The Wit's Guide to Music

Or, feeling vs. thinking

Ye Olde Flute n’ Lute, Dutch (Utrecht Caravaggist) Painter, 17th century 

Listen: Do you hear music or do you feel it? When Zora Neale Hurston attended a jazz cabaret, the sounds overtook her like a demonic possession:

“It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen[s]—follow them exultingly.”

In the same audience, she wrote in “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” was a white man who mildly remarked, “Good music they have here.” 

“He has only heard what I felt,” she thought, and his response brings to mind Samuel Johnson’s verdict:

 “Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.”

Though Dr. Johnson also called music the only sensual pleasure without vice, so he could clearly feel it too. So what exactly do you feel? In his essay on the philosophy of pop, Mark Greif describes how country music is consolation, rock is freedom, and rap is victory — all experiences that get up in your feelings.

 “You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.”
— Rebecca West

But does that negate an intellectual response to music? If you really listen to music and think it through, you might forget to feel it and hence summon the widely attributed line that writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

“Some people don’t dance if they don’t know who’s singing
Why ask your head? It’s your hips that are swinging.”
— Shirley Bassey, on “History Repeating” by The Propellerheads

To avoid this trap, we need a Great Wit who both thinks and feels the tunes. And so we look not to the musicians but to the person at whom they’re looking. That person, for a good chunk of the twentieth century, was Sir Thomas Beecham, the preeminent British conductor of his day. Or as he put it: “I am not the greatest conductor in this country. On the other hand I’m better than any damned foreigner.”

Beecham issued a raft of clever observations about music and the people who made it, starting with this guidance to his orchestras:

“The world is a difficult world indeed,
And people are hard to suit,
And the man who plays on the violin
Is a bore to the man with the flute.”

Beecham knew his musicians, his public, and the music that came between them. He had strong opinions but stronger feelings, and believed that: 

“The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought.”

His ultra of ultras was Mozart, and he mused that if he were a dictator, he would “make it compulsory for every member of the population between the ages of four and eighty to listen to Mozart for at least one-quarter of an hour daily for the coming five years.”  Everyone else came up short: Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was “like a lot of yaks jumping about,” Bach was “too much counterpoint — and what is worse, Protestant counterpoint,” Brahms an “old bore.” He defined the trombone as a “sluice-pump,” the harpsichord as “a birdcage played with a toasting fork,” and the upright piano as “a musical growth found adhering to the walls of most semi-detached homes in the provinces.” (Ouch!)

By understanding his audiences, he put his baton on the difference between musical thought and feeling:

“The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.”

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Quote Vote

Bookworm vs. social butterfly? Last week, a songbird swallowed them both. I speak of course of the Quote Vote, this weekly exercise through which you help me create the Complete Wit’s Guide To Life.

The runoff began with Reading vs. Parties, a classic introvert vs. extrovert showdown. Reading pulled ahead which makes sense: Everyone here can read, but can you all party? Then, like a clarion call from on high with kettle drums from on low, Music surged to the forefront with 24% of the Quote Vote to Reading’s 22%.

Does this call for electoral reform? Maybe! But it also tricked me into preparing the Wit’s Guide to Reading, which will land in your inbox next week with a brand new Quote Vote.

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Speaking of…

Today’s Hits

Everything rhymes with Billie Eilish

Yesterday’s Favorites

The wit of jazz, and vice versa

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Most amps go to 10, but Get Wit Quick goes all the way to No. 170. If you experience constriction of the thorax and splitting of the heart, consult a physician. If you don’t know all the words to Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, just hum along. Speakerboxxx/The ❤️  Below