catapult magazine

grant and i have been having an e-discussion about music and history, and various related topics that we thought might be interesting to some cino readers, so we decided to post the conversation here. Of course everyone is welcome to join in.

Two additional random thoughts:

I took a intellectual development class. We discussed how the mind develops, and studies have been done on young infants to see how their minds are developing. Interestingly, infants are able to hear differences in phonemes (sounds) of foreign languages that the adult ear cannot hear, unless they were raised hearing the language. The ear gets trained to hear a certain way, and it “closes” itself to foreign phonemes. In another study, researchers found that infants seem to be able to identify mistakes played in music of all kinds, while the adult ear does not pick up on mistakes in music of foreign cultures. This study has been used to suggest that infants’ ears are innately tuned and that there is perhaps the possibility of some basic objective standards for music. At any rate I found the study quite thought-provoking.

I was reading an interview with Bono recently and he said it was uncanny how songs sometimes come to him. They have a life of their own, before their written down or performed. A lot of writers seem to say that their writing is shaped, almost as though they have a life of their own and refuse to cooperate in some endeavors. Artists report similar experiences. I think Michelangelo said he viewed his task as sculptor to free the sculpture from the rock. The Greeks spoke of a Muse. Sometimes I hear music and think, “Yeah, that’s it. They’re hitting it right on.” The music seems natural, as though it was just waiting for someone to help it come on out. Other times I think they’re missing the mark. It’s a strange premonition.

I like the image of the sculptor freeing the image from the rock. In the same way historians free stories from archives. I guess musicians free songs from their instruments too.

How do historians free stories from archives, and musicians songs from instruments?

Above I said poetry is not considered the clearest conveyor of history. Now I’m wondering if I was mistaken. I ran across this quote from Gadamer in an interview:

Gadamer: Naturally, that is also the reproach I see in critical reviews of my written work—that I am so vague in my expression. Yet the people who write that do not realize how flattered I feel. It is not so terribly easy to speak in such a way that many ideas are awakened in a person without his being hammered on the head.

Question: Do you mean that to express one’s self clearly and distinctly is not necessarily the right way?

Gadamer: Exactly. It may be a cultivated thing to eat with a knife and fork, but that is not the right approach in philosophy.

Perhaps it’s not the best way for historians to free stories from archives either. Music seems to have that quality, of awakening many ideas in a person without hammering them on the head.

Do you think it’s possible to be vague and truthful at the same time? This seems like a question that may be relevant to Grant’s proposal of music as history.

Archives are full of raw material: diaries, records, statistics, legal records, letters, art, maps… The stories aren’t there until someone goes in like a sleuth with a magnifying glass and follows the leads to discover the cool stories. The stone-sculpture metaphor appeals to me because it seems to the artist/historian/musician that the work/story/story is already there, and maybe that’s so, but on the other hand they’re all creators. Not ex nihilo of course.

So, to try and use Grant’s terminology, the spirit’s alive, and the artist/historian needs to listen to it and represent it well/truthfully/honestly through some medium or other (in this case, music). Would this be a fair description?

Where has Grant gone?

thanks guys for picking up the slack while I was gone. I think we’re making progress here. WE all agree that there is an artistic dimension to the writing of history and it sounds like we’re even agreeing that there is an actual story already there for us that is revealed in the work of the historian just as a songwriter gathers the sonic elements of the world and finds the relationships between them that seem to have already been there.

I also wanted to reiterate my point that I’m not speaking of truth as one particular way of seeing events but more as a proper or good way of relating to the past in the present, like ethics, perhaps…although this term is limited. It’s more like a feeling that you’re in the right moment, doing the right thing for that moment—are obedient to that moment. And here is where music comes in again. I am becoming more convinced that music is the very act or exercise of history. The playing of an instrument in an improvisational jazz band is the very activity of history (not the writing of history, but of history itself). The player takes the context of past notes and makes his own contribution at the precise moment necessary to form a “true” note. If he hits a wrong note, he goes against the structure and built-in harmony of the piece. In the same way, history books are either true or false depending on how well they fit into the entire improvisation of the world.

It’s an interesting idea, being obedient to the moment. It seems abstract but may still contain the ring of truth. In that last post, though, it seems like you’re on the level of analogy (“Music is like history”) rather than on the level of actuality (“Music is history”). How would you think of music on the level of actuality? How is music actually history (not as an event but as a communicator of past events)? I still don’t understand quite what you’re doing to music itself, how you’re changing it, though I’m beginning to get a feel for what you’re up to.

It is also interesting that you seem to portray the task of the historian, not as faithful to the past to represent the past as it would want to be represented, but as genuinely creative. The historian is “making his own contribution.” In that contribution, however, there is constraint (“structure and built-in harmony”) as well as creativity.

More Bono quotes to fuel the fire:

“The thing about song lyrics is: with the cadence and the way the melody falls, they can be more articulate than any purely literate response…It’s a funny thing, but when U2 lyrics are written, I don’t write them in English. I write them in what the badn call “Bongelese.” I just sing melodies and the words form in my mouth, later to be deciphered."

“When people are absorbed in the culture, and they’re going out, they’re listening to music, they’re in the clubs, music is just part of their every waking moment, and as a result part of their sleeping times, in their dreams….But that’s where you did all your great work: you did it when you were…unconscious.”

Interviewer: “I don’t know how it is for you, but my best ideas come when I’m about to go to sleep, or when I feel like I have spent my entire day wasting time, or working without thinking, which may amount to the same thing. I go down to buy a paper, and all of a sudden the idea that I was looking for just happens.” Bono: “Yeah, the unconscious…That’s why songwriting by accident is so important, and the getting to the place where that can happen or, as we say, getting to the place where God can walk through the room.”

I’ll add more fuel to the fire by suggesting that this question of whether the song has a life of its own or not has an answer that is relative to the perspective of the questioner. To Bono the song is a living organism and he seems to see himself as the instrument of the song. A sceptic might just say that Bono is weird and lacks the perspective to see that he is the creative force behind the song and not the other way around. Both are true, don’t you think?