Musicking. Christopher Small G.
a consumer guide, both to tell them what is good and what is bad, what is à la mode and what is passé—in short, what they should and should not buy—and to give them confidence in the rightness of their choice.
Given the mercantile and nonparticipatory nature of today’s concert world, criticism is a perfectly honorable profession, but we should remember that wherever people participate fully in musical performance or where musicking is part of a larger social, religious, or political ritual, there is no need for critics. In the medieval and Renaissance church there were no critics, nor were there any in the world of palace or castle or royal or ducal opera house; as like as not it was the archbishop, king, or duke who decided what was good or bad, and everyone else agreed with him. In general the prince’s ability to dictate musical taste related to the strength of his political power; Louis XIV of France, in his day the most powerful man in Europe, was also its leading tastemaker. On the other hand, among the egalitarian Ewe of Ghana, John Miller Chernoff (1979) tells us, when he played the drums badly for the dancing, people danced their criticism, either by dancing in a listless manner or by simplifying their dancing to help him.
Once people have been attracted to the performance and have ordered, paid for and received their tickets, in itself no mean logistic feat, they have to be brought to and taken home from the hall. Many people will have traveled considerable distances, and few will have come on foot, without relying on some form of public or private mechanized transport. Without a highly developed system of transport extending into a sizable hinterland, none of today’s big concert halls would survive. This means that any concert in such a hall depends not only on international managements and advertising agencies, not only on sophisticated means of communication, but also on means of transport: airplanes, buses, trains and automobiles.
Then there is the internal organization of the hall itself. Like any other enterprise in our society, it is organized hierarchically, with its boss and its administrators as well as its proletariat, whose joint task is to keep the place running smoothly and produce concerts throughout the season without the appearance of effort. It needs accountants, lawyers and clerks; secretaries and computer operators; ticket collectors and ushers; program sellers; electricians, sound men, piano tuners, and other technicians; hefty men to shift the piano around and arrange the orchestra seating; and staff for the bars and restaurants, not to mention the cleaners, those Nibelungen of the modern industrial state without whose underpaid services not only concert halls but also school, factories, offices, and airports would quickly choke to death on their own rubbish.
Most of these people are invisible to us or at least taken for granted and unnoticed even when we do glimpse them at work, but all are working to create the illusion of a magical place set aside from everyday life, where we can contemplate, in stillness and in silence, the works of master musicians. All are contributing to the nature of the musicking, and their working relationships, and those between them and the audience, are an essential part of the relationships of the events that take place in the hall and thus of the meanings that the performances generate.
If we imagine a performance in which the members of the orchestra sold the tickets themselves, arranged their own seating and moved the piano around and where everyone, audience as well as conductor, soloist and orchestra members, stayed afterward to clean up, there would be brought into existence another set of human relationships, another kind of society. It would not necessarily be a better society, but we may be sure that those taking part would not remain strangers to one another for very long. Another set of relationships again would be created if one person were to pay the expenses of the performances and if all the audience were to be his guests, as in the old days of aristocratic patronage, or if everyone concerned in the performance were to give their services free and no admission charge were made. It is a matter of choices; there is nothing inevitable about the arrangement that prevails in today’s concert halls. It was not ordained by nature but is a social arrangement.
For each concert there are a thousand details to be attended to. Program notes have to be written and edited, the program booklet designed and printed with its photos of conductor and soloist, the piano tuned and its depth of touch adjusted to the exacting demands of the famous pianist, the orchestra’s seating placed in the conductor’s desired manner and the correct orchestral parts for tonight’s works placed on the music racks that stand before each player. The flowers that are presented to an artist with such apparent spontaneity at the end of the performance do not materialize on their own, nor does the bottle of his favorite brand of malt whisky discreetly placed in the famous conductor’s dressing room. Even the disembodied hand that pulls aside the curtain or opens the door to admit the conductor to the stage belongs to someone who was told to do it.
Before a note of music has been played, the building and its mode of organization have created among those present a set of relationships, which are a microcosm of those of the larger industrial society outside its walls. As we have already noted, all the relationships of the concert hall are mediated by the passing of money. To put it flatly, those who pay for admission, whoever they may be, are entitled to enter and to take part in an event, while those who do not pay are not. And on the other side, those who get paid will play their part in making the event happen, while those who do not get paid will not. There is in our society nothing very remarkable about that, of course; what is remarkable is the care that is taken to conceal the functions of administration and accounting, to create the illusion in the great building of a magical world where things happen of themselves, where nobody has to work and nobody needs money. It is none of the audience’s business how much the performers are paid—and in the case of many conductors and soloists it is remarkably difficult to find out.
If this link between the lofty ceremony of the symphony concert and the down-to-earth values of industrial society as a whole seems farfetched, consider this. In countries outside the older industrial heartland of Europe and the United States of America, an early sign that the conversion to the industrial philosophy and the social relationships that belong to it has taken place and become interiorized is often the takeover of the country’s musical culture by Western-style musicking. As the relationships of industrial society take over and a middle class develops that has grown prosperous on the wealth generated by industry, so professional symphony orchestras appear in the major cities, along with opulent centers for the performing arts built to house their performances. Conservatories of Western classical music are opened and infant-prodigy virtuosi, mostly the sons and daughters of the newly wealthy middle class, begin to astonish audiences in the concert halls of the older musical centers, often showing a freshness of approach that must reflect the newness of their encounter with the musical works of the Western tradition.
On the other hand, the Western-style popular music that frequently develops at the same time tends to explore, affirm and celebrate other desired relationships and other identities, in particular that of the industrial proletariat that comes into existence to serve the purposes of the new middle class. As I noted in an earlier book (Small 1987), it tends, as a lower-status music, to be less concerned with notions of correctness and is thus able to absorb into itself elements of traditional ways of musicking, which the middle classes, in their eagerness to align themselves with the international industrial culture, reject, even though at the same time they may pay lip service to them.
It happened in Japan around the end of the nineteenth century; a marker of a kind is that the piano firm of Yamaha is now a little over a hundred years old. It happened in South Korea in the 1960s and is happening today in Indonesia and the People’s Republic of China. And if a 1989 article in a London newspaper is to be believed, the wealthier parts of the Arab world are becoming interested (Campbell 1989).
This article tells us, with breathless enthusiasm, of the formation of the Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra in the oil-rich Gulf state of Muscat and Oman, by command of the sultan himself. Teenage boys are being recruited from remote tribal communities and are being trained in the English language and in the disciplines of the symphony orchestra by a former British army musician. This orchestra, if it is anything more than a passing sultanic whim, may well be part of a new phenomenon, for Muscat and Oman is not an industrial state at all in the ordinary sense and has no middle class to speak of; its wealth comes from industry at secondhand, so to speak, through supplying the oil needs of industrial states. But the article speaks clearly of the desire, on the part of the sultan at least,