Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, someone once said. It’s one of those quotes that everyone said, but it doesn’t matter who first uttered it. The question is whether you can talk about one medium through another, and if so, how. An even deeper question is: what’s the use of different media, anyway? Why don’t we just stick with writing, or music, or architecture? It seems absurd because we get different things from literature and music and architecture. They speak to us on different levels, and we can appreciate them for different reasons. Experiencing one isn’t like experiencing another. This must mean there’s something about each medium that other media can’t offer. I think that good works in any medium must play to the medium’s strengths, which must be those things that any given medium does better than every other medium. If that’s so, then a picture isn’t worth a thousand words, because a single picture contains something that’s simply impossible to capture as precisely, or powerfully, or meaningfully in words. A good picture must make the most out of being a picture, which means that it must do something that a song or an essay or a building can’t do. Otherwise, why make a picture? Why not make a building or a text? Only mediocre pictures can be fully captured in words. Actually, describing even a mediocre picture fully in words is probably impossible, but words could at least invoke a comparable feeling in the reader. I believe the feeling of seeing a good picture or hearing a good song is fundamentally different from that of reading. It’s just a different kind of experience, a different quale, if you will, impossible to recreate or fully describe in another medium. But of course this creates problems because we’d like to talk about music or pictures, and we’d like to do it in words.
Music probably isn’t my medium. It’s not that I don’t like music, it’s just that I don’t get the same intense feeling that real music fans get when they hear a great song. At least, that’s what I gather when I read music writing. I doubt music writing can give me a real sense of what it’s like for a real music fan to experience their favorite song, but even imperfect approximations give me the feeling I’m missing out on something. That doesn’t bother me much, because I do like music, even if I might never experience musical ecstasy, and more importantly, I get feelings of comparable intensity from other media. Maybe experiencing a great song is qualitatively different from experiencing a great photograph or great literature, but there may be equally strong sensations involved in truly appreciating these art forms for what they are. If I want to share this or discuss it, though, I hit the same dilemma that music writers do. Literature is easier, because it’s text, and text has always been the best medium to comment on itself; even if it’s hard to describe the feeling you get when you read a great novel, at the very least it’s the feeling of reading a text, and that experience can be described in words much more readily than the feeling of hearing a song or seeing a painting. But what if I want to share or discuss the experience of seeing a great photograph? I don’t want to be dancing about architecture. I want to say something meaningful, but how am I going to do it if the very qualities I appreciate the most are those that are the hardest to capture in any other medium?
The standard approach is either technical description or comparison. The sound of a band may be described by referring to a few genre touchpoles, or as a blend of — at this point, insert unlikely combination of various bands the reader is likely to have heard, or, if the reviewer is smug, bands the reader is likely not to have even heard of — or by a technical listing of instruments, beats, rhythms, samples, lyrics (those are the easiest, since they’re text and hence easy to analyze in text). None of these, usually, succeed in capturing the experience of listening to the band, or why that experience is great or lousy.
The alternative is a lyrical metaphor: it’s the sound of the dull waves moving towards the shore at 2 am on a summer night, as you run along the shore holding the hand of a pretty young girl, but under this lies is something foreboding, subtle drums and something in the riff of the guitar remind you… Ok, I absolutely suck at faux poetic music metaphors. There’s a reason there is no music criticism on this blog. I can’t write this stuff, but you get my point: if this is even meaningful, it’s going to conjure up wildly different associations from different people. If the metaphor is going to come alive for me, it’s probably because I already associate the metaphor with a personal experience and that personal experience with some music. You can’t really rely on the reader having done the exact same things you as a writer have done and having associated music that is exactly like the one you’re supposed to be describing with these memories, so that you can just tap into the memory and automagically activate the sensation of experiencing the music. And if you have no real life associations with the metaphor at all, there’s no logic that can tell you what kind of music the metaphor is supposed to be describing or how it feels to experience that kind of music. If ten talented musicians read the metaphor above, or another, better-written poetic music metaphor from a music review, totally detached from all context, and were told to recreate the music the metaphor describes, they’d come up with ten wildly different interpretations. And none of the interpretations would be any more correct.
Don’t think I’m criticizing music writers. I think they do an admirable job of what’s essentially a hopeless task. I don’t think they have to perfectly capture an experience perfectly to be entitled to write about it. I can’t write well about music. Some people can, and I admire them for it, even as I think they’re doomed to forever circle around the core of their subject, that ineffable essence of music that music does so well that no other medium can capture the feeling.
An analogous situation happens if you try to describe good photography. You could describe genre, subjects, the technical process of creation, objective qualities like aspect ratio, resolution, dynamic range, or formal aspects, like composition, or you could create a dreamy metaphor that supposedly captures the feeling or significance of it, but problems analogous to those that appear in music writing will appear very quickly.
I really don’t know how to capture in a text the essence or feeling of a work of art that isn’t text. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be tried, I’m just saying we may have to accept that it’s something we can only ever achieve in the limit. Permit me my own slightly dreamy metaphor: we’re like flies, and the essence of a work of art — by which I don’t mean any metaphysical mumbo jumbo, but simply the part of the artwork we appreciate the most and the part that is uniquely expressible in the artwork’s chosen medium — is a lightbulb. We can only circle closer and closer. If we get too close, we get burned; if we look directly into the light, we get blinded. Our attempts are nothing but descriptions of perilous journeys around and around the essence, and these roundtrips would need infinite time to fully capture the whole, so in practice we’ll never get there. The peril isn’t any real danger, it’s just the risk of going totally off the rocker, of aiming so closely at the core that you end up getting blinded by it and, trying to jump this chasm between media, end up falling between them, saying something that makes no sense in either writing or music or photography or architecture. Kind of like dancing about architecture.
