Global Sonic Culture
Music and Musicking (Ideas might be useful)
Many different kinds of action, many different ways of organizing sounds into meanings, all of them given the name music. What is this thing called music, that human beings the world over should find in it such satisfaction, should invest in it so much of their Iives and resources? The question has been asked many times over the centuries, and since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, scholars and musicians have tried to explain the nature and meaning of music and find the reason for its extraordinary power in the Iives of human beings.
Musicking is part of that iconic, gestural process of giving and receiving information about relationships which unites the living world, and it is in fact a ritual by means of which the participants not only learn about, but directly experience, their concepts of how they relate, and how they ought to relate, to other human beings and to the rest of the world. These ideal relationships are often extremely complex, too complex to be articulated in words, but they are articulated effortlessly by the musical performance, enabling the participants to explore, affirm and celebrate them. Musicking is thus as central in importance to our humanness as is taking part in speech acts, and all normally endowed human beings are born capable of taking part in it, not just of understanding the gestures but of making their own.
What is 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 the action, whose reality 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 narne) is probably as old as language; it is useful in the conceptualising 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 abstracrions which we call love, hate, good and evil as having an existence apaft from the acts of loving, hating, or performing good and evil deeds and even to think of them as being in some way more real than the acts rhemselves, a kind of universal or ideal lying behind and suffiming 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 is earliest perpetrators.
What is musical? What is musical related to performance?
Musical meaning resides uniquely in music objects, comes with a few corollaries. The first is that musical performance plays no part in the creative process, being only the medium through which the isolated, self-contained work has to pass in order to reach its goal, the listener. We read little in music literature about performance other than in the limited sense of following the composet’s notations and realizing them in sound, and we are left to conclude that the more transparent the medium dre better.
Since each performance is at best only an imperfect and approximate representation of the work itself, it fol lows that music’s inner meanings can never be properly yielded up in performance. They can be discovered only by those who can read and study the score, like ]ohannes Brahms, who once refused an invitation to attend a performance of MozarCs Don. Giopanni, saying he would sooner stay home and read it. What Mozart, the supreme practical musician, would have had to say about that one can only imagine. We note dre corollary to thatidea, which is seriously held by many musical scholars and even musicians: only those who can read a score have access to the inner meanings of music. One wonders, in that case, whywe should bother performing musi- cal works at all, when we could just sit at home, like Brahms, and read them as if theywere novels. A musical performance is thought of as a one-way system of communication, running from composer to individual Listener through the medium of the performer. This is perhaps just another way of stating dre first, though it brings a change of emphasis, for it sug- gests that the listenet’s task is simply to contemplate the work, to try to un- derstand it and to respond to it, but that he or she has nothing to con-tribute to its meaning. That is the composet’s business.