirini play their ancient Maori
instruments and tell us how the culture, that is to say, the way of thinking and perceiving that
gave them birth, that seemed to have been lost forever had never gone away but had been
there hidden away all the time, and how the shards and fragments were being put together
again to form an element, not of the old culture, but a new, tougher culture capable of
surviving in the brutal conditions of the modern world.
Cultural groups are not watertight but are highly permeable to elements from other
groups, even those whose values would superficially seem to be antagonistic. After all, we
are all human beings with similar wants and needs, even if we have different ways of
satisfying them. We all eat and shit and reproduce our kind and we all need to music if we
are to attain to our full humanity. Even the highest of high cultures are constantly being
colonized by low-status cultures by reason fo their Achilles’ heel – the fascination exerted
by the low-status rituals on the higher. Even in the high noon of modernism this process
could be seen among the mandarins – think of T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney or Stravinsky’s
Ragtime or Darius Milhaud’s La Création de Monde, or Yehudi Menuhin playing what he
seems to have imagined was jazz with Stéphane Grappelli – how Grappelli must have
laughed as he pocketed his fee, even though it was probably only half that which Menuhin
received. Condescension drips from every word and note, but nevertheless the fact is that
these and dozens of other such performances are Trojan horses in the invasion of high-status
culture by the lower.
Christopher Small
Exchanges between people of low status also show the permeability of cultural
assumptions. The rap audience I talked about earlier is just one example of the fantastic
variety of ways in which African Americans and disadvantaged white people, not just in the
United States but across the whole of that vast double continent and today across the whole
world – have over the centuries exchanged musical ideas across what one would have
thought was an uncrossable racial and cultural divide. It has been one of the most fertile and
heartening interactions in the whole recorded history of human musicking. Far from being a
behemoth that is sweeping away all local ways of musicking its has become a language that
disadvantaged people the world over can use to assert their own identity, their own This is
who we are, and it has adapted itself with extraordinary courtesy to form a medium for
disadvantaged people everywhere, for example in the Pacific Islands, as we hear from the
testimony of Opetaia Fo’ai. That testimony is not just verbal, but also musical , through his
amazing band Te Vaka, and is available wherever and whenever people need a widely
understood musical language to tell of themselves and of who they are against those who
have been telling them, That is who you are.
It is a phenomenon that would suggest a greater degree of shared values, of mutual
identification, and of underlying, even though it may be unconscious, sympathy, than the
brute facts of racial and social division would have us allow. It is an admission, a joyful
admission, that members of each groups had a need for what the other had to offer.
It would seem clear that these interactions do not occur at random but are always a
sign that members of one cultural groups can find something useful to them in the ritual
practices of another group, something with which they can empathize and that calls to them.
It is not a question of conscious multiculturalism, which to be honest is a word I don’t much
like to use, more a question of what one might call cultural permeability. That is to say,
members of one group do not learn and take on board in their entirety the ritual practices of
another, they do not ‘learn the culture’ , as we hear said frequently these days, but rather
take bits and pieces, elements that appeal to them, and incorporate them in the larger body
of their own practices.
We know that today cultural permeation is taking place on a global scale, with
everybody listening to everybody else and all musical traditions up for grabs by whoever
wants to make their musicking more interesting – or more profitable. This process of musical
globalization, which is part of a process that has been going on for some five hundred years,
ought to be a cause for celebration, but we all know that the process isn’t as politically
innocent as that. The much warmed-over dispute about Paul Simon’s Graceland album
Christopher Small
shows us how right we are to be suspicious of the ways in which in practice it is being
carried on, and how the perfectly natural need in western industrial culture for what others
have to offer becomes too often a cover for greed and exploitation.
