In the book Musicking, Christopher Small asks many questions about music. Some of them are neatly aligned in one of the final chapters , 193-199) and allow to examine relationships within and around any type of music-making.
Let's do our best to answer these questions with regards to music games. Even if it is impossible to speak definitively as there are many ways of playing. All questions, too many to copy, will be answered in the same order as in the text (and some are not technically even questions). All the issues analysed are grouped in the book into three general topics:
- What are the relationships between those taking part and the physical setting?
- What are the relationships among those taking part?
- What are the relationships between the sounds that are being made?
"We have seen that the physical setting…" (the first paragraph of questions)
Our imagined music games take place in a building in a city. The admission is free, but there is a donation jar from the venue. Anyone could take part today, if they knew about the event of course, as information about it was on the Internet — on organizers' social media, G4M wiki's events subpage and the front page, and a few other free-of-charge places.
"If it is indoors, we may ask…"
The space was not purpose-built for playing music games, it is a community center, a room used for workshops. It is not extremely sound-proofed, but reasonably isolated. The space is arranged to bring all participants together, no-one is elevated.
Questions about the auditorium won't concern us, because there is no separate "audience". Although people can sometimes move aside and listen to get back later for another game. The space is generally functional and simple, but often busy, with art supplies, family games, or toys on shelves around the playing area. Maybe even some snacks to grab or glasses of water. Generally a colourful, informal environment, not especially cosy.
Exact possibilities of action for "musicians" (all participants) will depend strongly on whether there is a single or more rooms at the disposal of the party. With a single room available it may be difficult to talk, eat, drink, or dance during the performance (unless the game requires it), but it should all be possible in this space during breaks. While the design and arrangement of this space allows free movement at any time, the activities usually won't.
"Of the performers we may ask…"
Performers' (emotional) relation to their body is diverse, but rarely at any of the extremes, neither very much detached, neither deeply engaged in expression, with occasional laughter being maybe the most intense emotional reaction. Players relate one to another casually but calmly, not the least because they are strangers, most of them are seeing each other for the very first time.
Are they inventing for themselves or are they playing someone else's invention? This one is not straightforward to answer. During the course of a game players may cross through all possibilities. A game may merely "suggest" a mood, or provide snippets of music. It may require to play notation that is traditional, niche, or devised specifically for the game, with material provided by the designer-composer, or generated by an algorithm or a random process.
What's more, during some games players invent music for each other to play, in which case, you'll quite often need to learn your part by ear. In some cases, players may not intend to make music, they e.g. give a sound signal, and music just happens from their sounds… Still, freedom is never strongly restricted, at least there is always some degree of openness to failure…
"There are physical factors also…"
(Questions come back here after two paragraphs of meditating on the role of improvisation.)
Players are quite close to each other, not intruding into others' personal space, but allowing the natural speaking voice to be easily heard by all. Participants are most often sitting in a circle on chairs around the table. Eye contact is possible but the game is central. Picking up visual clues from one another is physically possible, although might be actively avoided depending on the played game. There is a second table with available toy instruments and games a bit aside to the central group.
"Then there is a group of questions centering on who is in charge…"
The facilitator is a person with some privileges, including the best access to that accessory table. It's also possible that this one participant will have a bit more open space around them than average, to gain access to items and arrange them more easily. The "nature of his or her authority" (as Smalls puts it) is tough to assess, as a lot will depend on the exact level of expertise of that "leader" and the participants, and many other factors like personalities and musical genre tendencies.
However, it is to be expected that the facilitator will know all of the available games, and should be the best person to find a piece that will suit the whole group. It's still a good practice to give options to participants, and make those options to be of diverse character (to make a choice of the game meaningful). But having a say in "what" is played is different than "how" to play it, which should generally be up to each player. However, a facilitator on an educational mission (given to them by their own aesthetic approach) is imaginable and may be more intrusive.
Because the group is probably very diverse, and involved skills usually become apparent in play, the authority may also be allocated provisionally. All depends on a fit between the game's requirements and players' experience. So, if you deliver a killer solo in some specific style, you become a local authority for that style, for the time being, similarly with other skills.
