participation and presentation

two modes of making music

For some time, I've had the book Music as Social Life by Thomas Turino in my possession, but am only reading it just now. I think it may have been recommended by the Amazon algorithm and I thought it might be useful for my dissertation (maybe I did use it, but there were a lot of resources that went into that). It's basically an ethnomusicology primer, looking at the fundamentals of music making from a socio-anthropological perspective; as opposed to the fundamentals of music in terms of skills and concepts, as it were.

Turino outlines four basic modes of music making that interact in a Venn diagram sort of way and talks about how the social functions and assumptions producing the music affect what kinds of musical materials people use. In a culture where everyone is expected to produce music and dancing as part of social life, the music tends to be shorter, cyclical, simpler to encourage playing and dancing. In a culture where presentation is the norm, music is often made mainly by specialists who play and create complex music at a very high level. Turino also outlines two modes of recording: "high fidelity" whose purpose is to create a sense of reality, no matter how artificial that creation process is; and "studio sound art" whose purpose is to create something equivalent to an art object, but in sound. All of these things can overlap. His go-to example is karaoke, which involves high fidelity recordings — the backing tracks, which, depending on the song selection can have elements of studio sound art — to produce a presentation-like situation in which everyone is expected to take a turn (participatory).

I found this quote to be particularly revealing about the state of music education in the modern Western world:

"…competence in performance will be lower among the general population in places where music and dance are assumed to be specialist activities not regularly practiced by everyone, and especially in places where the habit of connecting musical ability with the idea of inborn talent prevails. … School music programs at all levels are geared toward presentational performances and do not involve collective music making among all ages as a normal part of valued social occasions — a normal part of being social. With the exception of singing in church, many middle-class North Americans stop making music altogether as they approach adulthood, and it is common to hear people in the United States say, "I don't know anything about music," or "I am not musical." Such statements would be surprising to people in societies where participatory music is common. These attitudes among North Americans are partially self-fulfilling descriptions, since they hinder musical participation and the continuous musical learning that results." [p98.]

It's not that I didn't know this, but I have never been able to put my finger on it so succinctly. Turino avoids the discussion of capitalism, but we need to be clear that capitalistic division of labor and attitudes toward labor, specialization, and stratification contribute greatly towards the hinderance of collective music making. What makes this all particularly difficult is that I sense a longing for participatory musicking from the public in general, but a fear of being seen as incompetent. For education, it's challenging because the adults want all the elementary school kids to be involved in creating presentational performances and that "music should be fun," but they don't realize that it's the culture and assumptions of presentational music itself that precludes the fun, participatory aspects. It might have worked during that short window in the 50s and 60s when the folk revival was in full swing and that kind of participatory music was kind of the norm, although, perhaps, artificially created. You can see it in the music textbooks that were created in the 70s that were based in this optimism.

Rock and roll started with that "I could do that" kind of participatory possibilities and many schools are now allowing this, if not promoting it. The problem with this, for me, is that rock originated in an anti-establishment stance (out of necessity for blacks, and out of, well, a myriad of things for whites, but probably the appeal of participatory vs presentational aesthetics and attitudes), which is really out of place in a school setting. It's not that anti-establishment stances undermine the authority of the school; it's that the school undermines the power of the anti-establishment stance. I let a group of students perform "Killing In the Name Of" — the first problem was that no one wanted to sing (which I would have preferred, albeit sans f-bomb), the second problem was very clear that performing it in a school sucked the energy and meaning out of it, even though the performance was good. Christopher Small talks about this kind of incongruity in Music of the Common Tongue:

"For all its technical sophistication, there is nothing new in the view of the world and of human relationships offered by ‘the new music,’ since all the relationships of the concert hall reproduce in if anything intensified form those of the industrial state. …It is not that the medium is the message, or even that the medium conveys a message that can swamp that which is intended; rather, it is that anyone who genuinely desired social change would not subject his message to such a conservative medium as the concert hall. ... That is the price exacted for the subsidy given by states and wealthy organizations to classical musicking: that the performance celebrate those values which legitimize the position of the privileged of the state. " p353-4 [italics are Small's]

You could argue that the school has a similar effect as the classical concert hall. In fact, I am arguing that the school does have the same effect as the classical concert hall. I'm not saying that we shouldn't have rock or classical in schools, but that we should be aware of and explicit about how those modes work. We should actually provide opportunities for both participatory and presentational modes, but we should not confuse the two. More explicitly, we should not force students into presentational modes and its music and think we are creating a participatory situation.

If we want to actually have a participatory culture, we — the adults — have to actually participate with the students. The less experienced need to model their courage; the more experienced need to model their generosity and hospitality and not shame the less experienced for their shortcomings.