classical music imitates our industrialized society with its fragmentedness, linearity, power hierarchy, etc. For Small, this manner of performance ... affirms and celebrates the values of the industrial state in all its singleness of vision (168).Hence, Small makes an insightful link between how social power--for classical musicians receive financial support from sites of power in our industrialized society--impacts the socially constructed myth that classical music is a superior form of music. On this construal, classical music is not music of the common tongue. Classical music is not deemed as that which is available, like language, to everyone. Classical music is not like vernacular speech; rather, it is deemed exclusive--a language that only a select group of geniuses is really capable of hearing and expressing.Small does an insightful job of providing readers with a thick socio-historical description of the survival and celebration of African-American musicking. He demonstrates how power and politics undergird music as a cultural form. As a result, he reveals how music and aesthetic values do not inhabit an ephemeral sphere divorced from cultural and political contexts. In the process, Small leaves the reader wondering about the future social context out of which African-American musicking will evolve. As the political state becomes even more restrictive and exclusionary, one can only anticipate a more powerful musicking of combat and overthrow.[E agora mais uma opiniao sobre a obra de Christopher Small, em texto escrito por Robert Christgau e publicado no Village Voice (NY), em 5 set. 2000]Thinking About 'Musicking'Robert ChristgauIn 1975, Christopher Small, a 48-year-old senior lecturer at a London college of higher education, approached independent publisher John Calder with a half-completed translation of Fragments Theoretiques sur la Musique Experimental, by the Belgian serialist Henri Pousseur. Small had left his native New Zealand in 1961 after receiving a grant to study composition in the mother country. There he fell in with avant-gardists he now believes derailed whatever compositional impulse he had, although he did produce several educational works as well as one called Actions for Chorus: Some Maori Place Names. Since Calder had put out titles by Cage and Ives, he seemed a good match for the recondite Belgian, but the publisher was more interested in the translator. Soon he was asking when Small would be writing his own book.Well, you know, every academic thinks hes got a book in him, Small told me recently in Sitges, Spain, a seaside outpost of Barcelona where hes lived with companion Neville Braithwaite since 1986. Designated a guru by more than one admirer, Small is a tubby, affable man with a trim white beard who speaks in a ruminative murmur few would call charismatic; several times he apologized for not answering my questions snappily enough. But he certainly did have a book in him. In the end, in fact, he had three. But only Music, Society, Education came easy--he wrote his visionary critique of classical musics industrial-capitalist apparatus in less than a year. And that, Small figured, would be that. I expected it just to sink from sight. It never occurred to me that there was