There really are very few decisions that would be considered "final". In our specific context, it is even possible that the piece will be stopped during the performance if someone has very strong negative feelings about it. No authority will be "ultimate".
"It is clear that many of the questions we ask of a performance will concern relationships of power"
Another somewhat open question is how much we're going to stick to the rules of the game. Again, it depends on the group, gamers will tend to respect the choices of the designer-composer, while improvisers will be quick to change rules to their liking or disregard them in the moment (which by the way correlates also to how they approach game creation and playtesting). In mixed groups such differences will be hard to negotiate, and it's possible that the facilitator will have to resolve that (alternating the approaches game-by-game is possible and advisable).
The venue usually puts some limitations, often on the maximum amount of participants (due to safety), and also on the volume of music which inadvertently affects usable styles. This depends not only on the character of the host institution, but also the neighbourhood. There might be further limitations on the contents of the meeting, in extra-musical aspects, with huge differences depending on whether the venue is run by a county, a church organisation, or a squat commune.
"Not even a patron always acts freely…"
Broader contexts of motivations should rather be analysed with a concrete real example in mind. The further we go into the social surroundings, the more hazy and hidden motivations become. But regardless of the details, venues and institutions quite often act with the idea of "local community" and "integration" in mind. That is usually a reason for letting the music games happen at their place. Furthermore, they'd rather avoid having a notoriety for "failed" events.
Contrary to Louis XIV mentioned in this source paragraph, venues will rarely intervene into music itself, but it may happen if there is some musical-educational profile in the host institution. These types may encourage more respect towards "music as taught in school".
"Among the listeners…" / "Between listeners and performers…" / "There is, for example, a power relationship…" / "We must not imagine, however…"
Four paragraphs regarding listeners may be covered shortly together, because at music game meetings there is no separate class of participants that strictly limit their activity to listening. The role is temporary, and you may be back to playing soon, according to your liking.
But then, fellow listeners are usually strangers, they may communicate, as long as it's possible without disturbing the players (otherwise they could be asked by the facilitator accordingly). People that assume the listener role, have minimal influence over what is played, some emotional reactions to music may be encouraging for players to take specific routes.
"That brings us to…"
The great absentees paragraph! We mentioned the broadness of approaches to designer-composers already. But focusing on that, we should notice that game creators are not a coherent bunch. An author of a modern game that have been to the meeting last month is "summoned by the musicking" (as Small puts it) in a completely different way that when you e.g. play a gamy by Mozart (attributed to). Still, more creators may fall between the extremes of fame, like when people have heard of some pieces… and find them ridiculous.
Strictly musical referents may be invoked when attempting a specific musical style, or in games that allow or require playing "covers". Other relations are especially visible when a game is traditional or with an otherwise unknown author. Then, there still are people, who taught the game, tweaked the rules, or otherwise contributed to the game's evolution or popularity.
Of those absentees more prominent within society and myth there are no historical names that would consistently appear at music game meetings. Occasionally, some may be called upon, depending on ideologies involved in a specific instance of music gaming. You may e.g. summon Marx, e.g. through Cardew, or Buddha (Cage?), but deeply involved mentions of this type are not a staple. A natural inherent tendency of music games could be aimed towards some sort of "pluralism", or "relativism", but pioneer proponents of that and not as mainstream and rarely appear.
Finally, just plainly: people that are not at the meeting. How are they relevant? Thought and talk about such people will be much more natural to those that are relatively active in the field of music games. But so far it is consequential that the activity is hyper-niche, and many people either haven't tried it, nor considered doing such a thing (as adults). Music gaming is unknown also to those that are "independently" interested in musical improvisation, to games hobbyists, but even to those that combine those passions. Having more people trying it out could upgrade these imagined music gaming meetings from once a month to once a week, so that's why the topic may appear in this specific musicking situation.
"The third group of questions concerns the sounds themselves…"
Here we enter an area of enormous complexity that I can barely begin to cover. [p. 197]
As always, with the enormous diversity of possible scenarios, we won't be able to be exact, but we can gather some answers together. Firstly, we need to remember that the group is most probably of very much mixed proficiency and genre affiliation. Precision and constancy of pitch are not to be expected, instead we'll encounter some amount of noise and unrefined timbres due to broad range of instrument quality. Some voices might as well be relaxed due to casual atmosphere, or tense because of low experience with public performance.
