Is writing about music something of a conceit? Liverpool University music professor Michael Spitzer, with self-parodying humour, says it is — “as absurd an activity as dancing about architecture”. The analogy can be attributed to zany rockers Elvis Costello or Frank Zappa, but has its roots in poet-philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe likening music to liquid architecture. Not being able to play an instrument, I take heart from Spitzer’s reassurance that “music writers succeed if they manage to communicate a bit of what it feels like to listen to music”. So please read on.
Humans are musical beings.
Archaeologists date the first instruments, pipe-like flutes made of bone, 43,000 years ago. Anthropologists believe rudimentary music-making — drumming and vocalisation — facilitated social inclination among even earlier Homo sapiens. The naturalist philosopher Charles Nussbaum theorises back to our evolutionary origins: music’s immersive sensations mimic the rhythmic, enveloping environment of the ocean. So we hear music, but we also remember somatically; wired into our brain architecture and embedded in the body’s cellular patterns, music is a biological echo of where we came from.
Woven into the physical, mental and spiritual human condition, it’s no wonder music stirs us. It becalms, energises, inspires, angers, gives us courage, makes us feel virtuous and connected, or vulnerable and lonely. It’s a language of love in an estimated 100-million songs, or, like Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, a summoning to war. Music, as an expression of imagination and a portal to understand our minds, liberates any and all emotions. Music lets us feel what’s in our hearts.
Indeed, while audiophiles can spend enormous sums of money on sound systems, most musicians and music lovers are drawn to this feel, the emotional core, of music’s language. Music’s heart-and-soul essence is why Beethoven, steadily becoming deaf from the age of 28, was able to compose works among the masterpieces of music’s Western canon. It’s also why nothing beats the thrill of live performance, beautifully captured in a passage in Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know. Describing a jazz band playing in a bar, the music has “a whirling counterpoint of trumpet, trombone and clarinet, the elephantine tread of the euphonium and … the syncopated choppy clinking of the banjo, four different but related chords to each bar as the banjoist’s left hand flashed up and down the frets”.
It’s a different instrument, and rather than jazz, ragtime as its musical precursor, but McEwan’s paragraph evokes an acted performance by Fats Waller of his 1929 song Ain’t Misbehavin’. Waller’s insouciant showmanship was inseparable from his musical genius, and ragtime, as cultural expression, was an assertion of Black identity — of freedom, spiritedness, and the rejection of discriminatory boundaries and laws. Music follows this protest arc across time and place. On the surface, Pata Pata is nothing more than a happy, catchy song; actually, Miriam Makeba’s defiant joyfulness spurred a 1960s generation of Westerners to rethink attitudes, and, as Mama Africa, she helped inspire a continent’s independence movement.
But if music moves us, true appreciation requires taking it seriously. The simple, resounding choral crescendo of the finale to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 is instantly recognisable, but its deeper emotional power lies in knowing Beethoven’s inspiration: Friedrich Schiller’s poem Ode to Joy, celebrating divine love, humankind’s unity, nature, and life itself. Understood as a quest to kindle an Elysium-like bliss on Earth, the music transforms from exuberant to stirringly joyous. Is there a more searingly grieving song than Eric Clapton’s hymn-like Tears in Heaven? The tune’s major-to-minor transitions tug at heartstrings; realising the lyrics’ context — his four-year-old son falling from their 53rd-floor New York apartment — triggers tears, every time.
Sometimes words are superfluous. In a similar register of distilled sorrow, the 75 seconds of Bryce Dessner’s Song for Ainola make you want to lie down and weep, the mournful depth of the cello like the purest bittersweet ache.
Musicians are our social conscience, and they express our rage, too. Beautiful veins and bloodshot eyes / Why’d you have to go and let it die?” sings Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, slating the scourge of drug addiction, partly responsible for the death of his friend, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. The unaccompanied acoustic guitar melody in Let It Die is slow, hauntingly beautiful, building to pulsing hard rock before ending in Grohl’s searing, condemnatory screech.
It’s probably apocryphal, but Björk is credited with saying that the most powerful thing is that which lies slumbering in the silence. So anger, revolt or confusion are also expressed in music’s pauses. The joke is on you / This place is a zoo / You’re right, it’s true, sing The Strokes in Hard to Explain, the relentless snare drum rhythm and dissonant harmonies suddenly stopping in a four-second silence. The juxtaposition spikes the 2001 song’s insistence: pick a side, it demands, in the new millennium’s culture clash.
“The four most famous notes in music are in the opening bar of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” says erstwhile Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra violinist Dilys O’Driscoll. “Da-da-da-DUM! And then there’s a rest, a pause. It wouldn’t be that dramatic, almost menacing, without that silence.”
That opening bar has become a motif for the knock of Fate at the door, and there’s a shadow over the fate of music itself. The Anthropocene is changing our relationship with nature; we are losing our instinct and ability to relate to fractal patterns, including sounds, in the natural world. Simultaneously, technology is subsuming music, spreading AI’s mindless mimics throughout our built spaces. The machines are winning, and, warns Spitzer, we risk becoming “musical posthumans”.
So, if you care about humankind, care about music. Listen.
