Chicago, Donovan, Miles Davis, and Jimi Hendrix. Oh yes, and Tiny Tim … I remember my American friends’ disgust at the tasteless behavior of a group near us, who were drinking alcohol—not just that but cider for god’s sake! I arrived back in Birmingham exhausted, saturated with music and marijuana and generally mindblown, and took about a week to come back to earth. What the experience did to my senses and my feeling for the order of things is something I am still coming to terms with.
I returned to London in 1981, having been appointed senior lecturer in music at Ealing Technical College, later Ealing College of Higher Education, later Ealing Polytechnic, and currently Thames Valley University. Still the same grotty dump that we loved back in ’71, the only difference is that the standard of teaching and general adventurousness have gone down in proportion as the status of the place has gone up. For me it was, at least initially, a great experience. The head of the Music Division was a straight-up-and-down Royal College of Music musician, a fine organist and choral conductor of the most traditional kind. But he used to say to me, “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, Chris, but if you think it’s music, go ahead and do it.” We got on well for the fifteen years I spent there until I retired in 1986.
In the early seventies we constructed a new BA in humanities degree under the aegis of the Council for National Academic Awards, and I was entrusted with the design of the first-year music course. I insisted that it be accessible to anyone interested, regardless of his or her level of musical expertise or previous musical experience. I included a three-hour practical composition workshop each week, which proved popular and useful.
We attracted some very offbeat students, one of whom introduced me to one of the finest musicians and teachers I have ever met: the jazz drummer John Stevens. His drumming was beautiful, and I could listen to him alone for hours—always different, always wonderfully fluid, and yet you never had the slightest doubt where the beat was (unless he wanted you to be unsure, of course). He had a group called the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, which included everyone from the best British jazzmen to tyros like me. I remember we did a BBC gig with two pianists in the group. When the other pianist arrived, it was the great Stan Tracey, doyen of British jazz pianists! I went through John’s “Search and Reflect” process with him, a very liberating experience, and we spent many hours talking and listening to music. He loved Anton Webern’s works and could explicate them better than any PhD. Like so many of the best British jazzmen (Americans seem to know little and care less about the very beautiful and lively British jazz scene of that time, which was enlivened by a number of superb, exiled, black South African musicians—your loss), John had come through the Royal Air Force Band at Uxbridge, not far from Ealing. He also helped me in my first tremulous attempts to play jazz, and though I never got good at it I did gain more understanding of the complexity of the art. One of my students, a good R&B saxophonist, who wanted to use the performance option in the degree to improve his jazz skills, asked me to act as pianist for his lessons. That was a steep learning curve if ever I got onto one.
In 1980, when I was on a year’s secondment to Dartington College of Arts in Devon, I got John down to give a workshop to the students. The workshop, predictably I’m afraid, attracted more students of drama than of music. John, clearly nervous of being in such posh surroundings, had put on his best Italian suit, very sharp, with white shirt and narrow black tie. He was an enormous success. One fledgling theater director said to me afterward, “Here comes this dude looking like everyone’s idea of a used-car salesman and just manages to blow everyone’s mind.”
John died of a heart attack in 2000, aged only fifty-three.
Also around that time I got involved in a sound poetry and music group around the sound poet Bob Cobbing. There was a young woman singer who wove marvelous lines of sound around Bob’s voice; a flutist, David Toop, who played some beautiful, big Andean flutes he had made; a percussionist, Paul Burwell, who had the biggest collection of hubcaps I have ever seen; a trombonist, and me at the piano. I loved it. We even did a BBC Radio 3 gig.
I had been working for some years on a translation of Henri Pousseur’s Fragments théoriques sur la musique expérimentale, a massive task, and had been trying to get a publisher to look at it. It was only when I offered it to Calder and Boyars, who had been the British publishers of a number of interesting music books, including the Cage books and Ives’s Essays before a Sonata, that I received any response, in the form of an invitation to talk with the great man, John Calder, himself. He looked at my manuscript, and we talked for a while about music (he is a great opera buff), and then he offered me a contract to write a book for him, just like that. That was the origin of Music, Society, Education, which I wrote more or less off the top of my head from my lectures and classes. I expected it just to sink from sight like dozens of other academic music books (every academic thinks he has a book in him), and no one was more surprised than I was when it started to get good and even rave reviews—and some bitchy ones. I had been in doubt as I wrote it whether I was just mouthing platitudes (after all, it all seemed to me so obvious) or making wild, unsupported, and maybe unsupportable, assertions. I certainly had no idea that I was writing an “important” book. I remember meeting the U.S. cultural attaché at a conference a few months after it was published, and when he asked me over lunch if I was “the” Christopher Small I had no idea how to answer.
I shall always be grateful to John Calder for giving me the chance to write and be published, but he did rip me off rotten, and still owes me a lot of money that I shall never see. I finally told him in a letter that I was grateful to him but that I had run out of gratitude. But I was frightened to take the rights back from him, although he was flagrantly in breach of our contract, thinking that I would never get another publisher and that a dud publisher was better than no publisher.
The breakthrough came when Rob Walser, whom I had met at the 1988 meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology at MIT, contacted me in Sitges and asked if he and his wife Susan McClary could stay with us for a couple of nights. Sitting out on the terrace of our apartment one evening, I told them about my woes with Calder, and they said that, as two-thirds of the music editorial committee of Wesleyan University Press, they could guarantee that if I could get the rights off Calder they would reprint my (then) two books. It took a while, but we managed it. Later Wesleyan published the third book, Musicking, so all three are now under the same imprint.
The other big influence on my feelings and ideas about music was knowing Neville Braithwaite, my friend and companion of thirty years. When I dedicated Music of the Common Tongue to him “for showing me what it was all about,” I meant it—not only for himself but also for so many West Indian friends (he is Jamaican by birth) whom I met through him and through his profession of youth worker, and from his wonderful welcoming family, scattered around the world, who view life from a viewpoint intriguingly different from my own, and who have enriched my life and especially my understanding of the act of musicking. Alas, he died of a brain tumor in October 2006, and I shall miss him forever.
People like to label me a musicologist, but I feel that the label puts me in a nice, safe pigeonhole and makes me innocuous. If I have always tried, not always successfully, to refuse it, it is not out of modesty, real or assumed, although it is true that I have no formal musicological training. Rather, it is because my ideas, such as they are, have grown more out of my musical experiences than out of any theory, which for me has always come after the musical fact. I consider myself, therefore, simply as a musician who thinks about his art.
SITGES, JULY 2004
I am also starting to realize that I have been lassoed into the music education corral, where I don’t feel I really belong either. True, I have been a teacher of music most of my professional life and have theorized some about my job, but being a teacher of music is not necessarily the same thing as being a music educator, although it is to be hoped that the latter category is always to be subsumed into the former. I have always tried to put my performing money where my theorizing mouth is.
I have a sneaky feeling that both
