The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.
The Christopher Small Reader
ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER SMALL
Music, Society, Education
Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music
Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening
Edited by Robert Walser
THE CHRISTOPHER SMALL READER
Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
© 2016 The Estate of Christopher Small
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill
Typeset in Minion Pro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Small, Christopher, 1927–2011. | Walser, Robert, editor.
Title: The Christopher Small reader /
Christopher Small; edited by Robert Walser.
Description: Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, [2016] |
Series: Music/culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015048308 (print) | LCCN 2015051357 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780819576392 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780819576408 (pbk. : alk.paper) | ISBN 9780819576415 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. | Music—Social aspects. |
Musicology. | Small, Christopher, 1927–2011.
Classification: LCC ML423.S58 A25 2016 (print) |
LCC ML423.S58 (ebook) | DDC 780—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048308
5 4 3 2 1
Cover illustration: Painting of Christopher Small and Neville Braithwaite performing in Sitges, Spain (Unsigned and undated.) Formerly in the collection of Christopher Small and Neville Braithwaite, now in the collection of Robert Walser and Susan McClary. Photo by Robert Walser.
CONTENTS
Editor’s Introduction by Robert Walser vii
Autobiography (2004; rev. 2008) 1
Introduction to Music, Society, Education (1977) 15
A Different Drummer—American Music: From Music, Society, Education (1977) 20
Introduction to Music of the Common Tongue (1987) 50
Styles of Encounter III—Jazz: From Music of the Common Tongue (1987) 62
Whose Music Do We Teach, Anyway? (1990) 87
Introduction to Musicking: Prelude: Music and Musicking (1998) 95
A Solitary Flute Player: From Musicking (1977) 114
Interview by Robert Christgau (2000) 120
The Sardana and Its Meanings (2003) 150
Why Doesn’t the Whole World Love Chamber Music? (2001) 153
Creative Reunderstandings (2005) 173
Exploring, Affirming, Celebrating—and Teaching (2003) 189
Deep and Crisp and Even (2008) 200
Six Aphorisms and Five Commentaries (2007) 207
Afterword: On Music Education (2009) 217
Afterword by Susan McClary: Remembering Neville Braithwaite 230
INTRODUCTION
Robert Walser
I am 75 years old and I have learnt that we are on the earth to enjoy it together. Music serves to explore our identity, helps us to know who we are, and to celebrate it.
Christopher Small 1
Christopher Small was born in New Zealand in 1927 and died in Spain in 2011 at the age of eighty-four, having spent much of his life teaching in London. I believe he was the most profound musical thinker of the twentieth century. I say that because the breadth and depth of his work, in which he drew upon his training as both a scientist and an artist, his accomplishments as a classical musician and as a devoted student of African American music, and his practical experiences as a composer, a pianist, an accompanist, and a teacher, enabled him to become the consummate insider/outsider who could empathetically challenge our assumptions about the nature of music and help us account for the pleasures that it gives us.
Mikhail Bakhtin wrote powerfully about the importance of outsiders for helping insiders understand the significance of things they had taken for granted. Chris, as a New Zealander, as a gay man, as someone without a doctoral degree who had strong opinions about higher education, and as an enthusiastic amateur musician, had forged an identity that didn’t quite fit into the contexts he inhabited during most of his life. And that helped enable him to become an original thinker. Yet it is also true that the insider brings to bear crucial intimate knowledge. The writers who are normally ranked highest in explaining the significance of the classical music tradition have been mostly quite parochial, and they usually did not even imagine that they should try to place that sort of music making in a larger context of human activity. More anthropologically oriented scholars have typically not had