Orwell Corollary

 thoughts  No Responses »
Jul 092011
 

I happened to be reading a book by Brian Christian called The Most Human Human 1, which deals a lot with human language, when I wrote that last blog post/rant about the way musicians talk and write about music. In the book, Christian cites a George Orwell essay called Politics and the English Language. I happen to like Orwell, so I checked it out. I found a couple of passages that I thought related to my last post so I thought I’d share.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Orwell is demonstrating how “ugly and inaccurate” language affects politics, but I think it affects the arts as well. By writing thoughtlessly about music, our language becomes less meaningful. Without meaningful language to describe music, we will conceive and thus create thoughtless music. Orwell posits that this kind of writing “consists less and less of WORDS chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of PHRASES tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” (emphasis in original)

He gives five examples of what he calls typical political writing and then lists several common shortfalls demonstrated in the examples. Two of them, “pretentious diction” and “meaningless words” are my biggest pet peeves in arts writing. I won’t copy them here; you can check out the essay for yourself. The underlying issue is that people are just putting these word-Legos together because they fist, not because they make a worthwhile thought.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing, is that it is easy. It is easier–even quicker, once you have the habit–to say IN MY OPINION IT IS A NOT UNJUSTIFIABLE ASSUMPTION THAT than to say I THINK.

See! George agrees with me!

Notes:

  1. The Most Human Human is about an annual computer science competition called the Loebner Prize, in which software developers compete in the Turing Test. Alan Turing proposed the test in 1950 as a standard for evaluating a computer’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior by conversing with a human. Christian discusses what the research involved in developing these chat bots tells us about what it means to be human. ↩

Word Up

 thoughts  2 Responses »
Jul 052011
 

I may have mentioned this before in this space, but I’ll say it again: I like words. I like them a lot. Some people have said and written in the past that music is impossible to describe in words. I would never say that putting important and insightful ideas about music into words is easy, but it’s far from impossible. You’ve probably heard the absurdism “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Alex Ross, whose writings about music are among the best in English today, tackles the issue in the preface to his most recent book, Listen to This.

Certainly, music criticism is a curious and dubious science, its jargon ranging from the wooden (“Beethoven’s Fifth begins with three Gs and an E-flat”) to the purple (“Beethoven’s Fifth begins with fate knocking at the door”). But it is no more dubious than any other kind of criticism. Every art form fights the noose of verbal description. Writing about dance is like singing about architecture; writing about writing is like making buildings about dance.

I fought the urge there to give a longer quote from Ross because his writing is so engaging it can be hard to find a point at which to cut him off. Seriously, you need to get this guy’s writings.

Words

"Magnetic Poetry" by Natalie Roberts (surrealmuse on Flickr)

Anyway, given that writing about the arts is a “curious and dubious science,” I’m prepared to accept many ways of doing things. But please, can we just rein things in a little bit? Don’t use words unless they mean the thing that you mean. I heard a very bright person recently describe a part of a work as being “asynchronous” (not at the same time), when he really meant that it was “asymmetrical” (not the same on both sides). Obviously, this was likely a simple mistake for this guy, and I still have a great deal of intellectual respect for him.

However, composers need to figure out how to talk about their music. I’m as guilty as anyone. In my last post, which I’m embarassed to say was two months ago, I linked to a Michigan Radio story that included an interview of me. When I sat down with the reporter (Jennifer Guerra), I struggled to describe my music to her. In the story, she quipped that my “elevator pitch” could use a bit of work. She was right.

A friend of mine recently described a piece of his on Twitter as being “abstract.” First of all, the artificially-imposed brevity of Twitter can be both a rhetorical blessing and descriptive curse. I understand that it’s not easy to describe a new piece, even without the 140-character restriction. However what could my friend possibly have meant by “abstract”? Was he just trying to tell non-musicians that it’s scary-angsty-dissonant music? If so, is that really the thing you want to squeeze into your 140 characters? Let us assume, for now, that my friend was trying to make his music sound appealing rather than threatening (an assertion which it would be fair to doubt). To me, especially in art, “abstract” means the opposite of “concrete” or “representational.” In this sense, isn’t most music abstract? Surely, Bach was not writing the Goldberg variations to represent sounds heard in nature, right? Of course there is quite an expansive continuum between abstract and representational, but I think most music, especially music that doesn’t use any sampled “found sounds,” falls much closer to the abstract end.

We have to remember that as composers, when we write about our music, our audience has likely never heard it and in some cases never will. When words are all we’ve got (and I think they’re pretty damn good), we have to choose them more carefully. Composers and musicians, how do you describe your music? Is it as big a struggle for you as it seems to me?