Musicking. Christopher Small G.
as they music is linked not only with the sound relationships that are created by the performers, not only with the participants’ relation to one another, but also with the participants’ relationships to the world outside the performance space, in a complex spiral of relationships, and it is those relationships, and the relationships between relationships, that are the meaning of the performance.
An unsympathetic observer might even find a certain hypocrisy in some popular music situations. Consider, for example, the relation of performers to audience. Many popular artists make a great show of their unity and their solidarity with their listeners; I remember an aging and justly famous star of country music sitting on the edge of the stage with his feet dangling over, thus symbolically breaking through the barrier between himself and the audience, and announcing, “We’re gonna be here all night!” We all cheered, even though we knew no such thing was gonna happen; neither the theater management nor the star’s own handlers would allow the performance to run much over its allotted two hours or so. But we appreciated the gesture, and—who knows?—perhaps he was wishing as sincerely as ourselves that it might be true. I doubt if sensitive artists enjoy the conditions under which they have to perform any more than do sensitive members of the audience.
Again, some popular artists go the the point of behavior onstage that under other circumstances could be interpreted as an invitation to sex. But woe betide any deluded member of the audience who takes the invitation seriously and tries to join the performer onstage. There will be a team of heavies, hired for the purpose, waiting to bundle him or her off, and not too gently either. The nearest anyone not in the performers’ charmed circle will get to them will be in the line for an autograph at the end of the show.
Such pretenses are, of course, absent from symphony concerts. Performers, however glamorous, do not issue sexual invitations, not onstage at any rate, and so do not need a team of heavies to keep people off the platform, and no one feels the need to pretend that the performance is going to go on all night. No hypocrisy there, if hypocrisy it is. But hypocrisy has been called the tribute that vice pays to virtue, and the pretenses that are made in these situations show what it is that those taking part, performers perhaps as well as audience, are looking for in the performance. We might read it as the quest for an ideal of community and conviviality as an antidote for the loneliness of our age.
A festival of folk music shows a similar quest more coherently, through a deliberate informality of presentation that goes beyond that of the usual rock concert. There is a studious avoidance of glamour. Stages are generally small and unpretentious, and amplification, if it is used at all (some folk artists righteously eschew amplification altogether) is discreet. Performers are expected to avoid the kind of forceful self-presentation and domination of the audience that characterizes the rock star and, in a different way, the concert soloist, and to fraternize with the audience when not performing.
This is of course as carefully cultivated a set of behaviors as that which is exhibited in any other musicking. Stars remain stars, even if they shine less ostentatiously than some of their pop or classical colleagues, and a paying public remains a paying public. That the experience is more of the desire for than of the actuality of community is part of my point; the relationships created during a musical performance of any kind are more the ideal, as imagined by the participants, than the present reality.
So if the community of the rock or even the folk concert is nothing more than a carefully orchestrated set of theatrical tricks played in collusion by performers, their handlers and the audience together, we cannot blame them if the participants feel that counterfeit community is better than none at all. In any case, people are on the whole not so silly as not to recognize the gap between desire and reality. What we need to keep in mind is that those taking part in performances of different kinds are looking for different kinds of relationships, and we should not project the ideals of one kind of performance onto another. Any performance, and that includes a symphony concert, should be judged finally on its success in bringing into existence for as long as it lasts a set of relationships that those taking part feel to be ideal and in enabling those taking part to explore, affirm, and celebrate those relationships. Only those taking part will know for sure what is their nature.
Interlude 1
The Language of Gesture
Before we go further into this description of the musical ceremony called a symphony concert, I need to make the first of my digressions in order to establish a simple theoretical foundation for understanding what is going on there.
If, as I have suggested, musicking is 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, and if through musicking we learn about and explore those relationships, we affirm them to ourselves and anyone else who may be paying attention, and we celebrate them, then musicking is in fact a way of knowing our world—not that pre-given physical world, divorced from human experience, that modern science claims to know but the experiential world of relationships in all its complexity—and in knowing it, we learn how to live well in it.
The first clues I received to this way of thinking came in the 1970s from reading the works of the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson, whose death in 1980 at the age of seventy ended a life given over to evolving a way of knowing that would unite the scientists’ impersonal way of knowing the world with the human knowledge of ethics, values and the sacred. The purpose of this way of knowing is not to dominate the world, as is that of scientific knowledge, but to live well in it. My own subsequent readings in neurobiology and the study of mind have made me realize that a great leap in knowledge in these fields has been made in the years since Bateson’s death, but nonetheless I still feel the power of his ideas; those later writers have served to confirm for me the essential rightness of his intuitions and of his enterprise.
One of Bateson’s recurring themes is the double nature of all philosophical questions. He takes Warren McCulloch’s (1965) version of the psalmist’s question, “Lord, what is man that thou shouldst be mindful of him?” and extends it into his own investigations. McCulloch asks not only “What is a number that a man may know it?” but also the reciprocal question, “What is a man that he may know a number?” and he points out that the answer to one depends on the answer to the other. Bateson returns repeatedly to this form of double reciprocal questioning, pointing out that to ask questions in this way is a little like binocular vision, in that it gives a greater depth than either question asked individually. He says that “two descriptions are better than one,” and I have found, similarly, that if I would ask the question What is musicking that human beings should like to practice it? I need also to ask the complementary question, What are human beings that they should like to practice musicking? It is in order to propose an answer to the latter that I need to make what appears like a long detour before I can propose an answer to the former; and in the course of my doing so, the discussion of musicking itself will necessarily recede into the background. I can only ask the reader to trust me eventually to make its relevance plain.
One of Bateson’s fundamental intuitions is a denial of what is known as Cartesian dualism, the idea that the world is made up of two different and even incompatible kinds of substance: matter, which is divisible, has mass, dimensions, and a location in space; and mind, which is indivisible, has no mass or dimensions and is located nowhere and everywhere. This mode of thought is very old in Western thinking and in fact, in the form of the concept of an immortal soul that is distinct from the body and survives its death, is part of our society’s religious orthodoxy.
It was first made explicit in a systematic way in the seventeenth century by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. Through Descartes it has not only come to form one of the foundations of modern science but has also become so ingrained in the thinking of members of modern scientific-industrial societies (by that I mean not just scientists but everyone, whether trained or not in the practice of science) that it hardly seems like a mode of thinking at all but more like simple commonsensical reality.
How,