What’s the point of writing about music?
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. I’ve placed this maxim in quotes because someone had to have said it first, but it’s not entirely clear who originated the phrase. When I was a student, one of my mentors told me that jazz pianist Thelonious Monk was the one who initially dispensed this quip, but cursory research seems to indicate that comedian Martin Mull was probably the first person to word it exactly this way, at least in a documented setting. Issues of authorship aside, the quote captures a sentiment that is extraordinarily prevalent in musical spaces; that music is somehow an artform that defies written description or analysis. I have always chafed at this idea personally, but perhaps that comes from a youth spent poring over issues of Rolling Stone and trawling through Pitchfork’s website to learn about the next indie darling I could rave about to my friends (who were so obviously less hip than myself). Perhaps my musical peers who recited this mantra had a point though, who could better understand music than those who create it? How can one impart the mind, body, and soul experience of musical creation into text, and do so in a way that is three dimensional and bears some semblance of objectivity? The great and terrible truth, dear reader, is that writing can’t do that, but the good news is that it simply doesn’t need to.
Writing is a rather different discipline from music. It produces work that is usually consumed very actively. It thrives in mediums that feel more tangible than the vibrations that transmit musical art to our senses. The process of creating a work of writing is, in my experience, a far less visceral and immediate sensation than that of playing an instrument. Do these differences mean that these artforms cannot or should not interact? I would argue that this is not the case. In fact, I think that different artistic disciplines are nearly destined to intersect. Perhaps the best and most succinct response to the classic “dancing about architecture” quote comes from the Dean of American Rock Critics himself, Robert Christgau, who stated “Dancing usually is about architecture. When bodies move in relation to a designed space, be it stage or ballroom or living room or gymnasium or agora or Congo Square, they comment on that space whether they mean to or not”. We can expand on this in ways both practical and poetic. If dancing is about architecture, is not music, at least in some sense, about dancing? Did human beings not originally organize sound in service of such external forces as ritual, communication, and entertainment, all of which might be embodied by physical movement? And if we circle this premise back to the topic of writing, do we not employ rhythm and cadence and lyricism into both poetry and prose? I can almost guarantee that by the time I have finished this essay I will have read and reread every section numerous times to make sure it “flows” the way I want it to, the same way I might reconsider a musical phrase to make sure it “grooves”. Dancing is about architecture, and writing is about music, and a solid case can be made for innumerable parallels between the other arts.
Putting aside the philosophical arguments for a moment, I think it’s worth getting to the core of what people are really complaining about when they make the “dancing about architecture” argument. I think in some cases they are merely lamenting the existence of bad music criticism, which isn’t entirely unfair. There is work in every medium that meets the criteria to be considered “bad” by many or even most observers. But the statement itself is all encompassing, and often deployed as a means of dismissing the field of music criticism entirely as a sort of non-art. I think intentionally or not, the argument being made is that musicians are the only people qualified to meaningfully critique musical works because they have a mechanical understanding of music. They comprehend some mechanism for composing or performing music, whether it be written notation, the ability to produce in a DAW computer program, or fluency on a particular instrument or instruments. This presents what I think most people would see as a fundamental flaw in the internal logic of the argument, however. If technical facility is the required knowledge base for a meaningful understanding of music, then we are implying that music is about technical facility. There are in fact people who feel this way. People for whom the only true art is art created for its own sake and deemed to be an adequate display of virtuosity. If you are one of these people, I suppose this is the point at which we shake hands and go our separate ways. I think most music lovers, even those who prefer listening to highly technical music, don’t believe that skill and complexity are the only things that make music good, and certainly not the only thing that music is “about”. I also don’t think this is the way that musicians themselves typically listen to music either. While “seeing how the sausage is made”, as it were, can spoil the magic a bit, I believe most musicians still spend at least some of their time listening with a non-analytical ear, in broadly the same way that non-musicians do. Spending some time listening with no agenda is arguably an essential part of being a good musician.
Perhaps the most frustrating element of the “dancing about architecture” argument is how much it separates the listener from the artistic space. There are countless ways to listen to music, and in many cases the act of listening exerts an influence on the art itself. As I alluded to when discussing the Christgau quote earlier, music has often existed to accompany dance, ceremonies, or other communal activities. The way that the listener moves or acts is accommodated by the music, which is arguably secondary in these situations. This is especially true in some non-Western societies where music is less often a profession (at least in the capitalist sense) and far more integrated into everyday life. In places where music is a communal practice with less distinct boundaries between performer and listener, the perspective on these roles may be quite different from what we are used to. Even in the formal concert halls of the West however, we can easily point to an example of interactive listening. In his famous and oft-memed composition 4’33, composer John Cage instructs the player to sit silently with their instrument for the duration of the performance. This inevitably leads to a great deal of gentle shuffling, coughing, and room noise, all of which constitute the musical content of the piece. The music comes from the audience and the experience is reframed around the perception of the listener, rather than the performance of the musician. And, of course, there are the numerous examples of popular music that exists specifically to be integrated into a particular crowd setting. There are entire genres (house, techno, trap, etc) designed for clubs, parties, or raves. These musics are shaped by the listeners’ social habits, venues, dance styles, and even their drugs of choice. While complex music has certainly emerged from all of these scenes, they originated from the culture of the listeners, rather than the individual ambitions of the artists working in those communities.
At this point, we’ve looked at the problematic elements of the “dancing about architecture” attitude from a variety of different angles. Yet, I still have not directly answered the question that I myself posed; what’s the point of writing about music? Every argument I’ve made in this essay has been in service of asserting that the listener has a valuable perspective on the music they engage with, regardless of their level of musical comprehension. Writing provides a potential vehicle for their observations, and when honed as a craft, can produce incredibly insightful work that speaks meaningfully to the non-technical elements of the art, the experiential elements that connect it to our humanity. The practical use of such writing is largely informed by how we as readers address the inherent subjectivity of each author. The perception that there is something truly objective to say in the text of a musical critique is often the source of dismissive arguments towards the field as a whole. Spend too much time reading internet comments (perhaps any amount of time is too much) and you’ll see people falling into the same trap repeatedly. A reader comes to a piece of writing with a set of values, the writer did not resonate with the work because they hold different values, the reader furiously types out a screed about how the author missed the point. And it’s true that the author has missed a point. Probably many points in fact, because there is no critic who can see every possible perspective on a given subject. But by consuming a balanced media diet filled with diverse perspectives, and figuring out where you generally agree and disagree with certain authors or publications, you can find some value in almost any work of music criticism. For example, if theneedledrop gives a poor or middling review to a new record from an indie “dad rock” band, I’ll probably love it. If he gives a glowing review to a metal record, I’ll probably also enjoy that. A recommendation can be gleaned from the review regardless of whether or not I agree with his opinion on the album. If we purge the critical world of untrained listeners by insisting that everybody commenting on music should also be a musician, we inherit all of the bias that comes from that one particular subjective experience. Simply put, it is better to have a wide range of perspectives from which to choose and compare, rather than an insular world of “qualified” critics. While it can be entertaining and enlightening to have an artist show you a behind the curtain view, it’s just as valuable to pay attention to all of the people center stage just dancing about architecture, even when the choreography is a bit off.
Nicholas Rossler 