“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” —Attributed to Martin Mull
Nobody knows who said it first. It has been handed to comedians, rock stars, a jazz pianist, a performance artist. Each time it passes through someone, a word changes. A line about the trouble with translation keeps getting translated.
The joke is clean. Music lives in the ear. Words live somewhere else. Carry one into the other and most of it spills.
I should admit something. Every Sunday I write about art. I take a thing made of paint or clay or wood and try to put it into sentences. By the joke’s logic, I have been dancing about architecture for years.
Here is what the joke leaves out. The man most often credited with it was a painter. He spent his life in two houses. He knew the walls between them were real. That is not the same as saying the walls should keep us out.
And dancers do dance about architecture. They always have. A body enters a room and answers it. It finds the corners. It measures the ceiling with a raised arm. It leans on a wall. It takes the stairs. The dance does not become the building. It shows you the building. You notice the height because someone reached for it.
That is the most writing can do. It cannot carry the music. It cannot hand you the painting. A sentence about blue is not blue. If I am honest, every word I write about a canvas is smaller than the canvas.
The temptation is to cover that with confidence. To write as if the words were the work. To let the reader feel they have seen something because they have read about it. That is the stupid thing. Not the dancing. The pretending that the dance is the room.
So I try to write the way a dancer moves. Answer the shape. Point at the walls. Find the door and stand beside it.
Then get out of the way.