The process of globalization, which is to say, the linking together of the members of
the human race by increasingly rapid and sophisticated means of transport and
communication, has been going on for hundreds if not thousands of years, almost certainly
represents the destiny of the human race, barring accidents. What is new in the last twenty
years or so has been the way in which those who would enrich themselves at our expense
have hijacked the process, and the word, and have succeeded in convincing the world that
the obscene enrichment of a few and the appalling impoverishment of millions, the
uprooting of entire populations, the desolation of communities, the exclusion from work and
society of tens of millions in the advanced industrial societies, and the continuing and
increasing devastation of the environment, are all unavoidable and even beneficent
consequences of this globalization and of the single global free market that they present to us
as inseparably linked to it.
In itself, globalization does not mean the destruction of diversity and the greying-out
of the world’s cultures. On the contrary, it presents ever greater and richer opportunities for
us to learn from one another end enjoy one another’s company on this planet. What is
destructive of human diversity is the insidious linking of globalization with the other
processes while those who oppose those by the way, were also not opposed to
technological progress, but rather were opposed to the use of that progress to dispossess the
already poor and further enrich the already rich. See E.P. Thompson’s great work The
Making of the British Working Class. They were broken in the early nineteenth century by
the same combination of media misrepresentation and police brutality that we have been
seeing in the streets of Seattle and Genoa. Things don’t change much.
In our musicking we can welcome the opportunities presented by globalization, even
as we resist with all our strength the destructive processes that have become linked to it. But
I don’t think globalization means the same as multiculturalism. You don’t learn a culture.
Each one of us carries around in him or herself innumerable strands of experience which
weave themselves into the single and unique way of perceiving, feeling and thinking that we
call a culture. You can have groups large and small of people in whom these ways are
broadly similar as they derive from broadly similar experiences, but each of us has one
culture, no more and no less, and everything we experience becomes a part of that culture. I
believe in fact that multiculturalism is a chimera whose imagined existence results from the
Christopher Small
reification of culture. That doesn’t mean that we are not capable of reaching out to others
whose ways of perceiving, feeling and thinking resonate with our own, and we may discover
those resonances, as we have seen in the case of black-white interaction, in surprising places
and across what might seem to be impassable social barriers.
It is not cultures that we respect, or deprecate, or preserve, or destroy, it is people.
Culture is an attribute of a person or of a group of people, and the word is an abstraction of
those attitudes and dispositions that underlie human beings’ ways of perceiving, feeling,
thinking and acting. The only way we can show respect for a person’s culture is to show
respect for that person for what he or she is. As for learning another person’s culture we can
do that only by knowing the person, and we learn what we can from on a day-to-day basis
and take from each other what we need. As all people are by definition authentic in their
lives, so the words ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ don’t seem to have much meaning in this
context. If enslaved Africans, and their descendants down to the present day, had given any
thought to preserving authenticity, or to preserving a culture, we wouldn’t have the way of
musicking today that we call African American. What they had in mind was personal and
communal survival, and the preservation of that precious sense of who they were without
which survival was not worth while.
Our way of life, of course, is constantly changing and developing, and with it
changes that set of attitudes we call our culture. We cannot stop this process and to try to
preserve a culture when the way of life that sustains it has gone is to do no more than
preserve a wax flower under glass – beautiful perhaps but lifeless.
Under the pressure of what is miscalled globalization, and the concentration of power
and wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer ever-greedier people, change in the modern
world is more often than not abrupt, brutal, violent and destructive to the lives of those who
are forced to undergo it. Even more vital it is, then, as more and more people and peoples are
being cut loose from their traditional moorings and flung into the maelstrom of twenty-first
century life, for people to retain the power to say, through musicking and other ritual
activities, This is who we are.
How to do that in our musicking? It seems to me the best way is to forget
multiculturalism, forget ‘teaching someone else’s culture’, which I believe to be an
impossibility anyway. I have lived in Spain for some fifteen years and I still feel I know next
to nothing about what makes the delightful Spanish tick. Why not just get in there and play,
and use whatever source that calls to us to give us what we need to make our musicking
Christopher Small
more meaningful and more effective in its evocation of the right relationships of our world,
making the lived-in order merge with the dreamed-of order.
When we music we have no responsibility to any culture, not even our own. Our only
responsibility is to the pleasure we and our fellow-musickers derive from our musicking.
