Howard Becker 1995
In conventional music-making, nothing goes away at the end of the day. We don’t invent a new scale every day. In fact, we hardly ever do, unless we are as eccentric and individualistic as Partch, or like to experiment mathematically as Easley Blackwood did when he systematically explored the possibilities of scales made by dividing the octave, electronically, into increasingly fine units. Instead, we use one of the several scales in common use. We don’t really invent new melodies every day, either, even those of us who improvise. Paul Berliner’s research on jazz improvisation (Berliner 1994) shows that
even the most inventive jazz players work with a small library of short phrases
which they vary and combine endlessly, starting on different degrees of the scale and at different places in the bar, to make enormous numbers of distinctive variations. He shows further that those phrases are typically not invented by the people playing them, but are part of a vocabulary of such phrases that go back to the beginnings of jazz playing. Thus the phrases he finds in the improvisations of trumpeter Booker Little can also be found, in slightly variant forms, all the way back to the beginnings of jazz trumpet playing, in the recorded solos (which Little surely knew) of Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Eldridge and Louis Armstrong (and even in the early piano solos of Earl Hines).
Similarly,
It’s the package that exerts the hegemony, that contains the inertial force,
if I can attribute agency to such a conceptual creation.
Think about Partch. When he spent a year at a college campus as composer in residence, he would spend months with students building instruments, teaching them to play what had been built, teaching them a notation, working on particular pieces, all in order to prepare (between September and May, let’s say) a two hour concert. A major orchestra in the 1990s spends no more than nine hours, and more likely six, preparing a similar amount of music. You might say that the difference between nine months and nine hours is a rough measure of the inertial power of a conventional musical package.
It is not only these musical considerations—scales and instruments—that make up the package. The package also contains the social situations in which music gets made, and in which the players and everyone else involved is trained. Symphony concerts are not the way they are just because the instruments are there and the music is written in an already established notation. They are what they are, also, because concert music is a business. The people who make that kind of music get paid for it, not as well as they might like, but enough that raising the money to pay them is a serious problem. That means that the orchestras must hire people to see that the money is there: fundraisers, marketing specialists, ticket sellers.
All that money requires tending, so orchestras also need bookkeepers, accountants, and lawyers. The players usually belong to a union, so there are labor relations to take care of; the inability of players and management to agree on a contract has killed off a few orchestras. The economics of the symphony business are what make it necessary for players to have certain skills, e.g., the ability to perform a difficult piece of music creditably or excellently with only a few hours rehearsal (when the rehearsal must be paid for at union rates). After all, it is not a necessary feature of making good music that you be able to learn to perform a particular piece quickly; that is a business driven requirement, as Samuel Gilmore’s (1987) explorations of such alternate musical organizations as university-based ensembles makes clear.
Part of the concert music package is an associated set of educational organizations. Professional training schools produce the players who can do everything the other parts of the package require: quick studies with virtuoso skills who can adapt to a variety of conductors. Elementary and secondary schools teach some rudiments of music (see the description of such a program in (Hennion 1988), in the places where penny-pinching state and city governments haven’t made that impossible, and take children to “children’s concerts” to give them a kind of minimal exposure to music, which might make them into potential customers for the concert business, if not for the live concerts then perhaps for television and recordings.
We can add to the package such frills as critics, theorists and scholars. I’ll leave their relations to what I’ve described as an exercise to be done at home.
All these parts of the package could themselves be done some other way. Music could be supported otherwise than by raising money from rich people and selling tickets. It could be an amateur activity, as so many other kinds of music are. Children could learn to play instruments proficiently in school, instead of learning to be consumers, the way some number of them learn to be proficient enough players of rock.
So that’s the package, and it creates the inertia that keeps things as they are. It’s important to see that it doesn’t in any way require anyone to do anything in the conventional way, or prevent innovation or unconventionality. You want forty-two tone music? Go ahead and write it. But you’ll have a lot of trouble getting it played,
because no one will have the instruments or know how to play them and, for that matter, no one will know how to listen to it either, since it will not be one of the kinds of music they learned to hear in school or from records.
You want to pick pieces of bamboo and invent whole new musical systems from scratch every day? Be my guest. But keep it to yourself and don’t expect anyone to cooperate with you.
You want to do it on a computer? Fine, but then you will spend time you might have been composing learning more about computers than you ever wanted to know (like Michael Joyce, who wanted to write interactive fiction and thought a computer would be the way to do it, and it was, but it took him, collaborating with Jay Bolter, three years to develop “Storyspace,” the software that made it possible, before he could write the first story (Joyce 1990).
You will have to recruit and train people who otherwise would have been ready to go, you will have to learn new ways of doing things, you will have to construct machinery or adapt it to your purposes instead of being able to use off-the-shelf products.
you might have devoted to making art, which is what you set out to do. So it isn’t surprising that
At every turn, there’s an easy way to go and a hard way, and people who have some art they want to make are likely to choose the easy way. Not because they are lazy, but because they want to get on with the work they set out to do.
On the other hand, it’s clear that
enough people with new ideas and the energy to give them a try. The problem about change is not whether there are such people but whether their ideas will be incorporated into the workings of the rest of the package, whether the changes will be institutionalized so as to get the advantage of all the apparatus that is already in place.
which will do all those things the regular system does for older kinds of work? In some ways, at least for a time, you could say that rock music did that, creating a network of performance sites and training institutions that were independent of what had been there before.
