Why Does Most Writing About Music So Often Miss the Point? By Thomas Wolf
At last! Someone has offered an honest and compelling piece describing the difficulty of writing about music. Not writing about composers or famous performers or historical and cultural trends. No, the author, Derek Neal, is explicit—it is writing about music (what we actually hear) that is so difficult.[i]
Most of us who love music, from the professional musician to the rank neophyte, have a desire to describe what we hear to others. It is only natural. And for some people, like music critics and program annotators, writing about music is their job. But it is not easy. Indeed, try this.
Think about a piece of music that you love (or even one you hate). Now try to describe it to someone who has never heard it before. What will you say? That the music is beautiful, or sad, or ugly, or fast, or slow or expressive, or percussive? Maybe there will be a personal association such as “It brings me back to a time in my life when everything seemed so optimistic” or “It gives me so much energy” or “I imagine a beautiful woman on the top of a mountain with the wind lightly mussing her hair.” But now try to describe in detail what you actually hear when you listen or play the piece. Can you be explicit enough that another person can imagine what the music actually sounds like and would be able to reproduce melodies or the chord structure even crudely? Probably not.
Compare this to your ability to describe a short story or a painting. When you do so, there is a good chance another person can begin to imagine the visual elements you are delineating. “It is a painting of a lone tree in winter surrounded by snow on a cloudy day.” You cannot do that with music. In order to “capture something as intangible as sound via the written word,” according to Neal, we depend on “analogies and clichés. This is understandable; you can’t describe music literally because it wouldn’t give an accurate representation of what it is you’re hearing. What use is it to say that a song is written in the key of A minor, has a tempo of 110 beats per minute, and follows a 4/4 time signature? These facts don’t add up to much. On the other hand, using analogies to describe music is meant, I suppose, not to state the objective facts of a song but to capture the experience of listening to a song and the subjective emotional response created within the listener.”[ii]
Many years ago, the philosopher Suzanne Langer described better than anyone why this is the case.
Suzanne Langer: Her book Philosophy in a New Key explains why it is so difficult to clearly describe a piece of music so that someone else will be able to imagine it.
In her masterwork Philosophy in a New Key, Langer describes the human mind as "constantly carrying on a process of symbolic transformation of the experiential data that come to it.” We often tend to convert what we are experiencing into words. But in some cases, this is easier than in others—painting and literature simpler, music more difficult. Langer describes a process she calls discursive symbolization—descriptions based on “stable and invariant meanings.” This is the process by which we can describe a painting. Let us look, for example, at a still life painting by Cézanne.
How would you describe this painting by Cézanne if you wanted someone to be able to recreate it without the benefit of looking at it?
There are many ways this painting can be described in words starting with the subject matter. It includes a pile of six visible apples on a plate on the left side of the painting with one and a half apples in front of a cup and saucer on the right (the half apple is on the right edge of the canvas which is why you don’t see all of it). At the top of the painting is the upper half of a trumpet or bugle hanging on the wall in back of the table on which the apples and plates sit (the table obscures the bottom half of the instrument). The colors can be described too and their relationships to one another, the perspective, and many other elements. Add all these together and someone can begin not only to imagine the painting but even draw a crude representation of it. We have used a process that Langer calls “discursive symbolization” to communicate what we see.
But with music, we are in another domain altogether, according to Langer. Here we are dealing with what she calls presentational symbolization. Such symbolization operates independently of elements with fixed and stable meanings. There is no one-to-one correspondence between what you are hearing and words that can describe it. You cannot build and communicate a comprehensive verbal description that forms a clear audio image of a piece of music the way words can give you a visual image of a painting. And there is something else. Musical meaning—what the actual sounds produce in us—is experienced not so much as individual elements (as was the case at least in part with the painting) but rather as a unified whole. It would be impossible to describe the units of music in such a way that someone, even someone trained in music, could even begin to imagine or try to reproduce the sounds and more to the point, it would be a waste of time since that is not how we experience music.
Here, for example, is an audio rendering of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony.
And here is a visual representation of the opening through printed music.
Two offerings of a piece of music where with the painting we only needed one. But even with both of these, I have yet to read any words about this musical work that is descriptive enough for a layman who has never heard it to imagine what it sounds like.
The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. This magnificent novel provides additional insight about why it is so difficult to convey what music sounds like from one person to another.
There is another way to understand the problem of writing about music and this explanation comes not from philosophy or psychology but from one of the great works of 20th century fiction—Herman Hesse’s novel Magister Ludi also known as The Glass Bead Game. The eponymous game described in the novel requires a life-time of study and is very complex. Master players must have knowledge of diverse fields—science, mathematics, music, cultural history—in order to see the complex connections and associations between them.
