Christopher small musicking pdf

Learning to cope with reading academic essays and articles is a valuable skill, but like may skills is one that you acquire rather than something you are born with. In this assignment you will begin to build on the skills that you already have in a structured way as preparation--a rehearsal, so to speak--of dealing with the readings in this course, and in future courses.

For this assignment, read "Prelude: Music and Musicking," which is the introduction to Christopher Small's book, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening.

For this assignment: take separate notes, highlight the important parts of the text in the PDF using the highlighter function. And write some notes outside the pdf document.

I’ve attached the pdf document below.

CHRISTOPHER SMALL * Musicking THE MEANINGS OF PERFORMING AND LISTENING * WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Published by University Press of New England Hanover and London Prelude Music and Musicking In a concert hall, two thousand people settle in their seats, and an intense silence falls. A hundred musicians bring their instruments to the ready. The conductor raises his baton, and after a few moments the symphony begins. As the orchestra plays, each member of the audience sits alone, listening to the work of the great, dead, composer. In a supermarket, loudspeakers fill the big space with anodyne melodi<:s that envelop customers, checkout clerks, shelf assistants and managers, uniting them in their common purpose of buying and selling. In a big stadium, fifty thousand voices cheer and fifty thousand pairs of hands applaud. A blaze of colored light and a crash of drums and amplified guitars greet the appearance onstage of the famous star of popular music, who is often heard on record and seen on video but whose presence here in the flesh is an experience of another kind. The noise is so great that the first few minutes of the performance are inaudible. A young man walks down a city street, his Walkman clamped across his ears, isolating him from his surroundings. Inside his head is an infinite space charged with music that only he can hear. A saxophonist finishes his improvised solo with a cascade of notes that ornament an old popular song. He wipes his forehead with a handkerchief and nods absently to acknowledge the applause of a hundred pairs of hands. The pianist takes up the tune. A church organist plays the first line of a familiar hymn tune, and the congregation begins to sing, a medley of voices in ragged unison. At an outdoor rally, with bodies erect and hands at the salute, fifty thou­ sand men and women thunder out a patriotic song. The sounds they make rise toward the God whom they are imploring to make their country great. Others hear the singing and shiver with fear. Prelude / I In an opera house, a soprano, in long blond wig and white gown streaked with red, reaches the climax of her mad scene and dies patheti­ caJly. Her deatl1 in song provokes not tears but a roar of satisfaction that echoes around d1e theater. As tl1e curtain descends, hands clap thunder­ ously and feet stamp on d1e floor. In a few moments, restored to life, she will appear before the curtain to receive her homage with a torrent of ap­ plause and a shower of roses thrown from the galleries. A housewife making the beds in the morning sings to herself an old popular song, its words imperfectly remembered. So many different settings, so many different kinds of action, so many different ways of organizing sounds into meanings, all of them given the name music. What is this thing called music, that human beings tl1e world over should find in it such satisfaction, should invest in it so much of their lives and resources? The question has been asked many times over the cen­ ruries, and since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, scholars and musi­ cians have tried to explain the narure and meaning of music and find the reason for its extraordinary power in the lives of human beings. Many of these attempts have been complex and ingenious, and some have even possessed a kind of abstract beauty, reminding one in their com­ plexity and ingenuity of those cycles and epicycles which astronomers in­ vented to explain tl1e movement of the planets before Copernicus simpli­ fied matters by placing the sun instead of tl1e earth at the center of the system. But none has succeeded in giving a satisfactory answer to the ques­ tion-or rather, pair of questions- What is the meaning of music? and What is the function of music in human life?- in the life, that is, of every member of tl1e human species. It is easy to understand why. Those are the wrong questions to ask. There is no such thing as music. Music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do. The apparent thing "music" is a figment, an abstraction of tl1e action, whose re­ ality vanishes as soon as we examine it at all closely. This habit of thinking in abstractions, of taking from an action what appears to be its essence and of giving that essence a name, is prpbably as old as language; it is useful in the conceprualizing of our world but it has its dangers. It is very easy to come to think of the abstraction as more real than the reality it represents, to think, for example, of those abstractions which we call Jove, hate, good and evil as having an existence apart from the acts of loving, hating, or per­ forming good and evil deeds and even to think of them as being in some way more real than the acts themselves, a kind of universal or ideal lying behind and suffusing the actions. This is the trap of reification, and it has been a besetting fault of Western thinking ever since Plato, who was one of its earliest perpetrators. MUSICKING /2 ,wn eu­ :hat ier­ she a pold any the )dd heir :en­ us1the )me )m­ ; 1n­ Lplithe ues­ and 1ery ask. The � re­ cmg and J1 in y to :nts, ood per­ :)me ymg : has 1e of If there is no such thing as music, then to ask "What is the meaning of music? )) is to ask a question that has no possible answer. Scholars of West­ ern music seem to have have sensed rather than understood that this is so; but rather than directing their attention to the activity we call music, whose meanings have to be grasped in time as it flies and cannot be fixed on paper, they have quietly carried out a process of elision by means of which the word music becomes equated with "works of music in the West­ ern tradition." Those at least do seem to have a real existence, even if the question of just how and where they exist does create problems. In this way the question ''What is the meaning of music?" becomes the more manage­ able "What is the meaning of this work ( or these works) of music?" which is not the same question at all.