Rock music did not take over jazz venues, or recruit the audience of jazz; it found new venues (San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium replaced an “Over Thirties Ballroom” whose clientele had gotten too old to dance) and created a new audience.
To show what it takes to make an enormous change, we can look at Pierre-Michel Menger’s study of the compositional scene in France (Menger 1983).
When composer-conductor-theorist Pierre Boulez came to control about 80% of all government money available for classical music (the kind of thing that can happen in so centralized a society), he declared a shift of emphasis from composition to “research in sonorities,” concerned less with producing works to be played in concert and more with investigating the new possibilities introduced by digital music. The result, according to Menger, was a paradox: governmental supported music that was radically avant-garde, neither conservative nor popular, but instead esoteric in the extreme.
That suggests one last aspect of the power of inertia, one implicit in most of what I’ve said until now. Boulez could do this because he was able, by virtue of the centralized apparatus he controlled, to control the definition of what constituted music. That control of definition exists in all professionalized music worlds. I began by referring to John Cage’s catholic and democratic notions about what constituted music. But then I pretty much proceeded, as most sensible scholars would, to ignore those ideas, by accepting the notion that music is what is conventionally thought of as music, which is to say professionalized music someone makes a living by. Within that enormous restriction on what I defined as music, I mostly concentrated on conventional concert music. By doing that, I accepted the most insidious exercise of power, which consists of letting people whose business it is define what that business includes, which versions of it are serious and important, and which don’t matter much.
Now I’ll repair that error. Take an unbiased look at musicmaking, as Ruth Finnegan did in her study of musicmaking in the new English town of Milton Keynes (Finnegan 1989). Look and listen as she did, using an inclusive Cagean definition, and find everywhere in such a city (whose population is about 200,000) that people are making music. You find all the rock bands, church choirs, and amateur orchestras. You find the large number of organizations in which specialized ethnic music is made: the Milton Keynes Irish Society, the Bletchley Edelweiss club (devoted to Austrian, Swiss and German music), the Hindu Youth organization, and the less organized but still musical Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Sikh, and Bangladeshi communities. The schools, of course, have musical organizations and programs. So do the clubs and pubs.
I’m not making a sentimental anthropological plea that we remember and honor all these wonderful folk, or even the Cagean aesthetic plea to enjoy ourselves by listening to all the wonderful sounds to be heard if we just pay attention. It’s
when we talk about music and power, we must recognize that
all these ways (of making music) are in active use and the power of professional definition prevents us from taking them seriously.
no grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, no fellowships, no commissions from players and groups. More generally, all the apparatus I described above,
as “music.” Which does not include the full panoply of musicmaking Cage would have us recognize and Finnegan found in Milton Keynes.
A striking example of what it means not to be part of the world defined by the professionals is found in Hermano Vianna’s study of the world of funk in Rio de Janeiro (Vianna 1988). Based on intensive obervation of this world, Vianna estimates that there are between one and two thousand clubs in the metropolitan area (whose population is around five million), each of them drawing as many as a thousand people a night for two or three nights each weekend to listen and dance to funk music imported from the United States. One striking finding of his research is that, until he wrote about it, “no one” in Rio, which is to say no intellectual or journalist or opinion maker, knew that this was going on. It was something poor, mostly black, people were doing in their own neighborhoods, neighborhoods to which the experts on “popular culture” never went. So, from a certain point of view, Rio’s funk scene “didn’t exist.”
Another surprising finding is that this was not a case of cultural imperialism, of culture from the metropole being forced on a helpless population in a dependent country through the devices of modern mass marketing. The companies producing these records in the United States were typically small, struggling enterprises which could not afford the price of cultural imperialism. Nor were the records the Brazilian funk fans liked ones that were popular or even well known in the United States. The only way the disk jockeys who ran these parties could get the records their fans liked was to fly to New York, spend the day scouring stores for possible music, and take the fruits of their search back to Rio with them the next evening. This is a long way from the stereotypical picture of the greedy multinational exploiting the “natives” of a poor country.
The poor funk lovers of Rio make their own world and so could overcome the inertia that might be imposed by the existing packages of the music world. In that way, they are a model of what is possible, as is Partch, and the bamboo flute maker, all showing what you could do if you really wanted to and what the price would be.
And all that shows how organizations stay stable—by raising the price of innovation—and how they change—through the activity of people for whom that price is, for whatever reason, not prohibitive.
Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Berliner, Paul F. Thinking About Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Finnegan, Ruth. The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Gilmore, Samuel. “Coordination and Convention: The Organization of the Concert World,” Symbolic Interaction 10 (1987), pp. 209-28.
Hennion, Antoine. Comment la musique vient aux enfants: Une anthropologie de l’enseignement musical. Paris: Anthropos, 1988.
Hennion, Antoine. La Passion musicale. Paris: Édition Métailié, 1993.
Hughes, Everett C. The Sociological Eye. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984.
Joyce, Michael. afternoon, a story. Hypertext edition ed., Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1990.
Menger, Pierre-Michel. Le Paradoxe du musicien: le compositeur, le m êlomane et l’Etat dans la societé contemporaine. Paris: Flammarion, 1983.
Sudnow, David. Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Vianna, Hermano. O Mundo Funk Carioca. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 1988.