The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.
and care less about the very beautiful and lively British jazz scene of that time, which was enlivened by a number of superb, exiled, black South African musicians—your loss), John had come through the Royal Air Force Band at Uxbridge, not far from Ealing. He also helped me in my first tremulous attempts to play jazz, and though I never got good at it I did gain more understanding of the complexity of the art. One of my students, a good R&B saxophonist, who wanted to use the performance option in the degree to improve his jazz skills, asked me to act as pianist for his lessons. That was a steep learning curve if ever I got onto one.
In 1980, when I was on a year’s secondment to Dartington College of Arts in Devon, I got John down to give a workshop to the students. The workshop, predictably I’m afraid, attracted more students of drama than of music. John, clearly nervous of being in such posh surroundings, had put on his best Italian suit, very sharp, with white shirt and narrow black tie. He was an enormous success. One fledgling theater director said to me afterward, “Here comes this dude looking like everyone’s idea of a used-car salesman and just manages to blow everyone’s mind.”
John died of a heart attack in 2000, aged only fifty-three.
Also around that time I got involved in a sound poetry and music group around the sound poet Bob Cobbing. There was a young woman singer who wove marvelous lines of sound around Bob’s voice; a flutist, David Toop, who played some beautiful, big Andean flutes he had made; a percussionist, Paul Burwell, who had the biggest collection of hubcaps I have ever seen; a trombonist, and me at the piano. I loved it. We even did a BBC Radio 3 gig.
I had been working for some years on a translation of Henri Pousseur’s Fragments théoriques sur la musique expérimentale, a massive task, and had been trying to get a publisher to look at it. It was only when I offered it to Calder and Boyars, who had been the British publishers of a number of interesting music books, including the Cage books and Ives’s Essays before a Sonata, that I received any response, in the form of an invitation to talk with the great man, John Calder, himself. He looked at my manuscript, and we talked for a while about music (he is a great opera buff), and then he offered me a contract to write a book for him, just like that. That was the origin of Music, Society, Education, which I wrote more or less off the top of my head from my lectures and classes. I expected it just to sink from sight like dozens of other academic music books (every academic thinks he has a book in him), and no one was more surprised than I was when it started to get good and even rave reviews—and some bitchy ones. I had been in doubt as I wrote it whether I was just mouthing platitudes (after all, it all seemed to me so obvious) or making wild, unsupported, and maybe unsupportable, assertions. I certainly had no idea that I was writing an “important” book. I remember meeting the U.S. cultural attaché at a conference a few months after it was published, and when he asked me over lunch if I was “the” Christopher Small I had no idea how to answer.
I shall always be grateful to John Calder for giving me the chance to write and be published, but he did rip me off rotten, and still owes me a lot of money that I shall never see. I finally told him in a letter that I was grateful to him but that I had run out of gratitude. But I was frightened to take the rights back from him, although he was flagrantly in breach of our contract, thinking that I would never get another publisher and that a dud publisher was better than no publisher.
The breakthrough came when Rob Walser, whom I had met at the 1988 meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology at MIT, contacted me in Sitges and asked if he and his wife Susan McClary could stay with us for a couple of nights. Sitting out on the terrace of our apartment one evening, I told them about my woes with Calder, and they said that, as two-thirds of the music editorial committee of Wesleyan University Press, they could guarantee that if I could get the rights off Calder they would reprint my (then) two books. It took a while, but we managed it. Later Wesleyan published the third book, Musicking, so all three are now under the same imprint.
The other big influence on my feelings and ideas about music was knowing Neville Braithwaite, my friend and companion of thirty years. When I dedicated Music of the Common Tongue to him “for showing me what it was all about,” I meant it—not only for himself but also for so many West Indian friends (he is Jamaican by birth) whom I met through him and through his profession of youth worker, and from his wonderful welcoming family, scattered around the world, who view life from a viewpoint intriguingly different from my own, and who have enriched my life and especially my understanding of the act of musicking. Alas, he died of a brain tumor in October 2006, and I shall miss him forever.
People like to label me a musicologist, but I feel that the label puts me in a nice, safe pigeonhole and makes me innocuous. If I have always tried, not always successfully, to refuse it, it is not out of modesty, real or assumed, although it is true that I have no formal musicological training. Rather, it is because my ideas, such as they are, have grown more out of my musical experiences than out of any theory, which for me has always come after the musical fact. I consider myself, therefore, simply as a musician who thinks about his art.
SITGES, JULY 2004
I am also starting to realize that I have been lassoed into the music education corral, where I don’t feel I really belong either. True, I have been a teacher of music most of my professional life and have theorized some about my job, but being a teacher of music is not necessarily the same thing as being a music educator, although it is to be hoped that the latter category is always to be subsumed into the former. I have always tried to put my performing money where my theorizing mouth is.
I have a sneaky feeling that both these “disciplines” are some kind of—no, not scams, which implies a degree of deliberate deception that I don’t intend—but that neither is really necessary for the universal practice of musicking. Perhaps I oversimplify (a sin of which I have been accused), but I cannot help feeling that these great intellectual (and career) structures have been erected around what are really two very simple propositions—that all normally endowed human beings are born with the capacity to music and that everyone wants to have the power to music just as they want to have the power to speak.
POSTSCRIPT, 2008
Introduction to Music, Society, Education
(1977)
It is generally acknowledged that the musical tradition of post-Renaissance Europe and her offshoots is one of the most brilliant and astonishing cultural phenomena of human history. In its range and power it is perhaps to be matched by only one other intellectual achievement—the science of post-Renaissance Europe. It is understandable, therefore, if those of us who are its heirs (which includes not only the Americas and many late and present colonies of Europe but also by now a large portion of the non-western world as well) are inclined to find in the European musical tradition the norm and ideal for all musical experience, just as they find in the attitudes of western science the paradigm for the acquisition of all knowledge, and to view all other musical cultures as at best exotic and odd. It is in fact precisely this inbuilt certainty of the superiority of European culture to all others that has given Europeans, and latterly their American heirs, the confidence to undertake the cultural colonization of the world and the imposition of European values and habits of thought on the whole human race.
We should not, however, allow the brilliance of the western musical tradition to blind us to its limitations and even areas of downright impoverishment. We may be reluctant to think of our musical life, with its great symphony orchestras, its Bach, its Beethoven, its mighty concert halls and opera houses, as in any way impoverished, and yet we must admit that we have nothing to compare with the rhythmic sophistication of Indian, or what we are inclined to dismiss as “primitive” African music, that our ears are deaf to the subtleties of pitch inflection of Indian raga or Byzantine church music, that the cultivation of bel canto as the ideal of the singing voice has shut us off from all but a very small part of the human voice’s sound possibilities or expressive potential, such as are part of the everyday resources of a Balkan folk singer or an Eskimo, and that the smooth mellifluous sound of the romantic symphony orchestra drowns out the fascinating buzzes and distortions cultivated alike by African and medieval European musicians.
It is only comparatively recently