Maybe Elvis Costello Is Illiterate...

The other day, I read a quote attributed to Elvis Costello: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do." It's a provocative statement and its ambiguity begs for clarification. Is he discussing the music press, music criticism, or any and all intellectual or spiritual writings about music? And what caused him to say this? Was he upset by a record review? Maybe someone wrote that he pales in comparison to his idols -- "You, sir, are no Burt Bacharach."

[My friend Andy just now pointed out that Costello borrowed this from the original line, "Writing about love is like dancing about architecture," which is perhaps taken from the film Playing by Heart, though the film may have lifted it from somewhere before that.]

The question it raises for me -- and I think the question that really needs to be asked -- is what can be written about music that music itself doesn't already say? As a music-lover and musician I hate to think that music is incapable of speaking for itself. But Costello doesn't elucidate why writing about music is "stupid." Perhaps music communicates via different brain receptors where spoken language does not travel. So what, then, is music designed to say? Well, Leonard Bernstein said, "Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable." A very lofty assertion, but maybe that's where Costello was headed.

Taking into account both Bernstein's and Costello's quotes, if music speaks to the unnameable and unknowable, then where indeed can any intersection exist with verbal discourse? Is it possible that music is too primal, too other that verbal analysis is futile? Reminds me of another quote by either Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, or Fats Waller (maybe all three, and anyway I'm paraphrasing): "If you have to ask [what jazz is], you'll never know." In order to understand music one must (at least as a component of that endeavor) experience music in non-verbal ways. In other words, if you haven't interfaced with music on it's own terms, then any rhetoric to explain it is difficult to comprehend.

That said, I do not intend to say that music is understood the same way by everyone. Yet it is in this very disparity where writing about music is important. After all, even if verbal discourse is not capable of distilling music's elemental truths, the dialectic itself can at least engender each participant's journey toward his or her own potential truth. Therefore, one must I believe give props to a reviewer of Elvis Costello's records even if such (lukewarm?) receptions are the cause of Costello's self-aggrandizing witticism. There are certainly many more maddeningly meaningless and unnecessary jobs out there (how does a "personal life coach" sleep at night with his or her conscience howling at the moon?).

And I would further counter to Costello that beautiful architecture can be very dance-like. Architecture can demonstrate a striking shape, the dramatic movement of contour and line, the delicate details, soft or bold, vast or intimate. Maybe Costello needs to get those oversized glasses of his checked because he may be more blind than he realizes.

What a Responsibility!

Recently I read that babies in utero can hear after the first few months, and that music and other sounds they hear in the womb (the mother's or father's voice, or a particular lullaby, for example) can later be recalled. Reportedly, a crying child was calmed upon hearing the theme song of a soap opera that his mother had previously watched while pregnant with him. I guess the music reminded him of the safety and comfort of the womb, and he was lulled by the music's sentimental connection.

I can't remember the first piece of music I ever heard, but I was born in the fall of 1970, and I can bet my parents listened to the radio back then (and what a time to listen to music!), so perhaps the Jackson 5's "ABC" or "Mama Told Me Not to Come" by Three Dog Night, or maybe "Bridge Over Troubled Water" or "The Long and Winding Road" – those were all playing in the months leading up to my birth. What effect might these songs have had on my early love of music I can only begin to imagine. Music has had a strong presence in my life. I can't imagine my life without it, and it has made so many events in my life more memorable and/or more bearable. The thought that maybe my musical journey began prenatally is fascinating to me.

But what if it had been something else? I mean, what a responsibility! What if my father had decided to blast Charles Ives quarter-tone piano pieces into the womb? Would I have any appreciation for traditional tonal harmony? I shudder to think of the attention deficit issues I might have had if I had been subjected at that impressionable developmental age to Philip Glass!

So what should one play for a prenatal child? Mozart? Children's songs? Songs with logical and beautiful tonic harmonic progressions? Upbeat or contemplative? Aggressive or leisurely? Major or minor? Songs with words or instrumentals?

Musical philosophers throughout history have commented that music has great power on the mind and body. Harmony, mode and key all affect the mental state (see: http://www.wmich.edu/mus-theo/courses/keys.html) . Plato discussed in the book iii of The Republic that certain musical modes were dangerous and ill-fitting for warriors to hear -- the Lydian and mixo-Lydian modes were too dirge-like, that Ionian and Lydian promoted drunkenness and sloth. The Dorian mode, however, was best suited to "fittingly imitate the utterances and the accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare or in any enforced business," and the Phrygian mode ideal for "a man engaged in works of peace, not enforced but voluntary...acting modestly and moderately and acquiescing in the outcome." Certain keys were considered appropriate for operatic dramatis personae not only because of vocal range, but because keys conveyed specific characteristics and therefore used to reinforce particular character traits.

If we accept that there is any truth to these assertions, imagine then the power that an initial piece of music would have on a brain when it first develops. Could this impact the synaptic geography? Would the ears, when first able to sense vibration, be skewed to accept certain aural presentations as the emotional and physical basis from which all other sound is judged? "Mozart's piano sonata in A is all well and good," the child would say, "but it pales in comparative beauty and logic to Billy Ray Cyrus's 'Achey, Breaky Heart.'" ...Yikes!