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Monday, October 8, 2018

Ineffable

Ineffability is a literary trope, so the ineffability of music is also a literary trope. The idea that music is something you cannot really talk about, or shouldn't talk or write about, runs through music criticism, writing about music or "dancing about architecture."  What is the point of it? 

Barthes talks about the tyranny of the adjective:  "To ascertain whether there are (verbal) means for talking about music without adjectives, it would be necessary to look at more or less the whole of music criticism, something which I believe has never been done."  Rosen says that musical analysis should "state the obvious." But then what is it good for, really?  

I happen to like adjectives, by the way. See my recent "dream of adjectives."   

We can talk in very precise terms about music, but then we are repeating the score: the melody begins with an octave leaps... It would be like expecting a very precise verbal description of a map to be useful for reading the map, or as good as a map at what a map does. We would just say, show me the map. Or we could play the score and say: "this is what it is." Music is very precise in its emotional valences. It says exactly what it says, in its own language, so we don't need a verbal translation of that. 



Yet I don't see writing about music as particularly problematic. What you do is to talk about what needs talking about, in any given case. Do you need to describe a texture, point out a structural feature, generalize about a performer? What I don't like is talking about music in the wrong way. The first wrong way is not talking about it at all, so that you talk about everything except the music: the words of the song, the composer's life... The second is to over-interpret, to state things that the listener is not hearing, that are not "obvious" or palpable in some way. 

I don't share the "ekphrastic fear" (W.J.T. Mitchell as quoted by Kramer in "Oracular Musicology; or, Faking the Ineffable." The idea that language will destroy the immediacy of the thing itself. What makes me nervous is that the verbal meanings found will be "wretched ones," simple disappointments. I fear the bad paraphrase.       

  


9 comments:

Vance Maverick said...

Got some examples of good music writing? My fixed star in this regard has been Rosen's The Classical Style, but it's now a long time since I read it. It certainly taught me a lot.

Jonathan said...

I do love Rosen. And I like Alex Ross of the New Yorker. That kind of thing.

Vance Maverick said...

But those are not really the same kind of thing, from my point of view. At least, the Rosen of that book is far more technically engaged than Ross has ever been.

I actually find Ross glib as a writer. I share most of his interests and I think some of his taste, but that doesn't mean I get much out of the pieces. While The Classical Style changed my life.

Jonathan said...

I know that, but I couldn't ever do what Rosen does in that book. What I enjoy of him are non technical writings in the NYRB.

I think that glibness is more my style. What I mean, non-facetiously, is a way of talking about music that people can understand without technical expertise. I think I could use that and combine it with my "academic" voice as literary critic.

el curioso impertinente said...

Perhaps it would be instructive to separate "writing about music" into musical analysis and musical interpretation.

Music specialists know a lot of technical stuff, and can recognize masked structures and patterns. Just listening to a dance suite, I couldn't pick out a sarabande from a gavotte or a courante. Listening to a piano sonata, I couldn't tell where an opening theme had later been inverted. But I can do the analogous things in literature.

Musical interpretation is where things get tricky, because music is notes and not words. You could say it's abstract, or that it's ineffable. But look at the bad rep. literary interpretation gets in many quarters, for a variety of reasons. But ultimately it doesn't seem like such an outlandish notion, because you're dealing in the same medium--words.

Imagine writing a piece of music not as a setting for a poem but as one's literary criticism of it.

Jonathan said...

A lot of the dance movements are simply distinguished by tempo and rhythm. You could probably teach yourself that just by listening a bit and seeing how one sarabande resembles another.

We have the "heresy of paraphrase" (Brooks) which is the closest you get to the idea that literary criticism cannot state the meaning of a poem without simply repeating the words of the poem. In practice, however, paraphrase turned out to the standard new critical practice despite the centrality of "the heresy of paraphrase" as New Critical doctrine. The you have Sontag's "Against Interpretation" which turns out to be a denunciation of -ist ir -Ian readings, the critical strip-mining of literature for meanings that can be translated into theoretical metalanguages.

Vance Maverick said...

Analysis and interpretation are elements of any writing about art -- I get the distinction, but they're hard to isolate. Even extremely casually written reviews usually try to say something factual about the art to support their interpretations. And even super-dry accounts of Schoenberg's pitch-class manipulations usually try to suggest why their facts matter.

That Rosen book is deep, I think, in both dimensions. For example, he gives an illuminating account of the aesthetic value of generic or boilerplate material in the Classical period. (Even if you're not musical, you'll recognize this sort of stuff -- trumpet and drum, scales, repeated chords, including the irritating conventions of the ending.) Rosen describes this material lucidly from a technical point of view, and gives a plausible picture of what it does for us as we listen.

He also writes well -- for example, he says of that generic style or mode, "Like bread, it cannot cloy." This phrase has stuck with me for a long time. Not that it's simply true (even bread can cloy!) but it precipitates the perception.

Jonathan said...

What's good about that book (among other things) is his distinction between the conventional backdrop of the practice and the particular innovations of Mozart, Hadyn, and Beethoven. I think most people just here it as classical music and don't make the distinction.

I'm going to have to give it another try. When I first tried to read it I didn't have enough keyboard skill to play through some of the examples or the patience to listen to everything he analyzes as I'm reading.

Vance Maverick said...

That Google Books link sent me back to the Mozart piano concerto K. 503, which really is an apotheosis of that generic material.