The Challenge of Writing About Sound: Putting Music Into Words
As both a cellist and a writer, I experience a particular challenge every time I sit down to describe a piece of music: how do you use words for something that's written in notes? The interpretation of music is so ephemeral that it's hard to find words for it sometimes. It's like trying to explain a color to someone who hasn't seen it before. You can compare blue to the sky (sometimes!) but can you really describe the experience of seeing it?
Music writing walks a fine line between technical jargon and subjective interpretation. Go too far toward the analytical—"the dominant seventh resolves to the tonic in measure 47"—and you might as well be hitting the off switch with readers who haven't studied music theory. Rely too heavily on flowery metaphors—"the melody danced like butterflies in a summer garden"—and you risk sounding cringe-making.
The best music writers solve this problem not by avoiding it, but by finding the words for it. They understand that their job isn't to replicate the listening experience in words, but to make listeners want to open up their streaming services.
Some books manage to do this so successfully that they send you straight to your music library. John Eliot Gardiner's Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven makes Bach's cantatas feel like living, breathing experiences rather than something out of a stuffy concert hall. Gardiner places the reader in the composer's mindset, bring in theology and culture and literature that might have been in Bach's mind as he worked on his music. Gardiner's verbal depictions of Bach's cantatas aren't the waffling of some dilettante, but the heartfelt impressions of a scholar-performer who knows them inside out.
Edward Dusinberre takes a different approach in Beethoven for a Later Age: The Journey of a String Quartet As the first violinist of the Takács Quartet, he writes from inside the music-making process, giving us a window into how chamber music becomes a conversation between four individuals who must also be as musically unified as it's possible to be. His description of working through Beethoven's quartets shows the reader the (sometimes painful) human negotiations, the moments of frustration, and the sense of history and importance that keep quartets coming back again and again to Beethoven. Even if you've listened to them before, this book makes you listen as with new ears.
Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts proves that classical music isn't just for old people. Based on a series of televised lessons Bernstein gave in 1958, this book fills even the most jaded reader with a new sense of joy and excitement about music. I particularly love the chapter on music with a sense of humor.
What these writers share is an understanding that writing about music is, in a strange way, an act of translation. We don't always understand music on first hearing, but really good descriptive writing about music prepares us for it by pointing out what to listen for. The best writing about music makes you want to grab your phone and start listening before you've even finished the book!
As I continue working on my own music writing, I try to keep these models in mind. Every time I try to verbalize the shape of a phrase in a lesson with one of my college students, or demonstrate how we use specific techniques as brushstrokes of a great work of art, I ask myself what one of these great authors would have to say about it. If ever we were in any doubt about the importance of classical music, books like these ones remind us of the excitement and joy it's possible to feel.
Music writing walks a fine line between technical jargon and subjective interpretation. Go too far toward the analytical—"the dominant seventh resolves to the tonic in measure 47"—and you might as well be hitting the off switch with readers who haven't studied music theory. Rely too heavily on flowery metaphors—"the melody danced like butterflies in a summer garden"—and you risk sounding cringe-making.
The best music writers solve this problem not by avoiding it, but by finding the words for it. They understand that their job isn't to replicate the listening experience in words, but to make listeners want to open up their streaming services.
Some books manage to do this so successfully that they send you straight to your music library. John Eliot Gardiner's Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven makes Bach's cantatas feel like living, breathing experiences rather than something out of a stuffy concert hall. Gardiner places the reader in the composer's mindset, bring in theology and culture and literature that might have been in Bach's mind as he worked on his music. Gardiner's verbal depictions of Bach's cantatas aren't the waffling of some dilettante, but the heartfelt impressions of a scholar-performer who knows them inside out.
Edward Dusinberre takes a different approach in Beethoven for a Later Age: The Journey of a String Quartet As the first violinist of the Takács Quartet, he writes from inside the music-making process, giving us a window into how chamber music becomes a conversation between four individuals who must also be as musically unified as it's possible to be. His description of working through Beethoven's quartets shows the reader the (sometimes painful) human negotiations, the moments of frustration, and the sense of history and importance that keep quartets coming back again and again to Beethoven. Even if you've listened to them before, this book makes you listen as with new ears.
Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts proves that classical music isn't just for old people. Based on a series of televised lessons Bernstein gave in 1958, this book fills even the most jaded reader with a new sense of joy and excitement about music. I particularly love the chapter on music with a sense of humor.What these writers share is an understanding that writing about music is, in a strange way, an act of translation. We don't always understand music on first hearing, but really good descriptive writing about music prepares us for it by pointing out what to listen for. The best writing about music makes you want to grab your phone and start listening before you've even finished the book!
As I continue working on my own music writing, I try to keep these models in mind. Every time I try to verbalize the shape of a phrase in a lesson with one of my college students, or demonstrate how we use specific techniques as brushstrokes of a great work of art, I ask myself what one of these great authors would have to say about it. If ever we were in any doubt about the importance of classical music, books like these ones remind us of the excitement and joy it's possible to feel.
No comments have been added yet.
