But even within a literate musical culture such as the Western classical tradition the exclusive concentration on musical works and the relegation of the act of performance to subordinate status has resulted in a severe misunderstanding of what actually takes place during a performance. That misunderstanding has, as we shall see, had in turn its effect on the performance itself—on the experience, that is, of the performance, for both performers and listeners—an effect that I believe to have been more to impoverish than to enrich it. For performance does not exist in order to present musical works, but rather, musical works exist in order to give performers something to perform.
That being so, a musical performance is a much richer and more complex affair than is allowed by those who concentrate their attention exclusively on the musical work and on its effect on an individual listener. If we widen the circle of our attention to take in the entire set of relationships that constitutes a performance, we shall see that music’s primary meanings are not individual at all but social. Those social meanings are not to be hived off into something called a “sociology” of music that is separate from the meaning of the sounds but are fundamental to an understanding of the activity that is called music.
The fundamental nature and meaning of music lie not in objects, not in musical works at all, but in action, in what people do. It is only by understanding what people do as they take part in a musical act that we can hope to understand its nature and the function it fulfills in human life. Whatever that function may be, I am certain, first, that to take part in a music act is of central importance to our very humanness, as important as taking part in the act of speech, which it so resembles (but from which it also differs in important ways), and second, that everyone, every normally endowed human being, is born with the gift of music no less than with the gift of speech. If that is so, then our present-day concert life, whether “classical” or “popular,” in which the “talented” few are empowered to produce music for the “untalented” majority, is based on a falsehood. It means that our powers of making music for ourselves have been hijacked and the majority of people robbed of the musicality that is theirs by right of birth, while a few stars, and their handlers, grow rich and famous through selling us what we have been led to believe we lack.
This book, then, is not so much about music as it is about people, about people as they play and sing, as they listen and compose, and even as they dance (for in many cultures if no one is dancing then no music is happening, so integral is dance to the musical act), and about the ways in which they—we—go about singing and playing and composing and listening. It is also about the reasons we feel the urge to do these things and why we feel good when we do them well. We could say that it is not so much about music as about people musicking.
So far as I know the word musicking does not appear in any English dictionary, but it is too useful a conceptual tool to lie unused. It is the present participle, or gerund, of the verb to music. This verb does have an obscure existence in some larger dictionaries, but its potential goes unexploited because when it does appear it is used to mean roughly the same as “to perform” or “to make music”—a meaning that is already well covered by those two words. I have larger ambitions for this neglected verb.
I have proposed this definition: To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing. We might at times even extend its meaning to what the person is doing who takes the tickets at the door or the hefty men who shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who set up the instruments and carry out the sound checks or the cleaners who clean up after everyone else has gone. They, too, are all contributing to the nature of the event that is a musical performance.
It will become clear as we go along how useful this verb—and especially its gerund—is (the added k is not just a caprice but has historical antecedents), and I shall use it from now on as if it were the proper English language verb that I hope it will become.
I have to make two things clear. The first is that to pay attention in any way to a musical performance, including a recorded performance, even to Muzak in an elevator, is to music. The second is related but needs to be stated separately: the verb to music is not concerned with valuation. It is descriptive, not prescriptive. It covers all participation in a musical performance, whether it takes place actively or passively, whether we like the way it happens or whether we do not, whether we consider it it interesting or boring, constructive or destructive, sympathetic or antipathetic. The word will remain useful only for so long as we keep our own value judgments clear of it. Value-laden uses that I have heard, such as “Everyone ought to music” or “You can’t call listening to a Walkman musicking,” distort its meaning, weaken its usefulness as an investigative tool, and plunge us back into futile arguments about what music or musicking is. Value judgments come later, if they come at all.
Apart from favoring the idea that music is first and foremost action, the word has other useful implications. In the first place, in making no distinction between what the performers are doing and what the rest of those present are doing, it reminds us that musicking (you see how easy it is to slip into using it) is an activity in which all those present are involved and for whose nature and quality, success or failure, everyone present bears some responsibility. It is not just a matter of composers, or even performers, actively doing something to, or for, passive listeners. Whatever it is we are doing, we are all doing it together—performers, listeners (should there be any apart from the performers), composer (should there be one apart from the performers), dancers, ticket collectors, piano movers, roadies, cleaners and all.
I am not, of course, so silly as to see no distinction between what the performers are doing and what the cleaners are doing; they are obviously doing different things, and when we want to distinguish between the two sets of activities we already have adequate words with which to do so. In using the verb to music, on the other hand, we are reminded that all these different activities add up to a single event, whose nature is affected by the ways in which all of them are carried out, and we have a tool by means of which we can begin to explore the meanings that the event as a whole is generating. We take into account not just what the performers are doing and certainly not just the piece that is being played or what the composer, should there be one, has done. We begin to see a musical performance as an encounter between human beings that takes place through the medium of sounds organized in specific ways. Like all human encounters, it takes place in a physical and a social setting, and those, too, have to be taken into account when we ask what meanings are being generated by a performance.
That being so, it is not enough to ask, What is the nature or the meaning of this work of music? To do so leaves us trapped in the assumptions of the modern Western concert tradition, and even within those limits, so narrow when one considers the whole field of human musicking, it will give answers that are at best partial and even contradictory. And of course, if there is no fixed and stable musical work, as is true of many cultures, then the question cannot even be asked. Using the concept of musicking as a human encounter, we can ask the wider and more interesting question: What does it mean when this performance (of this work) takes place at this time, in this place, with these participants? Or to put it more simply, we can ask of the performance, any performance anywhere and at any time, What’s really going on here? It is at that point, and not before, that we can allow our value judgments full rein—if we wish to do so.
In framing that question, I have placed the words “of this work” in parentheses to remind us that there may not necessarily be a musical work but that when there is, then the nature of that work is part of the nature of the performance, and whatever meanings it may in itself possess are part of the meaning of the event—an important part but only a part. I do this in order to reassure those who fear that I am going to ignore the part that the nature of the work plays in the nature of the performance or even that I am going to deny its existence altogether. Of course not; those set