Music that is not for listening to

The arrangement in which people sit silently facing performers who play for an audience is one way of organising music, and it is far from the only one.

Across many traditions, music is embedded in activity. It coordinates work, it accompanies ritual, it enables dance, or it marks a moment. It is participatory rather than presentational, and the question of whether it is good is answered by whether it did its job.

Work music

The clearest case. Music that coordinates collective physical effort exists wherever people have pulled, lifted, hammered, rowed or ground together.

Sea shanties, documented in detail, had specific types for specific tasks — different rhythms for hauling a line in short pulls, for continuous heaving, and for tasks at the capstan. The rhythm matched the movement, and the call-and-response structure allowed a leader to set the pace and adjust it.

Comparable traditions exist for agricultural work, for grinding grain, for building, for paddling, and for the coordinated labour of moving heavy objects.

These songs frequently have improvised verses over a fixed refrain, which means the leader can comment on the work, on the overseer, on the weather, while the group supplies the response and the pull.

Where mechanisation removed the collective labour, the songs went with it, and much of what survives was recorded by collectors in the final decades of the practice.

Ritual music

Music that is part of a ceremony rather than an accompaniment to it, and which in many traditions is understood as doing something rather than representing something.

Specific rhythms or melodies may be associated with particular entities, occasions or stages of a ceremony. Performing them may be restricted to certain people, at certain times, in certain places.

This raises real questions about recording and dissemination. A recording of restricted ceremonial music, freely available, makes accessible something that the tradition deliberately controls. Several communities have negotiated with archives over access restrictions on historic recordings for exactly this reason, and some collections now operate with tiered access.

Dance music

Music whose function is to enable movement, where the test is whether people can dance to it.

The relationship between rhythm and movement is frequently far more specific than outsiders assume. Particular dances have particular rhythms, and a musician who plays a rhythm that does not correspond to the dance is not making an artistic choice but an error.

In several West African traditions, drum ensembles and dancers interact directly, with drummers responding to individual dancers and vice versa. The performance is a conversation, and a recording captures one side of it.

Participatory versus presentational

The ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino drew a useful distinction between participatory performance, where the goal is to involve as many people as possible, and presentational performance, where specialists perform for an audience.

Participatory music has characteristic features: repetitive forms that let people join in, dense textures that hide individual mistakes, open-ended duration, and a low barrier to entry. Judged by presentational standards it can seem repetitive and unrefined. Judged by its own, those features are the design.

The two coexist in most societies, and the balance has shifted heavily toward presentational in industrialised contexts — where the great majority of people consume music and a small minority produce it, which is historically unusual.

What recording changed

Recording made music portable, repeatable and separable from occasion, which transformed it.

Music that existed only in the moment of a ceremony can now be heard anywhere. Music that required a group can be heard by one person. Music tied to a season can be played at any time.

The effects are genuinely mixed. Recording has preserved a great deal that would otherwise be gone, has allowed communities to reclaim material after a break in transmission, and has provided income to musicians.

It has also decontextualised, redistributed royalties in ways that have frequently disadvantaged the originating communities, and made restricted material public.

The listening problem

For anyone encountering a tradition from outside, the useful discipline is to ask what the music is for before deciding whether it is any good.

A recording of a work song, played in a room, is a fragment. A ritual piece on an album is missing everything except the sound. Dance music without dancers is half a thing.

That is not an argument against listening. It is an argument for holding the judgement loosely, and for noticing that the standards being applied — melodic interest, harmonic development, virtuosity, recorded quality — come from a specific tradition and are not general.