Apropos the recent inter-weblog skirmish on writing about music (here, and here), New Yorker music critic and weblogger Alex Ross of The Rest Is Noise writes:
I have to admit I never got that old "dancing about architecture" joke, which has been attributed variously to Schopenhauer, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Snuffleupagus. Why is music more difficult to write about than any other art form? [...] Here is my choice aphorism: writing about music is like writing.
While I suspect that in writing the above Alex was being just a teensy-weensy bit, um, ironically cavalier, I'll respond by simply remarking that, as skilled a writer on music as Alex is, he surely can't imagine that his prose, even at its most lapidary and eloquent, can capture even a minim of the essential character of a piece of music which merely a single hearing of the music itself would afford but a casual listener. Alone of the arts, music addresses and speaks directly to the center of feeling, bypassing altogether, and with no need of the interposition of, the intellectual faculty. For one to imagine that one could capture and transmit even the smallest part of the essential character of such a thing through the agency of a medium that requires the fullest interposition of the intellectual faculty to even begin to comprehend is, well, unimaginable.
On The Road To Prohibition
