Why write about music?

Mendelssohn once said that music is too precise for words – so is writing about it a fool’s errand? Tom Service suggests why so many great minds persist in this ‘folly’

Want to seem really clever when you’re next having a convivial conversation about music? Easy: proffer the aphorism that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’, and your audience is likely to be reduced to a moment of stunned stupefaction. It’s a phrase that conveys the redundancy of writing about music, using mere words to convey the power of sound. There’s nothing new about this aperçu: the American comedian Martin Mull is probably the original coiner of this quippette in the 1970s, but it’s been variously attributed to Frank Zappa and Laurie Anderson, to Elvis Costello and John Lennon. Although Lennon actually said writing about music is like ‘talking about lovemaking’ – Lennon used a different word – ‘who wants to talk about it?’.

Well: over the millennia of oral and literary history, quite a large percentage of humanity want to talk, and write, about music. If it really were the acme of intellectual and expressive redundancy, why on earth is there so much of it, from the Ancient Greeks to 19th-century memoirs and 21st-century revisionist histories, from Plato’s theory of music and society to Hector Berlioz’s memoirs and Pierre Boulez’s essays?

It’s because writing has the power to change how you imagine music, even and especially pieces and songs and performance you thought you knew, whether it’s a line in a novel or a poem, a phrase that sparks an idea that latches into your listening – or this paragraph, by Jackie Kay, on the blues of Bessie Smith:

Writing can be the light on the waves that allows us to perceive the thing itself

‘Bessie Smith’s raw, unplugged voice dragged you right down to a place you had never been. It seemed to drag you down to the depths of yourself. Her voice carried a kind of knowing that made you feel this woman knew everything about life and was not frightened of any of it… Her voice made me want to be her.’ Writing can be the light on the waves that allows us to perceive the thing itself – the music – in different ways.

And that difference is the point. Writing about music isn’t trying to be music – it’s writing, just as a ballet about architecture is still a dance. And without difference, without metaphor, without language standing for other phenomena in the world – trees, birds, friendship, politics, oceanic trenches and asteroid belts – we wouldn’t be able to talk about anything, ever. To suggest that dancing about architecture or writing about music are pointless exercises is basically to say there’s no point representing any phenomenon in any other medium: – which would mean the end of all artmaking, the end of all conversation, and the end of all creativity.

So we should all keep doing it: what writers, philosophers and composers from Plato to Margaret Fuller, from Claude Debussy to Rose Tremain have been doing over the aeons and are still doing today, relishing the creative spaces, differences and possibilities of writing about music.