Robert Christgau: September 2011 Archives

Christopher Small was a musicologist, and a few of his fellow musicologists swore by him. But musicology is an exceptionally hidebound and exclusionary academic discipline even now--especially in insecure and hence snobbish America, as Small, a New Zealander who taught in England, was the first to point out to me. As a result he had at least as much impact on journalists. Dave Marsh was the first to tell me about Music of the Common Tongue, and when I wrote the Times's Jon Caramanica to make sure he knew not just that Small had died but how important he was, he wrote back to let me know that the same book had had a major impact on him as a student.

In 2000 I met him in at his retirement home in Sitges, near Barcelona, for a Voice piece called "Thinking About Musicking," and eventually Perfect Sound Forever published a transcript of our conversation. Musicking was the title of the third and most theoretical of his books, my own favorite--a prolonged argument based on a concert performance that rather than an art concerned most fundamentally with time, the standard view, music is an art concerned most fundamentally with relationships, and also that music is more properly a verb than a noun. He did a brief lecture tour in the States a few years later and he and his then companion, later husband Neville Braithwaite came over for dinner along with PSF's Jason Gross. They were both extraordinarily kind and gracious men. Charles Keil wrote recently:

Somewhere in the early 1980s I remember finally reading the chapters of Chris's first book and feeling elated, healed, challenged, and most of all, surprised that points I was trying to make in anger, filled with righteous indignation, could be made concisely, clearly, elegantly, in a prose style for which I still can't find the precisely "right" adjective--the word that means non-polemical, even gentle, ways of proceeding that nevertheless inflict great and lasting damage on a powerful and opposing point of view.