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Christopher Small

By Ernesto | February 8, 2008

In my first semester at Berklee I went through a kind of musical crisis.  I became obsessed with the reasons for making music: why do we make music? Is it important?  What is my role as a musician in society? Hey, if there’s a moment in life to get all philosophical, it’s college, right?

Anyway, my first course of action was to hit the library in search of books about the origins of music.  I was reading about how humans may have started singing by imitating birdsongs, or how singing might have been a precursor to language, or about how we’re a visual-oriented society, etc, etc… Fascinating stuff, but it didn’t really provide me with answers to what I was looking for.

Then, and I don’t really remember the details of how I ended up checking it out, I found a small red book called Music, Society, Education by Christopher Small.

Now I have to make a side-note here and mention that this is probably one of the worse titles ever given to a book.  It gives no indication to what’s inside.  People would see me reading it and ask, "Why the hell are you reading THAT?"

Yeah, it didn’t seem like much of an interesting read, but reading that book ended up being one of the most important and defining moments in my musical life (your mileage may vary).  Oh, and it answered all of my questions, too.

So what’s it about?  The basic idea that Small tries to present, is that music is not a thing, but a process.  And what’s more, this process doesn’t only involve the musicians that perform and compose the music.  It also includes the audience and everybody involved with that moment in time.  And the purpose of this process is to celebrate and assert the myths believed by the society.

He also criticizes current practices in classical music, since they try to present music as an object (THE COMPOSITION) created by one very important and distinguished person (THE COMPOSER), and to be performed by a highly trained group of people (THE MUSICIANS).  The performance is an attempt to recreate the composition, which only exists in its ideal form in the mind of the IMAGINER! (Zappa reference. Sorry, couldn’t resist).

Going back to Small’s view of things, one would say that the composition only truly exists in the moment it is being performed.  And each time it is performed, it is a different moment; a different process.  His problem with the classical world is how they try to separate the composition from the context it was created in.

There is a lot more to this book, but I read it ten years ago and I currently don’t own a copy, so I’m going with memory alone.  I did go on to read his other books, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening and Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music.

In Musicking, he focuses on music as a process, and suggests that we should use a verb instead of a noun to describe it. Hence, "Musicking".  I’d actually recommend anyone to read this book first, since it is shorter and a lot more focused.  Then, if you like where he’s coming from, you can check out his other books.

Music of the Common Tongue is also quite a good read.  It’s about the influence that African music and culture has had on the whole world, and how it came to happen.  For example, the differences between the slaves that came to the U.S. and those that were sent to Latin America, and why the music they created was different.  Or how reggae became such a powerful influence in the English music scene, etc…

So as you can see, I’m a Christopher Small fan.  It seems I keep good company too.  Robert Fripp has said he has read Small’s book, and I’ve heard him use the term "musicking" on occasion. Yet he still doesn’t seem to be all that well known.  I hope that changes in the future, because it would be a shame if his books ended up out of print.  Or better yet, maybe I’m completely wrong and he is relatively well known.

Here are some links about Christopher Small:

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/rock/small-00.php

http://www.musekids.org/musicking.html

http://www.furious.com/PERFECT/chrissmall.html

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    • One Response to “Christopher Small”

    1. Joe Says:
      February 12th, 2008 at 3:34 pm

      I’m working on a couple long posts on this topic myself. Small’s ideas you mentioned are new to me, and I find them quite interesting, I’ll have to check him out.

      And I dig the Zappa reference. I laughed out loud.

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