“CHRISTOPHER SMALL – MUSICKING IN TERMS OF PERFORMING AND

LISTENING”

Berkant GENÇKAL
Anadolu University State Conservatory Music Department
bgenckal@gmail.com

Many music books when talking about music have continuous type of periodic
divisions. These divisions such as Ancient Era, Medieval, Renaissance, Classic Period,
Romantic Period, Twentieth Century and etc. represent separate volumes, parts or paragraphs.
The Ottoman music was also subjected into “pre” and “after” Canemir’s treatise by many
theoreticians. But these divisions are not a natural appearance of this continuum; rather, they
are fragmented by writers who divided them humanly according to particular events and
products. This is a method that objectifies and squeezes music into categories more easily. At
the same time, this is one of the most important strategies of the scholarity. It is quite liable to
hear such a statement from a scholar who says: “The music in the past was like that – now,
the music is like that.” It is almost like we see the music has been gone somewhere. And even
more important, the human starts to think that it is developed because more complex tools
were used.
A fanatic Brahms interpreter, when loosing him/herself inside the tremendous acoustic
atmosphere while playing (in fact, this statement is more appropriate for Wagner) is the
reflection of the nature into the work of art, mirroring it today, that Aristotle said thousands of
years ago. On the other hand, Webern said that this is not an invention or a discovery; this is
procedure of the exposing the existent. In this context, Edward Said (1993:3) clearly asserts
the question of uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded or
whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps.
In fact, the music does not go anywhere. The thought that the human brings the music
somewhere where it is subjected into objective and his/her expression that projects a sort of
crisis is the ongoing on phenomenon that existed before and that exists today. Here it is, this
crisis triggers the Musicking (Small: 1998), and it starts to appear in many formats such as
DVD,CD, mp3, TV shows, concerts and so on. In this respect, Musicking may objectify the
individual’s choice and, as we witnessed, it may agglomerate on particular populous ground
that once Platonic state mechanism of Bolshevik Russia imposed.

Key Words: Musicking, acoustics, Plato