So let’s start here: at the point where I frankly admit I'm taking up a dubious rhetorical task, writing about music. And that happens to be the same point where I claim that a lot of familiar, convenient, inevitable "dancing about architecture" metaphors folks use to explain this misguided chore are a good bit more quaint that they immediately appear. I'm writing about traditional Irish music specifically - but pick any genre, talk to someone who plays it, and they'll give you a pretty good sense of why writing about any kind of music is actually more like miming a performance of an unauthorized Portuguese translation of the Bhagavad Gita.
After all, there's no isolated, "pure" form of music you can compare things too; music only exists in artistic and cultural ore. So whether it's traditional Irish music, classical, Jazz, electronica, or Indonesian nose flute you're writing about, making a narrative out of music can never be "simple" process of fumbling together a one-to-one relationship between two distinct art forms. Any writer crazed/misguided/drunk enough to try this inevitably runs up against the fact that any form of music, just below its Wikipedia-entry surface, is a natural alloy: music is an art form wrapped up in social institution that hooked up with a personal addiction after going on a date with a cultural institution while cheating on a subculture. Good luck making rhetorical matchups. Hell, I'm a paragraph deep and I'm already running out of fancy nouns. What am I going to do if I start trying to describe the politics of dating on the Irish session scene?
Strangely, I'm undeterred. I just keep repeating to myself a well-establish dictum that's guided many musicians and writers alike through similar creative straits:
"Why the fuck not?"
In the spirit of that statement, I ask for forgiveness in advance.
After all, there's no isolated, "pure" form of music you can compare things too; music only exists in artistic and cultural ore. So whether it's traditional Irish music, classical, Jazz, electronica, or Indonesian nose flute you're writing about, making a narrative out of music can never be "simple" process of fumbling together a one-to-one relationship between two distinct art forms. Any writer crazed/misguided/drunk enough to try this inevitably runs up against the fact that any form of music, just below its Wikipedia-entry surface, is a natural alloy: music is an art form wrapped up in social institution that hooked up with a personal addiction after going on a date with a cultural institution while cheating on a subculture. Good luck making rhetorical matchups. Hell, I'm a paragraph deep and I'm already running out of fancy nouns. What am I going to do if I start trying to describe the politics of dating on the Irish session scene?
Strangely, I'm undeterred. I just keep repeating to myself a well-establish dictum that's guided many musicians and writers alike through similar creative straits:
"Why the fuck not?"
In the spirit of that statement, I ask for forgiveness in advance.
ahem, what politics? ;)
ReplyDelete