But one of the keys to the game is distinguishing between two kinds of associations—those that are widely shared and are universally understood as opposed to those that are simply personal associations that others will not comprehend. A simple example might be as follows: The colors in the Cézanne painting we described earlier are primarily shades of reds, yellows and greys. This concept of color is universally understood—most people can see those colors in their minds. Contrast that to this statement: “The first movement of the Mozart symphony is effervescent, shimmering with a brilliant golden hue.” Another color, but this one we cannot clearly comprehend—it is a metaphor. To the person who utters these words, this personal association is clear—he or she can see it and feel it and hear it. But to someone else, it is meaningless. In no way can you reproduce a sense of the music to match the speaker’s experience of the work.
So what is to be done? How do writers on music deal with this challenge? Writers tend to resort to a few different strategies, sometimes in combination, but generally obscuring and not getting at the root of the problem which is writing directly about the music itself.
The first is to focus on biography and historical context. When in Mozart’s life was the “Jupiter” Symphony written? What were the cultural, historical, and personal trends that shaped his thinking? Who were the composers whose works influenced him? When and where did the first performance take place and who was conducting? Such writing can be very informative but it does not tell us anything about the auditory experience of the music itself.
A second approach is to try to convey the emotional impact of the music. How do Russians feel in listening to a heroic masterpiece like Shostakovich’s seventh symphony (the so-called “Leningrad”), written and first performed during the siege of that city during the Second World War? Why does Beethoven’s ninth symphony, so often played after tragic events, help convey hope for the future? What music is appropriate to enhance the mood of a wedding or a funeral? Often performers will write about what it feels like to play certain music or why they feel most comfortable playing the works of certain composers.
A third approach to writing about music is to get very technical. Here is a short description of the first half of the opening movement of Mozart’s symphony from Wikipedia. I couldn’t help myself from chuckling when I read it:
The sonata form first movement’s main theme begins with contrasting motifs: a threefold tutti outburst on the fundamental tone (respectively, by an ascending motion leading in a triplet from the dominant tone underneath to the fundamental one), followed by a more lyrical response.
This exchange is heard twice and then followed by an extended series of fanfares. What follows is a transitional passage where the two contrasting motifs are expanded and developed. From there, the second theme group begins with a lyrical section in G major which ends suspended on a seventh chord and is followed by a stormy section in C minor. Following a full stop, the expositional coda begins which quotes Mozart's insertion aria “Un bacio di mano”, K. 541 and then ends the exposition on a series of fanfares. [iii]
Are you edified or are you, like me (a trained musician), feeling as though you know no more about this sublime work than you did before reading this dense prose?
George Bernard Shaw, himself a distinguished music critic, had little patience for music writing that was overly technical in nature.
It was George Bernard Shaw, after quoting from an 1893 review that displayed this kind of musical analysis, who provided his own tongue-in-cheek ‘analysis’ of Hamlet’s soliloquy “To Be or Not to Be,” in the same scientific style:
“Shakespeare, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon; and a pointed pository phrase, in which the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, brings us to the first full stop.”[iv]
There is yet another way to write about music, and I believe it is the one that is most likely to be successful in conveying the musical experience as directly as possible. It is my contention that any attempt to truly convey a sense of the actual music MUST be accompanied by auditory snippets of the music itself. Happily, given the power of the internet, this is now easier than it has ever been. Describing what you hear and then listening to it (or doing it in the reverse order and preferably at least initially in bite size bits) is the only way I have found to describe music accurately and with any degree of precision to another person who is not already familiar with it.[v] With the aid of a computer, you might even consider writing about the music in real time (i.e., as it is playing), directing someone’s senses to what you believe is going on at particular moments in time. Purists may sneer. But who cares? The point is to describe the music any way you can. Good luck![vi]
[i] Derek Neal, “Writing About Music,” https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/05/writing-about-music.html?mc_cid=bff4800ec7&mc_eid=670c94a6ea (accessed 5/5/22)
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._41_(Mozart)?msclkid=6e1c76e1cf9f11ecaa44dcb882286898, accessed 5/7/22
[iv] See Bernard Shaw, Music in London 1890-94 [1932], Vienna House, 1973, vol. 2, p. 338.
[v] This can work especially well in lecture format. Rob Kapilow has made a career out of lecturing on what makes particular pieces of music great, often in a concert hall setting with live musicians. One of his lectures can be found on YouTube where he discusses Mozart’s “Ein Kleine Nachtmusik.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwWs7Z4iwAg&list=OLAK5uy_m5-4WpLOH0n0fp4jnwSq4kV3zXD_TsAS8.
[vi] My thanks to Gregor Benko for commenting on an earlier draft of this blog.