#john blacking

[solbacka]

[hanathemah]

Performative Writing, 26 October 2018

Credit for third photo: Burcu Alp Erdem

[bronek-dan]

 "The value of music is, I believe , to be found in the terms of the human experiences involved in its creation. There is a difference between music that is occasional and music that enhances human consciousness, music that is simply for having and music that is for being. I submit that the former may be good craftsmanship, but that the latter is art, no matter how simple or complex it sounds, and no matter under what circumstances it is produced."

[deivulcaniciechi]

John Blacking - How musical is man?

Editor: University of Washington Press, 1973

This important study in ethnomusicology is an attempt by the author -- a musician who has become a social anthropologist -- to compare his experiences of music-making in different cultures. He is here presenting new information resulting from his research into African music, especially among the Venda. Venda music, he discovered is in its way no less complex in structure than European music. Literacy and the invention of nation may generate extended musical structures, but they express differences of degree, and not the difference in kind that is implied by the distinction between 'art' and 'folk' music. Many, if not all, of music's essential processes may be found in the constitution of the human body and in patterns of interaction of human bodies in society. Thus all music is structurally, as well as functionally, 'folk' music in the sense that music cannot be transmitted of have meaning without associations between people.

If John Blacking's guess about the biological and social origins of music is correct, or even only partly correct, it would generate new ideas about the nature of musicality, the role of music in education and its general role in societies which (like the Venda in the context of their traditional economy) will have more leisure time as automation increases.

John Blacking was born October 28, 1928, in Guilford, Surrey, England. With his family he moved to Salisbury, Wiltshire, at age three, where he received his early education and exposure to music at the Salisbury Cathedral Choir School. Blacking obtained a degree in archaeology and anthropology from Kings College Cambridge in 1953. He spent a large part of his life doing fieldwork in countries around the globe. In addition to being a well-known and well-respected professor of social anthropology and gaining professorships in England and Africa before eventually settling in the United States, Blacking was also an ethnomusicologist: He was interested in the relationship between music and biology, psychology, dance, and politics. He believed that making music is fundamental and universal to humans. Blacking stated that through music people express the human condition, transcend class boundaries, and improve the quality of life. He spent 22 months with the Venda people in South Africa. He wrote Venda Children's Songs (1967) based on this experience. Blacking's best known work is How Musical Is Man? (1973) Blacking died in 1990.

[daisychainsandlaughs]

The value of music is, I believe, to be found in terms of the human experiences involved in its creation. There is a difference between music that is occasional and music that enhances human consciousness, music that is simply for having music and that is for being.

John Blacking, "How Musical is Man?"

[leadingtone]

If a composer wants to produce music that is relevant to his contemporaries, his chief problem is not really musical, though it may seem to him to be so; it is a problem of attitude to contemporary society and culture in relation to the basic human problem of learning to be human.

John Blacking

A great insight--and whether or not it is to my discredit, I have never been interested in producing music that is "relevant to my contemporaries." I am interested in producing music that is relevant to the oceans and the trees and the stars, whose modes of expression are vastly older than any of mankind's, and any audience I have will be those to whom those things provide the same kind of solace.