📜 Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press
This is an important book for modern, socially conscious musicology, with a few other disciplines involved. It delivers many remarks of interest on the titular "musicking", which was a term in little use before, and is here understood as any involvement with the performance of music. The very act of performance is absolutely central to Small's approach and all conceptual or theoretical definitions of music are much less appreciated.
At the same time, the understanding of music is quite broad, including, importantly for us, performing without any audience with occasional examples from many different cultures easily fitting in. Constant stressing of the fact that a piece (a "work") is a superfluous element in music is a slight misfit for our wiki though, as here "works" (games) are central, even if they are much different from classical music pieces.
The topic of classical music is unfortunately important for the book. The theoretical concepts are very general, but about 70% of the text exemplifies them with symphonic music, analyzing venues, audience experience, interactions between the performers and many more aspects of musicking in that context. This specific genre, despite still keeping its social cache, is practically irrelevant for music games apart from a few examples like Jubilee Games by Bernstein, etc.
Such crossovers are brushed upon with the topic of "division of labor" in symphonic music, when speaking of typical orchestra members (p. 68) Small says that:
they are inclined to resent those contemporary composers who require them to invent material for themselves to play
This characterization, like many others, is provided without any reference to preceding qualitative or quantitative research. Such facts are established purely anecdotally (which does not make them false, but just showcases a loose writing style in some aspects). Proper citations appear unevenly, especially in musical parts, while the situation is a bit better in the "interludes", where symphonic music also takes a back seat.
Interludes are three chapters that venture outside of musical writing to gather material from other disciplines. The first such chapter is for anthropology (Bateson), then comes myth and ritual with threads from cognitive studies, and lastly the role of social groups is examined. All that investigated material is mainly a support for one central recurring thesis:
[M]usicking is 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 [p. 50]
Then, if music is taken as not that abstract after all, you can interpret it in more ways, including being ethically judgemental towards it. And in the eyes of Small, symphonic music comes off rather poorly, with tendencies to gender bias and authoritarianism. Such ideas might be in line with what many pioneers of music games thought — the aim for some of them was to build a more egalitarian way of music-making. Our distance towards a symphonic concert might not be so bad after all!…
Close to the end, on pages 193-198, in the chapter What Is Really Going On Here?, there's a long list of questions to help readers examine any kind of music(king) to identify inherent relationships and (hence) meanings. We should ask those questions of music games, which is to be done in another article.
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