Christopher Small

Christopher Neville Charles Small (17 March 1927 – 7 September 2011) was a New Zealand-born musician, educator, lecturer, and author of many influential books and articles in the fields of musicology, sociomusicology and ethnomusicology. He coined the term musicking, to highlight music as a process (verb) and not an object (noun.)

Biography Small was born in Palmerston North, New Zealand, to a dentist and former schoolteacher, and was the youngest of three children.

His early school education took place at the Terrace End and Russell Street Primary Schools (1932–1939), Palmerston North Boys' High School (1940–1941) and Wanganui Collegiate School (1942–1944). Between 1945 and 1952 he attended the University of Otago and then Victoria University College. He taught at Horowhenua College (at the same time working at Morrow Productions Ltd making educational animated films) from 1953 to 1958, and at Waihi College from 1959 to 1960.

In 1960, he was awarded a New Zealand government bursary and he spent 1961 travelling in the United Kingdom, before studying composition in London with Priaulx Rainier, where he also had contact with Bernard Rands, Luigi Nono and Witold Lutoslawski. After his studies he stayed in England, where he taught at schools, including Anstey College of Education in Birmingham. He became senior lecturer in music at Ealing College of Higher Education in London (1971–1986) and he also taught at Dartington College of Arts in 1979. Between 1977 and 1986 he was adjunct professor of the history of music at Syracuse University London Centre, and a tutor in music to the summer school of the BEd course of Sussex University between 1981 and 1984.

Smalls retired from teaching in 1986 and moved to Sitges, Spain, where he lived with his partner Neville Braithwaite (a Jamaican-born dancer, singer, and youth worker) whom he married in 2006. During his time in Spain, Small conducted Catalan choirs and was visited regularly by people from both Europe and the US, who admired his work. In the US, his ideas have been supported by prominent musicologists such as Charles Keil, Robert Walser, Susan McClary and The Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau.

In expanding his ideas presented in his earlier book (Music, Society, Education, 1977), Small continues to demonstrate that musicking is an active way in which we relate to the rest of the world.

The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world.

Works