"The relation between sounds can be divided into two groups…"
When considering the vertical and horizontal organisation of music, we need to notice that the latter has an advantage in music games. Pitches appear simultaneously quite often, but the music is both improvised, and played with a broad range of skill, so pitch relations are rarely in full control of players resulting in lack of "harmonic identity". Horizontal organisation dominates, with frequent call-and-response structures, although often occurring a few at a time.
In rhythm we hear a few patterns at once, there is no common downbeat, and accents are irregular. Melodies are rather jagged, but low-tension, with the most convenient range in use for a given instrument giving them low tessitura (individually). Phrases of diverse length may cross chromatic scales, with no clear mode, with some xenharmonic sounds occasionally appearing (not everyone cares about "proper" tuning).
The pace of sounds is not break-neck. Music evolves steadily, but over a longer period of time strong contrasts are audible. In this typical example of a game (which still stays unspecific) players listen mostly for the opportunity to introduce a clear change or to follow a far-reaching direction together or in subgroups.
"Simultaneous relationships include…"
The number of concurrent sounds depends here mostly on the number of players. Seven people came today, and at any given time, most of them play. Most of them give only one sound at a time, apart from, let's say, those with a melodica and a guitar. Usually, the voices are equal, and all can be easily heard. All in all, the texture is not very dense. Not all instruments in use are pitched; moments of conventional harmony appear by skill of a few more capable participants or by general luck, but the dissonance is fully emancipated — it's tolerated, and doesn't matter a lot.
"There are also relationships between simultaneous and successive…"
Not much happens in this regard, we may observe that if some consonance shows up, it will be sustained for some time, with a few variations of it explored. If a congestion appears, and many players play a lot, it's usual that some will pause for a moment to let the texture become more readable.
"Then there's a question of how much deviation…" / "What counts as excess…"
"Official" or notated norms of pitch and rhythm have no rein here. During the playthrough deviations are not introduced in any consistent manner, many of them are natural random imprecisions due to lack of skill, but you can also hear moments of participatory discrepancies with clear genre provenience, e.g. the guitarist inserts some bluesy licks here and there, or the vocalist adds stylish folky slides at the end of many phrases. Maybe it would be somewhat of an excess, if it was done each and every time, but probably everyone would endure that anyway. Let's also notice that nobody uses vibrato today, but it may happen another time…
"Those sound qualities…"
Larger-scale sound relationships effecting from small-scale ones are not very distinct. In the piece, there was a well-defined beginning, even if not punchy and highly coordinated. The ending is more akin to fizzling out this time. Some climax-resolution action occurred in the playthrough, or at least moments that can be imagined as such by people who appreciate this kind of musical solutions… The music is certainly not "about that", and you can also say that this musicking takes place entirely in the present.
"These three, probably arbitrary categories…" / "Let us take from our catalog…"
Relationships between relationships (second order) will be either overly complex (as Small also projects) or trivial.
Of two topics mentioned here before, it's clear that similarly to the book's example, the relationship between the composer and players strongly influences the relationship between sounds. Here, the designer-composer has defined in rules many aspects of the overall form of the piece, and some interactions that appear throughout, but the timing and exact melodies or patterns are brought by the will of players. In a similar manner, we can see that the relationship between players is involved by the virtue of abundant opportunities to inspire one another.
"There is a relationship between the relationships…"
The physical settings influences all participants to different extent, e.g. their mood, but this paragraph looks for the further effects of that fact over listeners, which we don't have separated.
"Those second order relationships…"
This paragraph touches on relationships between second-order relationships, and as the material, it uses those that have been present in two previous paragraphs (subchapters in our case). Again, we can't use "listeners" in the analysis, but not much is said in the source about this topic anyway. However, there is a formulation of a very complex description of a third-order relationship.
"With that near-incomprehensible sentence…"
With the level of abstraction growing consistently, the text has no more specific questions for us, and we're already on page 200.
References
📜 Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press
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