Uncategorized

3588596

Interview with Christopher Small is one of the surprisingly small number of classically identified commentators to suggest any kind of parity between popular music and the operatic-symphonic tradition. In England he was preceded by composer-academic Wilfrid Mellers (Twilight of the Gods, Music in a New Found Land) and critic Henry Pleasants (The Agony of Modern Music, Serious Music and All That Jazz). In America he was followed by Susan McClary, who eventually won a MacArthur Fellowship for championing what is called the new musicology, an endeavor influenced by Small’s first book, Music, Society, Education, which explored many of the ideas she’d been thinking through in the early ’80s. Small has also been a close long-distance associate of radical American ethnomusicologist Charles Keil, whose Urban Blues was the first book of rock criticism ever published.