by Chloe Hansen
I have only ever really been excited about two things in my life: rhetoric and music. I have never played any instruments or gotten into music on that level, I just listen all the time. I am that person who always has music playing (usually too loud) whether I’m in the car, in the shower, writing or reading, cooking, cleaning, waking up or falling asleep. Everything is better with music; a “let there be songs to fill the air”, sort of thing. [‘You Can Call Me Al’ by Paul Simon is playing right now, for example.] As far as that other passion of mine – rhetoric – goes, I am currently pursuing a degree in Rhetorical Studies. I have always figured that I would use rhetorical theory and rhetorical criticism to study music, as it’s the only other subject I’ve ever really been interested in, but I have somehow had a hard time getting into the study of music. I’ve looked into a few things here and there, written a paper or several, but I haven’t really committed to the popular (or even unpopular) music direction as my main academic focus. And I’m not entirely sure why.
It has recently crossed my mind that in order to study music from a rhetorical perspective a sort of meaning has to be assigned to a song. It can be argued that certain tones, certain harmonies, certain tempos convey certain meanings, even without the addition of any kind of lyrical content, and I think perhaps everyone has attempted to describe these meanings with words. This is where the problem arises: we, the everyday casual listener without training in musical theory, cannot help but find language strikingly inadequate in the task of describing music, of assigning linguistic meaning to sound.
I recently read an article on goth music by rhetorical scholar Joshua Gunn in which he theorizes that talking about music is (at least) three steps removed from the actual musical experience. We listen to music which creates some sort of internal feeling, meaning or response (step one). This meaning can only be expressed using adjectives, as in hard or soft (step two), which is then articulated, most often to others (step three). All of this is to say that talking about music alienates us from the actual music. I’m not saying (and I don’t think Gunn was either) that describing, for example, the way you felt attending the 2003 Twisted Sister reunion tour or even the way you feel watching ‘Stop Making Sense’ by the Talking Heads is alienating or somehow illegitimate. But describing the music itself, pinning down musical meaning with linguistic meaning inevitably disconnects you from the music itself.
If you break down language to its most basic elements you get sound. We have assigned meanings to particular sounds, strung them together in particular ways and gone to great lengths to ensure that everyone united under a common language knows and understands what these sounds represent. Using words to describe anything alienates you from that thing. In using the word ‘book’ to describe this thing sitting next to me I am talking less about the thing itself and forcing it into the category of those objects that possess ‘bookish’ qualities. It stops being this book and becomes a book in order for me to talk about it. Now back to the music, which is formed in much the same way as language described above, just without the assigned meaning. Perhaps one of the reasons that music has the effect that it does on people is precisely because it cannot be described with words. It has not, again for the average, everyday listener, been broken down into those categories such that it stops being what it is and becomes something general, something that can easily fit into a category. Instead of defining these sounds, we process them without assigned meanings and so … they can be anything. This is probably what makes music as compelling and universal as it is.
Music is the ultimate persuasive device. It moves people, plain and simple, and there is something singular and amazing about that. “The magic’s in the music and the music’s in me” and I think that articulating or theorizing about that magic will ruin it. I know that I’m not alone when I say that music has caused me to fall in love, has excited me, gotten me through tough times or depressed me, that certain songs will always, without fail, remind me of particular periods and people in my life, and that I have had conversations about bands with complete strangers who felt like old friends in that moment. All of this is exactly why music should be studied, but is also perhaps why I am hesitant to study that music: assigning linguistic meaning to music would alienate me from the music itself and take away exactly what makes it worth studying in the first place.