anything out of the ordinary about it.Soon, however, Music, Society, Education received a glowing notice from the pop-friendly English musicologist Wilfrid Mellers. A whole torrent of reviews followed, although Small seems just as gratified by all the letters from undergrads and schoolkids--several letters from schoolkids--and students in music college. What caused the clamor was that Small had examined classical music from the inside and found it wanting--humanly wanting as opposed to aesthetically wanting, to exploit a distinction he has little use for. Smalls literary presentation mirrored his musical values, which emphasize musics function in, well, society and education. Deeply thoughtful and broadly informed without any of the usual shows of erudition (spare footnotes, no bibliography), it really was accessible to interested schoolkids, and although Small insists that it was not conceived as an attack, it alarmed the old guard mightily. It was both more sweeping and more unassuming than anything Mellers had in him, and its commitment to democracy had a radical edge absent from the centrist middlebrow Henry Pleasants, whose crankier Serious Music and All That Jazz, Death of a Music?, and The Agony of Modern Music Small would only discover later.What distinguished Small from his fellow dissenters was that he wasnt just an antielitist praising melody and rhythm, much less an elitist spinning off into some airless avant-garde stratosphere. He was driven by an overriding idea: that music is always a social activity, never a reified thing. Thus the Balinese and African musics his first book describes early on are the equals of the European classical tradition whose audience he is addressing, and perhaps its superior. The moral agenda that goes with this concept not only insists on musics social context but challenges the whole idea of music as communication--especially the myth of the composer as an anointed genius with a message to impart to his inferiors in the orchestra and the audience.It took Small 10 laborious years to reconfigure these concerns in what he calls my favorite of my three children--an idiosyncratic, autodidactic history of African American music. Music of the Common Tongue is an ambitious, original, moving synthesis, propelled once again by Smalls signature ideas. But because he came to the subject late and learned American history on his own, its awkwardly researched, and while theres earnest charm and emotional power in the books flaws, theyre sometimes distracting or misleading, especially when they touch on such white-dominated precincts as Tin Pan Alley and country music. Its easy to imagine a more smoothly executed version turning Small into a genuine intellectual celebrity. Instead, it remained surprisingly obscure--the time wasnt right for such a radical book, and Calder did nothing to compensate. By pub date Small and Braithwaite, a Jamaican-born youth worker in music and dance, had escaped Thatchers England and retired to Sitges, an old Catalan community that has accommodated significant touristic, bohemian, and gay infusions.One hallmark of Smalls modestly momentous career, grounded in classical music and then bent toward America as it is, is that he never got the time of day from the U.S. classical establishment, which