for them to become anything else, for they enter and leave the building by separate doors, occupy separate parts of it, and never meet during the event. This seems to be felt more as a relief than a deprivation by both parties, who apparently treasure their separation and prefer not to enter into a relationship of familiarity with members of the other group. And on the other hand, the audience is expected to sit quietly and accept the orchestra’s performance as it plays, the only response open to its members being applause at the end. To boo at the end of a performance one has particularly disliked is possible, though a bit extreme. What is not an option is to make any visible or audible response, of either approval or disapproval, during the course of the performance; there is no way in which such a response could be incorporated as an element of the event, in the way that, for example, applause at the end of a solo is incorporated into jazz performance and is a legitimate element of it, or the response of the Jamaican audience I mention below.
The concert hall thus presents us in a clear and unambiguous way with a certain set of relationships, in which the autonomy and privacy of the individual is treasured, a stance of impersonal politeness and good manners is assumed, familiarity is rejected, and the performers and their performance, as long as it is going on, are not subject to the audience’s response. Because people who attend symphony concerts mostly go voluntarily, we can assume that they enjoy doing so; therefore, it is not too far-fetched to suggest that those relationships represent some kind of ideal in the minds of those taking part. I shall be discussing later the general proposition that how we relate is who we are. If that is so, then those taking part in this or any other musical event are, at some level of awareness, saying, to themselves, to one another and to anyone who may be taking notice, This is who we are.
The silence and apparent passivity of audiences at symphony concerts deserves a little more attention. Historically it is a recent practice. The eighteenth-century scene I described in the Rotunda at Ranelagh was by no means exceptional for the time. Aristocratic listeners of the time felt free to treat the musicians and the performance as background to their other activities, to listen attentively when they felt like it and to talk, eat and drink, and even make love when they did not. Why not? The musicians were their servants. In the Paris Opéra, says the historian James H. Johnson (1995), “gripping moments in the drama or especially renowned airs brought silence and genuine attention, but on the whole the Opéra in 1750 was a public setting for private salons, for which the music, dancers and machines provided an excellent backdrop.”
Mozart on his visit to Paris in July 1776, reported in a famous letter to his father his delight when the audience broke into applause during the performance of the symphony he had written for performance there and, perhaps even more significantly, said “Hush!” at the opening of the last movement, which Mozart, cocking a snook at noisy Parisian convention, had written for the violins only, pianissimo. Johnson tells us too that when, in the late 1820s, the symphonies of Beethoven attained a belated recognition with Paris audiences, spectators applauded particularly striking passages and erupted into storms of applause at the end of each movement, sometimes forcing its repetition, while at other times they “bubbled over with happy sighs and murmuring approval.” Such noises do not suggest inattention, and certainly not disrespect, but betoken rather an audience that is active rather than passive in its attention, that considers, in fact, that its own audible responses are a legitimate element of the performance.
The silence that will greet tonight’s performance while it is in progress suggests a different attitude. Those who wish perfect communion with the composer through the performance can have it, uninterrupted by any noise that may signal the presence of other spectators. On the other hand, while our attention is without doubt active, it is detached; we no longer feel ourselves to be part of the performance but listen to it as it were from the outside. Any noise we might make would not be an element of the performance, as were the sighs and murmurs of the Parisian audience, but an interruption or distraction. I have even known the minute clinks and jingles of a female listener’s charm bracelet to put its wearer’s neighbor in a rage.
Who we are, then, is spectators rather than participants, and our silence during the performance is a sign of this condition, that we have nothing to contribute but our attention to the spectacle that has been arranged for us. We might go further and say that we are spectators at a spectacle that is not ours, that our relationship with those who are responsible for the production of the spectacle—the composer, the orchestra, the conductor, and those who make the arrangements for tonight’s concert—is that of consumers to producers, and our only power is that of consumers in general, to buy or not to buy.
Other kinds of performance conjure up other kinds of behavior, other kinds of relationships. Many reveal a complex ambivalence about their ideal relationships that can tell us much about the nature of musical performances and about the function that they serve in human life.
The differences between the various kinds of performance are not clear- cut, of course. It is easy, for example, too easy in fact, to set up a simple antithesis between the relationships of a symphony concert, as a representation of the values of the contemporary industrial world, of the scientific worldview, of the bourgeoisie, or whatever, and those of other ways of musicking—rock for example, or reggae—as representing various degrees of rejection of (or as some would have it, liberation from) those relationships. That kind of neat antithesis has been the basis of a great deal of pop sociology of music, often bringing with it a cargo of unwarranted judgment, either covert or overt. Unfortunately, although there may be some truth in the antithesis, it hardly matches the untidy reality of musicking in the real world.
It is true that there is a good deal of the values of the contemporary industrial world or the scientific worldview built into the symphony concert, including, of course, the musical works that are played there; I suggested that in my first book (Small 1977), and I have seen no reason since to change my mind. But those values permeate as well, to a greater or lesser extent, all the large-scale public musicking that takes place in the Western industrial world.
All public performances, for example, are open to anyone who has the price of admission, which means that the passing of money is an important factor in whatever values are established there. In all of them the experience is shared with strangers, although the degree of intimacy that can be attained during the performance may be different, and in all of them the audience is kept apart from the performers and is to a greater or lesser extent dominated by them. All maintain a network of stars and superstars whose glamour and inaccessibility is part of the deal, and all rely for their very existence, if not as forms of artistic activity then at least as social institutions, on a highly developed technology. The existence of these and other factors in all these kinds of performances makes for a complex ambivalence to which no simple antithesis can do justice.
The great rock festivals of the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were famous as events where strangers came together for a few days in tens and even hundreds of thousands to share not just a musical but a total social experience. They were experienced by those who took part in them as a liberation from the day-to-day social constraints of their lives, where strangers were free to encounter one another, even perhaps to become lovers, where no style of dress (including none at all) or behavior was too outrageous to be tolerated so long as it did not interfere with the enjoyment of others. The musical performances came in an endless stream, sometimes in the foreground and sometimes in the background (whether foreground or background at any moment was an individual matter), but always a magical presence acting as catalyst for whatever human encounters were desired. The sociability was not separate from the performances but an important element of the total musical experience.
During those two or three days it was as if a new society had been brought into existence—loose, tolerant, intimate, unconstrained, and loving—the Age of Aquarius it was called. It was, of course, to a large extent a cleverly stage-managed illusion. But even to the extent that it was genuine, it was not just, as many commentators hastened to point out, that it depended on the very technological culture from which the participants thought themselves to be escaping; it was also, as was pointed out by
