"Writing about music
is like dancing about architecture." — Elvis Costello
Music is essentially mysterious. Talking about it makes you
sound like an idiot. Yet here we are, day after day, night after night, arguing
about our favorite bands and our favorite songs, analyzing why this song sucks
and why that guy's a genius. In chat rooms, on telephones, in bar rooms, on
talk shows, and in esteemed publications like this one we never tire of
grasping for the right words to capture the ungraspable experience of music.
Songs are catapults and there we are, feet off the ground, flying through the
air, awash in waves of sound and sense, tears welling up, fists clenched in righteous
assertion with the truth of this song, this moment, this emotional ecstasy,
this transcendent eternity – and then we have to muck it up by trying to talk
about it. We just can't help ourselves.
The Quakers
don't talk much. They haven't wasted a lot of time developing a theology or a
creed. They don't have a professional clergy or any real hierarchy. They don't
tell each other what to think. They're much too smart for that. The emphasis is
on the individual experience of God, or Spirit. When Quakers gather together in
church each Sunday, they sit in silence. There is no sermon. If someone wants
to stand and speak they can, with this caveat in mind: speak only if you can
improve upon the silence. Many times, an entire service passes without a word.
But everything has its counterpoint.
After the inhalation of silence comes the exhalation of expression. After all,
we can't stay silent forever. "After silence, that which comes nearest to
expressing the inexpressible is Music."
— Aldous
Huxley
—
Music rises
out of the silence like dawn rises out of the darkness. And the best music is
never fancy or busy or clogged with pointless ornamentation. The best music is
simple and direct and honest because it trusts the silence. Maybe the Quakers
can help us scour the banality and insignificance from our songwriting and
performance: do not sing unless you can improve upon the silence. Drawing from
the depths of silence, we dare now to speak and to sing, not of the fancies and
follies of our own darkness, but of the timeless universal truths that surge up
in us like fountain-streams.
"Now I have learned to
listen to silence. To hear its choirs singing the song of ages, chanting the
hymns of space, and disclosing the secrets of eternity."
— Khalil
Gibran
—
When we
emerge from these solitary depth experiences we feel the countervailing pull of
communion. Like scattered stars we gravitate together into galaxies that inform
and define us. We need each other. Even the Quakers meditate together in
groups. We grab our guitars and gather in rooms, around dinner tables, in
cafes, or on stages, and we speak the blurry language of our hearts. We weave
our songs from the threads of the One Song (uni: one; verse: song), and mixed
through the weave are threads of our dreams and nightmares. We exorcise our
demons. We tread with angels. We sanctify the beauties. We eulogize the
passings. We praise in song the courage of those who love without fear. We
break the unbroken silence with our shimmering strings, the golden peals of our
horns, and the reverie of our radiant voices and with language and rhythm we
carve the uncarved whole of the universe into songs that carry us over the
endless sea of our lives like ships pressed on by a sacred wind, lifted on the
shoulders of innumerable waves, unmoored forever over an infinite depth.
Without our songs we would surely drown and never reach safe harbor.
Music is
like a crow bar – it pries us open. It slips past the security guard, crawls
under the gate, navigates the twists and turns of the labyrinth of our
pain-drunk consciousness, grabs us by the collar, and drags us squinting and
blinking out into the sun. Here in the open we unfurl like a flag and finally
feel the depths of our own belonging, our own value, our own beauty. A good song
burns away all the lies the way sunlight burns away shadows – all the lies our
pain tricks us into believing – that we're forlorn and alone, that it's
hopeless, that we don't matter, that nothing matters. Music takes us back to
our original state – oneness with the nameless, sacred source from which we and
all things come. Our boundaries dissolve and we rejoin boundless Reality.
Then the
song ends and the show is over and we pack our instruments and head home. We
got some of it right. We got some of it wrong. We try to talk about the music –
what worked, what didn't work, and why. Like dogs chasing our tails, we never
really get close to the truth, no matter how clever our words, no matter how
immediate our insights. I mean, we were standing right there. But it's gone.
The truth was in the song. It passed between us like a ghost, ungraspable and
fleeting, a shimmer of eternity in the river of time. There's nothing we can do
to bring it back or frame it or explain it. Music is its own language, its own
reality, its own realm. Music rubs up against our reality and leaves its scent
on us. There's nothing to say. Because talking about music is like dancing
about architecture.
Peter Bolland is a professor of philosophy and humanities at
Southwestern College and singer-songwriter-guitarist of the Coyote Problem. You
can complain to him about what you read here at peterbolland@cox.net.
www.thecoyoteproblem.com is the ethereal home of the Coyote Problem.