What Does Musicking Afford?

The concept of affordances continues to provoke debate in the wider ecological community, and more specifically within the study of music, where the term has started to make increasingly frequent appearances. The adoption of this powerful idea by a range of authors interested in the human engagement with music is not without its problems, stemming from different attitudes to what musicking (to use Christopher Small's neologism) can be understood to afford. In this paper I consider some of those possibilities – ranging from the manifest affordances of physical instruments in the hands of suitably attuned players, to the social and empathic affordances of collective musicking – and raise questions about possibilities and limits. If the idea of affordances is predicated on the principle of opportunities for action, what is afforded by the apparently passive musicking that can be witnessed in concert hall audiences, and listeners to recorded music in trains, cars, shops, restaurants and bedrooms? And what is gained by bringing together this rich variety of phenomena with the terminology and conceptual commitments of affordances?