BiblioAddict

On the influence of literature in songwriter Joe Henry’s music, liking and/or not liking music, and Diabolus in musica:

From “Music’s Literary Side” –

I was taken with music at a very young age… Around this time, my older brother Dave slipped me a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. And when he did, the electrical circuit was finally closed. The light came on.

I had always been word-obsessed as a listener, but before Vonnegut, I’d never read any prose I could connect to the music I heard, that played on both words and form with such deliberate and irreverent purpose. Yet right there in the first chapter, Vonnegut reveals the beginning and end of his tale and gives nothing away. He places the past, present and future all in the same room and defeats time as a reliable voice of reason and judgment. He identifies himself, The Writer, as a marginal character in the story, thereby removing himself from it completely. He is the singer, not the song, and the tune is singing him. He is free.

And somehow I was liberated as well. Vonnegut allowed me to see consciously what the songs had been saying to me obliquely: that I could say “I” and mean another; that I was free to adopt another’s point of view; that I could construct a narrative without occupying the center of it. I needn’t worry about blurring the distinction between the real and imagined since no song is ever made more meaningful simply by virtue of being true. Emotional resonance gives a song its “truth,” and it has nothing to do with literal honesty, since all art is at its core an articulation of a single impulse: to affirm life’s timeless and fractured beauty in the face of mortality.

Lately I’ve been very interested in conversations on music. More specifically, how people listen to music, why they’re touched by a particular kind of music or song, and why people of every culture seem compelled to create and listen to it. Reading This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin may have something to do with this newfound interest, but I’m pretty sure the seeds of my growing fascination with the ‘why’ of music were planted nearly six years ago when a professor for whom I was working as a student assistant complained, “I don’t like music.”

I paused for a moment, then considered the radio which I’d turned to a popular R&B station. “You mean, you don’t like R&B music?” I asked.

“No,” she clarified. “I don’t like music.”

I was dumbstruck. Call me crazy, but I had been under the impression that everybody liked music. We may disagree on what constitutes good music, but I had never met anyone who didn’t like music – period. Not at least one song? What kind of cold-hearted, unfeeling person doesn’t like music, I wondered. It was unfair, maybe. But I thought it, nonetheless.

I never looked at her the same way again. In fact, I’m still convinced that she was mistaken, and that maybe by some fluke of chance, in all of the forty years of her life, she just never came across the right kind of music that had the power to move her. Or, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe This Is Your Brain on Music will teach me there are just some people in the world who remain untouched by the harmonious combination of sounds. If they exist, I feel for them.

A couple of interesting facts on how the church and music sometimes just can’t get along:

The Catholic Church banned music that contained polyphony (more than one music part playing at one time), fearing that it would cause people to doubt the unity of God. The church also banned the music interval of an augmented fourth, the distance between C and F-sharp also known as a tritone (the interval in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story when Tony sings the name “Maria.”). This interval was considered so dissonant that it must have been the work of Lucifer, and so the church named it Diabolus in musica.