Welcome to the blog for Note Perfect Notes, a classical music program note service. Here we discuss concert music (also known as “classical” music) and various aspects of writing about music.
If you’d like to see some of our program notes, or contract for our services, go to www.noteperfectnotes.com.
You’ve no doubt heard the oft quoted line “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” attributed to Laurie Anderson, Martin Mull (!), and many others. (See http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/ for an interesting discussion of the origins of this quote.)
The whole issue of writing about music is, admittedly, a little strange. The point of music is to communicate something that can’t be talked about. Composer Ellen Zwillich once said “if I could explain it in words, I wouldn’t have to write music.” I certainly agree with this. But if we want to understand how and why a particular piece of music came to be written, if we want to probe deeper into what music “means” (and, for that matter, what we mean by “what music ‘means’”) we have to resort to words.
In a way, it’s like talking about God. We’re not capable of really understanding what God is; Maimonides says we can only talk about what God isn’t. And at some point, words fail us.
But words are all we have, realizing there are limits to their usefulness here. At some point, you need to just shut up amd play the music. As one of the great musical sages of our time, Peter Schickele says, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that je ne sais pas.”
