Music and musicking: a prelude

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2525-3123.gis.2024.218338

Keywords:

Music, Musicking, Musical meaning, Performance, Western classical tradition, Classical music

Abstract

The text presents a translation of the introduction Prelude: music and musicking from the book Musicking: the meanings of performing and listening, by New Zealand composer and ethnomusicologist Christopher Small, where the concept of “musicking” is presented. Small invites us to think of music as action and relative to its performance environment. In this way, he goes against traditional approaches that think of music as an object fixed on paper. Therefore, the discussion is conducted throughout different contexts. In the modern Western music tradition, where the sheet music is highly valued, Small invites us to analyze the concert hall and its social relations by proposing a theory of musicking that allows the inclusion of performers (interpreters) and other actors of the musical activity (audience, roadies, production, etc.) as active agents in the act of musicking.

 

 

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Author Biographies

  • Christopher Small

    Christopher Small (1927–2011) was a New Zealand-born musician, educator, lecturer, and author of a number of influential books and articles in the fields of musicology, sociomusicology and ethnomusicology. He coined the term musicking, with which he wanted to highlight that music is a process (verb) and not an object (noun).

  • Vítor Vieira Machado, University of São Paulo (USP)

    Vítor Vieira Machado has a degree in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and is an undergraduate student in Music (with a specialization in Composition) at the University of São Paulo (USP). He was a scholarship holder for scientific initiation in the project Indigenous Art and Sociability in the Western Chaco, in the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and a scholarship holder for the project to digitalize the phonographic collection of wax cylinders from the historical collection of the Discoteca Oneyda Alvarenga in São Paulo (CCSP) by the Unified Scholarship Program (PUB/USP). Composer, researcher and educator, he currently works as a composition teacher at the ALLEGRO Music Course at the Department of Music at the University of São Paulo (CMU/ECA/USP).

  • María Eugenia Domínguez, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC)

    María Eugenia Domínguez is associate professor of Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). Graduated in social anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina); she has a master and doctorate degree in Social Anthropology at UFSC (2009). She completed her postdoctoral studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain) as a fellow of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and at the Laboratory of Image and Sound in Anthropology (LISA) of the University of São Paulo (USP). Researcher at the Center for Studies in Art, Culture and Society in Latin America and the Caribbean (MUSA/UFSC/CNPq). Researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology Brasil Plural (INCT-IBP/CNPq).

References

Dalhaus, Carl. 1983. Foundations of Music History. Translated by J. B. Robinson.

Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press.

SMALL, Christopher. 1998. “Prelude: music and musicking”. In.: ___. Musicking: the meanings of performing and listening. Middletown/CT: Wesleyan/University Press of New England, Hanover/NH, pp. 1-18.

Stravinsky, Igor. 1947. Poetics of Music. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

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Published

2024-08-21

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 1 (2024)

Section

T.I.R. - Translations, Interviews and Reviews

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Christopher Small; Vítor Vieira Machado, María Eugenia Domínguez

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How to Cite

Small, Christopher. 2024. “Music and Musicking: A Prelude”. Translated byVitor Vieira Machado and María Eugenia Domínguez. GIS - Gesture, Image and Sound - Anthropology Journal 9 (1): e218338 . https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2525-3123.gis.2024.218338.