Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening » (1st Edition)

CHRISTOPHER SMALL is author of Music, Society, Education (Wesleyan, 1996), Music of the Common Tongue (1987; Wesleyan, 1998), and Schoenberg (1978). Senior Lecturer at Ealing College of Higher Education in London until 1986, he lives in Sitges, Spain.

Acclaimed scholar rethinks the nature and meaning of music.

[Small is] a perfect outsider critic, the kind of wise, generalizing mind who sees the whole picture; he is the opposite of a striving, circumspect academic who has followed the trail of specialization toward the goal of tenure. Though educated in the classical tradition and thoroughly at home with its canon, Small has shown a rare catholicity of interests . . . like all gurus, Small teaches more about how to live in relation to the subject matter than he does about the subject matter itself . . . Small's strength is openness. He fiercely believes in the universality of musical experience and seeks to make understanding of it accessible to the general reader . . . His most personal book, Musicking can be seen as a bold divestment of his own cultural training, ending in the man standing naked before his peers.

Prelude: Music and Musicking A Place for Hearingue A Thoroughly Contemporary Affair Sharing With Strangers. Interlude I: A Separate World A Humble Bow Summing Up the Dead Composer. Interlude 2: The Mother of All the Arts Score and Paris Harmony, Heavenly Harmony. Interlude 3: Socially constructed Meanings An Art of the Theater A Drama of Relationships A Vision of Order What's Really Going On Here?
A Solitary Flute Player. Postlude: Was It a Good Performance and How Do You Know?