‘Musicking’ – Symphony and Ceremony

Christopher Small has spent much of his scholarly career arguing that a classical European symphony concert is a musical ceremony. He does not argue that a symphony is ceremonial rather than musical. Instead, he says a concert has social dimensions that we do not often recognize and that the most appropriate label for those dimensions is ritual.

Small contrasts classical European music with African and African-American music. We are used to thinking of African music as ritualistic, at least in its origins. Small claims that the European musical performance tradition is no less ritualistic. The difference is not between ritual and non-ritual. Rather it is between the values each tradition ritualizes.
Small refers to ritual as “the mother of all the arts” and as “the great unitary performance art.” He does so not because he believes ritual is the origin of the performing arts but because he observes ritual functions in the arts. Accordingly, he proposes a definition of ritual with several variants:

• …the acting out of desired relationships and thus of identity.
• …[an] activity in which the identity and the values of the members of a group are explored, affirmed and celebrated….
• …an action which dramatizes and re-enacts the shared mythology of a social group.
• …a form of organized behavior in which humans use the language of gesture, or paralanguage, to affirm, to explore and to celebrate their ideas of how the relationships of the cosmos (or a part of it), operate, and thus of how they themselves should relate to it and to one another. Through their gestures, those taking part in the ritual act articulate relationships among themselves that model the relationships of their world as they imagine them to be and as they think (or feel) that they ought to be. (Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998, pp. 105, 106, 133, 135.)

Small’s criteria are commonly enunciated in other definitions of ritual. There is nothing especially profound or controversial about them, although they are at the more open rather than the more closed end of the spectrum of definitions. Small’s characterizations allow him to apply them to what we usually label “the arts.” For him, as for a growing number of scholars, ritual is not restricted to its expression in religious institutions. Like Emile Durkheim, Christopher Small treats ritual as organized group activity, as society’s way of reflecting upon, performing, and ultimately venerating itself.

Because the act of “musicking” (his term) is a form of ritual, music is not only about the relationships among sounds-although it is about them too-it is also about the relationships among the people attending and participating. Christopher Small treats ritual as the performance of an idealized reality capable of exercising influence over the world outside the rite itself. Ritual is not only a mirror of how things are but also of how they ought to be. The idealized activity of a rite not only shows participants a different world, it helps bring that world into existence. The question is: Is he right?