Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (review)

Book Review Christopher Small. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. Christopher Small, inhis most recent book, Musiking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, provides a penetrating analysis of the social world of Western art music. Small takes a social construction stance in explainingthat music is a form ofcommunal ritual through which social relations or meanings are enacted, sustained and, ideally, contested. Musical meaning is both metaphorical, in the sense of representing or bearing a resemblance to social relations (including ones ofclass, gender, ethnicity, and so on) and mythical. Music is a gestural language and form of ritualized story or myth telling through which groups of people express their understandings ofthe world and their places in it. As such, it is intimately connected with issues of politics and identity. Contending that the currently prevailing social order within the Western art music tradition is dysfunctional, Small states that his aim is consciousness raising. The intent is to make people more aware of the relativistic nature of their musical theories or myths so that they can be better positioned to exert personal control over their musical lives. Small drawsupontheworkofmusicologists Richard Taruskin, Susan McClary, and others to craft a complex andwell-structuredcritique ofthe Western concert music tradition. The argument goes something like this. The Western musical tradition has become concretized and stultified as a result ofreification of so-called "masterworks" and scores thereof coupled with an overreliance uponanddeferenceto musical experts. Theseand other factors have stifled individual creativity while rendering society musically passive. The problem is not so much with the music or the musical experts, since all "musicking" is deserving of respect, but with the absolutist and technical rationalist tendencies associated withthe cults ofthe classical and genius. This absolutist and authoritarian theme is contrasted with a more humane, relativistic, and democratic approach in which "everyone's musical experience is valid" (p. 13). The tension betweenthe authoritarian, absolutist themeversus the democratic, relativistic theme is resolved with the author's admission ofpersonal contradiction and paradox. While rejecting the violence and egotism embedded or encoded in the Western musical canon, Small acknowledges personally benefitting from that tradition (by virtue ofbeing a member ofa privileged group) while continuing to be drawn to a select number ofthose works. Small's greatest contribution in this book, apart from reminding us that music literally only exists in performance and not in the score, is in providingarichdescriptionandexplanationofthe social significance of the concert hall and the myriad social and musical relationships therein. As described and interpreted by him, many of those relationships are dysfunctional-composers, conductors, managers, and academics are all too controlling-whilehistoricalrelationships encoded in the musical score and libretto and in performances thereof, have functioned to marginalize women and minorities. Symphonic music, like opera, is a "men's world" in which women have been "obliged" to assimilate to the "masculine system ofsigns ofconcert music" (p. 171). Reason is implicated in this authoritarian scheme for it provides the intellectual and epistemological foundationforthehighlyevolved butultimatelyrestrictiveWesterntonal system (p. 128). Small's book is a sociological tour de force in that it explains better than any other source I©Philosophy ofMusic Education Review 9, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 45^46. 46 Philosophy of Music Education Review know how music might convey or communicate social information. But while providing rich description and theoretical explanation of a complex social system, the book suffers from the usual circularity and paradoxes associated with more extreme social construction agendas. For while arguing against social determinism, reason, andpositivisticmusicology, Small'sconceptionof social construction sounds deterministic while his arguments depend for their cogency on a strong sense ofreason supported by abundant historical data. Small's extremism occasionally leads to philosophical contradiction. For example, while decrying the growth of the music authenticity movement, he accepts as unproblematical the radical feminist proposition that women are essentially different from men and thus ought to have "authentic" musical voices of their own. The corollary assumption is that women ought to have their own "genuinely [italics mine] feminine semiotics of representational music" (p. 171). The unfortunate example is given of one of Small's own composition teachers fromhis youth who is described as having composed like a man. He thinks it would be...