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Can you describe how your favourite piece of music makes you feel? Steven Boykey Sidley tells of the torturous process of putting those feelings into words - and making people believe them.
Can you accurately describe how your favourite piece of music makes you feel?
I have battled all of my life with an inextinguishable frustration. Someone will ask me to listen to a piece of music that has quickened their hearts and I think, God, what a piece of harmony-challenged, toneless, repetitive, derivative rubbish. Sometimes I am even moved to express my opinion, never with good results.
Conversely I will be moved to tears and cheers by my own musical choices, unable to make the obvious case that my selections are simply better than their dull offerings, a fact that I know with the conviction of the devout. If my music is so axiomatically better, why cannot I not make them hear?
What fails me is words.
And this the nub of the matter. If it is hard to explain emotive response to melody, harmony and rhythm to someone, then it is just as hard to write about it (forget lyrics for the moment - a very different and wriggly can of worms ). Writing about music, not the shiny surface of it but the depths of a why choice of a F# rather than an F against a given chord raises gooseflesh, is a rarefied challenge. Rather like trying to explain painting to a blind man. Or perhaps, more pointedly, trying to write a fittingly climactic description of an orgasm. There is an award for bad sex writing, perhaps there should be one for bad music writing.
If it is hard to explain emotive response to melody, harmony and rhythm to someone, then it is just as hard to write about it.
As a novelist and long-time jazz saxophonist (not a great one, but capable of an occasionally pretty solo), I recently found myself at the writing end of music, armed only with the suddenly paltry tools of words to substitute for the real thing.
When I was barely out of my teens, I wrote an unduly smug letter-to-the-editor complaining about their music critic, who spent the bulk of his reviews describing ambience, audience reaction, musician’s clobber, facial expressions and playlist. Everything but what actually emerged from their instruments. The critic resigned from his post on publication of my letter, presumably humiliated beyond bearing. I still feel shame (my letter was a masterpiece of insult and youthful incivility). I now realise, that part of the critic’s difficulty is that it is unbelievably hard to describe musical performance with anything approaching veracity. Writing is to be read, music is to be heard. Mixing the two is generally a fool's errand.
But not completely. Richard Powers, in his wonderful 2003 novel, The Time of Our Singing, merges genres to an extent that is astonishing, I could clearly hear the music as described, and felt the hairs rise on my back during a solo vocal Bach performance by a young teenager. Ian McEwan also did a wonderful job in his novel, Amsterdam (and a short section in Saturday). I am sure there are others, but they are hopelessly outweighed by ham-fisted, vocab-challenged and tone-deaf attempts to describe the thing, the gestalt, the sacred core - whatever it is that pulls us from the ordinary everyday to the extraordinary few moments that we we hear, metaphorically, the voice of God.
Perhaps the writer should stay within the boundaries of his craft, and not trespass on other arts. But in this art-of-word, as in all other arts, boundaries are there to be breached. So we blunder in and hope that the reader hears the sounds we write.
Steven’s novel, Imperfect Solo, is published by Blue Mark Books and available from Amazon.
By Steven Boykey Sidley
Twitter: @stevensidley
Why did I just know by reading the first two paragraphs that this was written by a man? 
(hadn't read who the blogger was)
It would be useful for the author to give us an example of the merging of the genres.
Otherwise, I have no idea what is meant. 
Wrong blasted thread! Sorry folks
That's OK, POGS, your post made just as much sense as the OP
And I speak as someone with two professional musicians in the family 
Jalima
The OP was a tad high brow for me , glad to know I am not alone.
Sorry Mr Steven Boykey Sidley, absolutely no offence intended , forgive my intrusion.
DD maybe would make sense of it but I doubt that she goes on GN
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