Writing About Music

(From When Words Fail, Listen to the Music)

The idea that feelings and thoughts can't go together is a pretty witless one. Every feeling is of or about something, even if we can't say what it is. In any case, music is full of ideas, often deep ones, and it finds ways to make them vividly real.

There's a moment in Monteverdi's Vespers where the words refer to the Trinity. What an unfathomable mystery, that something can be both three and one; but the music brings the mystery before our very ears, making the three vocal parts converge on a single note.

It's not just in sacred music we find this. There's a song by the 14th-century composer Machaut in which the words muse on the circular nature of life. The music finds the perfect way to express the idea of "in my end is my beginning", by having the same vocal line sung both forwards and backwards.

What these have in common is symbolism, something music does very well. What music can't do is the mundane work of language; it can't say "maybe" or "if", it can't do negatives.

There's a comic illustration of this in a Monteverdi madrigal that has the line "not yet has risen the new dawn". He mimics the rising dawn in notes, but he can't do the "not yet", which makes a complete mismatch between words and music.

So music has its weaknesses when it comes to representing ideas. But what if music itself were a kind of philosophy, a way of revealing truths inaccessible to words? Could such an outlandish idea be true?

  ¶ 12/16/2004 05:09:00 PM