Because ultimately that’s what we do it for – for the pleasure it gives us and the reciprocal
pleasure of others which unites us for the duration of the performance in a community of
like-feeling people. And pleasure, as Tricia Rose has reminded is a political matter also. We
need not be afraid of misunderstanding other ways of musicking. Misunderstanding has
always been a powerful tool for keeping the work of creation on the move. I might go so far
as to say that ultimately all learning is misunderstanding.
It is taking bits and pieces from whatever comes to hand, a process that goes under
the fancy name of syncretism, not so-called authenticity or purity, that keeps that work
going. A pure musical culture, if such a thing could exist – and I can’t imagine what such a
monstrosity would be like – would be one that was without life.
We need not imagine, just for example, that the western classical-music culture, the
culture of Mozart or Beethoven or Brahms, is a pure culture, far from it. What we today
revere as the pure classical-music culture is in fact a mongrel, a hybrid, a creole, of countless
different traditions, cobbled together in an ad hoc way to present us with a tolerably
consistent view of the relationships of the world. It was a social consensus that held it
together, and it’s no wonder that today, with that particular social consensus in ruins, that
the culture is falling apart.
No, we are all hybrids, every one of us, all creoles, and we all speak our music with
some accent or other. We should strongly resist those who tell us that we speak our music
with an accent while they possess the pure language. There is no pure language. If I say that
even the Queen of England speaks with an accent, and if I say that I find the accent a pretty
unattractive one, that says as much about my social attitudes as it does about the royal voice.
As for authenticity, there is only one authenticity, and that is in fidelity to our own
experience and to our pleasure in musicking. All musicking is authentic when we do the best
we can with what we have.
The rich and complex web of relationships that we create every time we music reaches far
into the past and across the whole pattern of the living world.All musicking is serious
musicking. Even the most seemingly t trivial and frivolous acts of musicking can be an
exploration, an affirmation and a celebration of the way in which we relate to one another
and to that pattern. We need not worry too much about preservation, whether it be of the
Christopher Small
treasured works of the western classical tradition or even of whole musical cultures. The true
treasure, the true Taonga is the human act of musicking, in the taking part in the act of music
itself. The ability to do so, indeed the need to do so, is part of the evolutionary inheritance of
every member of the human race. To be able to say, to ourselves and to anyone else who
may be listening, This is who we are is central to human life and dignity, and to empower
them to do so is surely the principal task of those of us who are entrusted with the education
of the young.
Sitges, June 2001
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BATESON, Gregory (1979): Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, Fontana/Collins, London
BATESON, Gregory and Bateson, Mary Catherine (1987): Angels Fear: Towards an
Epistemology of the Sacred, Macmillian, New York
LIPSITZ, George (1994): Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the
Politics of Place, Verso, London
ROSE, Tricia (1994): Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary
America, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CT
SMALL, Christopher (1977): Music, Society, Education, John Calder, London and
Riverrun Press, New York 1982, also published in Italian by Feltrinelli, Milan
1982, in Greek by Nefeli, Athens 1983 and in Spanish by Alianza, Madrid 1989.
Reissued, with a new foreword by Robert Walser, by Wesleyan University Press,
Middletown CT 1996.
SMALL, Christopher (1987): Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in
African American Music, John Calder, London and Riverrun Press, New York.
Reissued with a new foreword by the author by Wesleyan University Press,
Middletown CT 1998
SMALL, Christopher (1998): Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening,
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CT
THOMPSON, Edward P. (xxxx): The Making of the English Working Class,
WALSER, Robert (1995): ‘Rhythm, Rhyme and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy’,
Ethnomusicology, Vol 39 No 2, pp 194-211
WALSER, Robert (ed) (1999): Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, Oxford University
Press, New York
WILLIAMS, Raymond (1976): Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London,
Fontana and Croom Helm

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Lecture for Taonga, July 2001 1

Lecture for Taonga, July 5 2001

Sitges, June 2001

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