Musicking

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(No Transcript)
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Musicking

• Music organizing sounds into meanings
• Music is an activity (a verb not just a noun)
  something people do
• Rather than just the thingness of music
• Musicking to take part in a musical performance
• Performing, listening, rehearsing, practicing,
  providing material for performance, dancing

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Musicking Christopher Small (1998)

• 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
• Through musicking we learn about and explore
  those relationships
• We affirm them to ourselves and anyone else who
  may be paying attention
• We celebrate them
• Musicking -- 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

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Small on Musicking

• If a musical work exists in the relationships
  between the sounds as performers make them and as
  hearers hear them, then it exists only in
  performance
• And can only be known in the act of musicking

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Spectacle

• performers present themselves as representative
  of a larger group or a larger reality
• Symbolic reality serves to differentiate theater
  and spectacle
• Must have an audience -- spectacles are things to
  be seen
• A public display of society central meaningful
  events
• The presentation of key elements in the publics
  cultural and emotional life
• Such public events by means of structure and
  enactment reconstitute the whole community

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The spectacle of professional music

• microcosm of the larger society -- model of
• social relations
• Cultural meaning
• the nature of the product to be made
• division of labor within the organization
  (players)
• Each player highly skilled on a single instrument
  (in contrast to Balinese gamelan)

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Musical Tropes

• figurative language is part of the reality
  maintenance system of a culture or sub-culture.
• The ubiquity of tropes in visual as well as
  verbal forms can be seen as reflecting our
  fundamentally relational understanding of
  reality.
• Reality is framed within systems of analogy
• Figures of speech enable us to see one thing in
  terms of another
• tropes 'orchestrate the interactions of
  signifiers and signifieds' in discourse
  (Silverman 1983, 87).

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The spectacle of music

• The ideal of heroic individualism that appeals to
  members of western industrial bourgeoisie
• Stories told will arouse no response unless they
  resonate with the desires values of those at whom
  they are aimed
• Struggle and the overcoming of one force by
  another and the celebration of victory
• The force that overcomes is depends on the
  music
• The formulas take us to mythic time
• involving activities of heroic individuals
  demonstrating in their conflict and resolution
  exemplary struggles and resolutions
• This closes the meta-narrative
• Order is brought into existence and the end is
  final