So I haven't yet gotten around to writing up Arthur Phillips' Prague (the next book club book may have come and gone by then--eep!), but in the meantime I should share an article that MTL passed along: Dancing About Architecture. In it, Phillips muses about how to approach music through writing.
I like his points about the risks of inserting music into narrative, particularly the idea that "the author is betting on a shared musical vocabulary, an occasionally dangerous wager." It gets a little too meta at times, but he does it charmingly enough. I'm looking forward to checking out The Song is You.
He also uses the old saying, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." For the record, I would like to note that Dancing About Architecture was the working title of the movie Playing By Heart, which features some of Jon Stewart's finest acting this side of Death to Smoochy. (Okay, so it's actually a very cute, very 90s little romantic comedy. And you're not gonna see Stewart making out like that with, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin on The Daily Show, so I recommend checking it out for the novelty factor.)
2 comments:
Late to the party, I know, but I've always resented the "dancing about architecture" phrase so....
Much of Phillips's essay would be just as applicable had he been addressing literary references to other literature, as opposed to literary references to music.
A description of a character's bookshelf dates as much as a description of a character's CD case (iTunes playlists?). Different readers will have as varied reactions to mentions of book titles as they will to mentions of song titles. The ambiguous meaning of both literary and musical references are equally cleared up by Kundera's more explicit explanations.
There seem to be actual problems with "writing about music" that are distinct to that particular art form. It does have its own jargon, and the average reader of literature is a bit more likely to be familiar with the plot of Madame Bovary than, say, the plot of La Traviata. Phillips's problems are more pedestrian, though.
I'm not a particular fan of the phrase either and see your points, but I think you might be a little hard on Phillips. It looks like he has subject crushes. Whereas Prague is an attempt at sociopolitical fluency, I think The Song is You (and the attendant burst of article-ing) is more about attaining some sort of cultural fluency. I see the article as more of an infatuation with his new idea.
Not the best journalism, no, but in terms of preciousness it's not all that different from other Believer articles.
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