Musicking
• Music – organizing sounds into meanings
• Music is an activity (a verb not just a noun) –
something people do
– Rather than just the ‘thingness’ of music
• Musicking – to take part in a musical
performance
– Performing, listening, rehearsing, practicing,
providing material for performance, dancing
Musicking – Christopher Small (1998)
• An activity by means of which we bring into existence a set
of relationships that model the relationships of our world,
not as they are but as we would wish them to be
• Through musicking we learn about and explore those
relationships
• We affirm them to ourselves and anyone else who may be
paying attention
• We celebrate them
• Musicking -- a way of knowing our world – not that pregiven physical world, divorced from human experience,
that modern science claims to know but the experiential
world of relationships in all its complexity
Small on Musicking
• If a musical work exists in the relationships
between the sounds as performers make
them and as hearers hear them, then it exists
only in performance
• And can only be known in the act of musicking
Spectacle
• performers present themselves as representative of a
larger group or a larger reality
• Symbolic reality serves to differentiate theater and
spectacle
• Must have an audience -- spectacles are things to be
seen
• A public display of society’ central meaningful events
• The presentation of key elements in the public’s
cultural and emotional life
• Such public events by means of structure and
enactment reconstitute the whole community
The spectacle of professional music
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microcosm of the larger society -- model of
social relations
Cultural meaning
the “nature” of the product to be made
division of labor within the organization
(players)
– Each player highly skilled on a single instrument
(in contrast to Balinese gamelan)
Musical Tropes
• figurative language is part of the reality
maintenance system of a culture or sub-culture.
• The ubiquity of tropes in visual as well as verbal
forms can be seen as reflecting our
fundamentally relational understanding of reality.
• Reality is framed within systems of analogy
• Figures of speech enable us to see one thing in
terms of another
• tropes 'orchestrate the interactions of signifiers
and signifieds' in discourse (Silverman 1983, 87).
The spectacle of music
• The ideal of heroic individualism that appeals to members
of western industrial bourgeoisie
• Stories told will arouse no response unless they resonate
with the desires values of those at whom they are aimed
• Struggle and the overcoming of one force by another and
the celebration of victory
• The force that overcomes is … depends on the music
• The formulas take us to mythic time
– involving activities of heroic individuals demonstrating in their
conflict and resolution exemplary struggles and resolutions
– This closes the meta-narrative
• Order is brought into existence and the end is final