in the conductor’s desired manner and the correct orchestral parts for tonight’s works placed on the music racks that stand before each player. The flowers that are presented to an artist with such apparent spontaneity at the end of the performance do not materialize on their own, nor does the bottle of his favorite brand of malt whisky discreetly placed in the famous conductor’s dressing room. Even the disembodied hand that pulls aside the curtain or opens the door to admit the conductor to the stage belongs to someone who was told to do it.
Before a note of music has been played, the building and its mode of organization have created among those present a set of relationships, which are a microcosm of those of the larger industrial society outside its walls. As we have already noted, all the relationships of the concert hall are mediated by the passing of money. To put it flatly, those who pay for admission, whoever they may be, are entitled to enter and to take part in an event, while those who do not pay are not. And on the other side, those who get paid will play their part in making the event happen, while those who do not get paid will not. There is in our society nothing very remarkable about that, of course; what is remarkable is the care that is taken to conceal the functions of administration and accounting, to create the illusion in the great building of a magical world where things happen of themselves, where nobody has to work and nobody needs money. It is none of the audience’s business how much the performers are paid—and in the case of many conductors and soloists it is remarkably difficult to find out.
If this link between the lofty ceremony of the symphony concert and the down-to-earth values of industrial society as a whole seems farfetched, consider this. In countries outside the older industrial heartland of Europe and the United States of America, an early sign that the conversion to the industrial philosophy and the social relationships that belong to it has taken place and become interiorized is often the takeover of the country’s musical culture by Western-style musicking. As the relationships of industrial society take over and a middle class develops that has grown prosperous on the wealth generated by industry, so professional symphony orchestras appear in the major cities, along with opulent centers for the performing arts built to house their performances. Conservatories of Western classical music are opened and infant-prodigy virtuosi, mostly the sons and daughters of the newly wealthy middle class, begin to astonish audiences in the concert halls of the older musical centers, often showing a freshness of approach that must reflect the newness of their encounter with the musical works of the Western tradition.
On the other hand, the Western-style popular music that frequently develops at the same time tends to explore, affirm and celebrate other desired relationships and other identities, in particular that of the industrial proletariat that comes into existence to serve the purposes of the new middle class. As I noted in an earlier book (Small 1987), it tends, as a lower-status music, to be less concerned with notions of correctness and is thus able to absorb into itself elements of traditional ways of musicking, which the middle classes, in their eagerness to align themselves with the international industrial culture, reject, even though at the same time they may pay lip service to them.
It happened in Japan around the end of the nineteenth century; a marker of a kind is that the piano firm of Yamaha is now a little over a hundred years old. It happened in South Korea in the 1960s and is happening today in Indonesia and the People’s Republic of China. And if a 1989 article in a London newspaper is to be believed, the wealthier parts of the Arab world are becoming interested (Campbell 1989).
This article tells us, with breathless enthusiasm, of the formation of the Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra in the oil-rich Gulf state of Muscat and Oman, by command of the sultan himself. Teenage boys are being recruited from remote tribal communities and are being trained in the English language and in the disciplines of the symphony orchestra by a former British army musician. This orchestra, if it is anything more than a passing sultanic whim, may well be part of a new phenomenon, for Muscat and Oman is not an industrial state at all in the ordinary sense and has no middle class to speak of; its wealth comes from industry at secondhand, so to speak, through supplying the oil needs of industrial states. But the article speaks clearly of the desire, on the part of the sultan at least, to show that Muscat and Oman is a civilized state. Even the headline, MUSICAL OASIS IN THE DESERT, carries an interesting implication: at last, a real musical culture has come to the hitherto deprived Omanis.
This state of affairs has, of course, partly to do with the fact that symphony orchestras and concert halls are expensive and can be afforded only by wealthy societies. Today that means societies that have benefited, whether directly or indirectly, from the wealth generated by industrialization. But for the Western concert tradition to become established, it needs more than the ability to afford it; it needs the desire and the will to spend the wealth on this rather than on other things, including other ways of musicking. That has to do with the acceptance of the philosophy that lies behind industrial development. I discussed this philosophy at length in an earlier book (1977) and shall not reiterate it here, but it concerns the acceptance of the scientific worldview; of Western-style rationality, including the Cartesian split between body and mind; and of the discipline of the clock. Certainly, those values are clearly in evidence in this important ceremony of the industrial middle classes.
A modern symphony concert, then, is a very different kind of event from those at which most of the musical works we hear there today were first performed. It is not unfair to compare the modern concert hall with that other contemporary leisure phenomenon, the theme park, whose archetype is the various Disneylands. There, as here, all the resources of modern technology are put unobtrusively to work to create an artificial environment, where the paying customers are led to believe that what they are experiencing is a re-creation of the world of their ancestors, without the dirt and smells perhaps, but otherwise authentic. It is, of course, nothing of the kind but is a thoroughly contemporary affair that celebrates thoroughly contemporary relationships.
Similarly, in the modern concert hall we hear the ideal relationships of the past re-created, not as they were or in their own terms, which would in any case be impossible, but in contemporary terms, which is to say, in terms of the relationships that those taking part in tonight’s performance feel to be ideal. In this the relationships created by modern technology play an important, though largely unacknowledged part. The tension between those two sets of relationships is an interesting matter that I shall be exploring later.
CHAPTER 3
Sharing with Strangers
There is a telling phrase in George Lipsitz’s spirited defense of American popular culture, Time Passages (1990), in which he speaks of audiences for the performance arts in Western industrial societies coming together to share “intimate and personal cultural moments with strangers.” It is an odd thing that Lipsitz reminds us of. Whether it be a play, a film or a musical that we have come to see and hear, an opera, a symphony concert or a pop concert, not to mention a professional wrestling bout, a football game or a tennis match, we accept without thinking about it that not only the performers but also most, if not all, of the audience will be strangers to us. We are prepared to laugh, to weep, to shudder, to be excited, or to be moved to the depth of our being, all in the company of people the majority of whom we have never seen before, to whom we shall probably address not a word or a gesture, and whom we shall in all probability never see again.
What we accept as the norm is, in fact, the exception among the human race as a whole. In the culture of villages, as well as of those quite small cities (by present-day standards), from ancient Athens to eighteenth- century Vienna, which up to the recent past have formed centers of urban culture, performers and audience have known one another as members of the same community. Most of the world’s population lived in villages, where if certain members specialized in instrumental music it was in addition to their agricultural activities, as others might specialize in smithing, milling or shoemaking. And if, like the smith and the miller,
