in class i mentioned the sublime as a way of thinking about the experience of music. the sublime, as a noun, is distinct from the adjective use of the word sublime, which refers to excellence, as in: you’re belly-dancing skills are sublime. as a noun, the sublime refers to the quality of sublimity (see the 7th meaning given on dictionary.com). it comes from the word limen, which is the threshold below which a stimulus is not perceived or is not distinguishable from another. so if something has a sublime quality it is affecting you on a level of which you are unaware, in ways you are unaware of. in other words, more is going on than your consciousness can comprehend.

the music of sigur ros is a clear example, i would say, of music which aims for the quality of the sublime. this is not to say one cannot consciously appreciate sigur ros, of course you can: consciousness and unconsciousness are fed from the same moment. kirk pillow (great name) has written interestingly about sublime understanding in relation to hegel and kant.

the above is just another (in my opinion interesting) way of saying what was mentioned in class, and what is always said about music: it makes you feel, it’s emotive, it’s multi-sensory, etc. but for us who are interested in expressing in language something about what music does, or is, questions then arise about how to go about expressing it. how does language work to capture and represent a musical experience, does it do so adequately and how might it better approach the task? so, how does language work to represent a musical experience? we saw in the lecture a bernard zuel review of a sigur ros show, where he balances a combination of landscape metaphors with biographical and technical detail to try to give an impression of the experience of seeing sigur ros live. does it work? do the metaphors carry the feeling of the experience successfully? here is another review of a sigur ros album by the same author, which is perhaps even more interesting in that zuel is explicitly grappling with the inadequacy of language to describe what the album does so he resolves to talk about what you could say about it (the inference being that you could just as easily not say it) to try to give the reader an idea of what’s it’s about. is this a more successful way of approaching the task? is this unwillingness to pin the tail of language on the donkey of music an acknowledgment of the problem of expressing music with language? the answers to these questions are yes and no, up, down, left, right and dressed in a 1001 variations on the purple poker-dotted theme. what i mean is, everyone will respond to the above questions in a different way, which is all good, but, i’m much less interested in answers than i am in further questions, and in an engagement with the issue the questions raise.

let us say – for discussions sake – we agree that it is impossible to capture the experience of music in language and transfer it to the reader, as if it were a computer file. what then? should we be silent? clearly, no, we are not going to be silent: language is the poisoned air we live in (in class i mistakenly attributed this quote to wittgenstein, when actually it’s the situationist raoul vaneigem) and we cannot escape using language. all this sounds too negative, but it’s not. words might not capture the kick-buttness of the music, but as someone touched on in class in relation to a review, nobody expects them to, they are impressions of the musical event with the intent of giving the reader an idea of what it was like, or is like. so what i mean to say is that language and music and not separated by any abyss, they are actually parallel practices. i think this is a useful way to think about the relationship of music and language in the context of this course: they are separate, yet run parallel.

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links:

sophie mentioned dj spooky aka paul d. miller and his book rhythm science. nina mentioned the political and social context to punk, which reminded me of this documentary about the situationists on ubuweb where features an interview with malcolm mclaren. graham, you mentioned a book about punk in the major cities, i couldn’t find the guy on the web, could you post a link in the comments? we also talked about blog reviews, here’s the blog of the sydney based magazine cyclic defrost.