What does music mean? Listening at the start, to birdsong, Charles Mingus, and plainchant, brought out a few possibilities.<\/p>\n
These questions arise from music\u2019s basic identity as a non-representational art: it is much harder for music to be about something in particular, than it is for poetry or, as we will see, for drawing and painting and other visual representations. But poetry and music are so bound up with each other, and often, when we are thinking about poetry and music, we are thinking of that aspect of poetry that strains away from sense\u2014as perhaps the repeated O O O at the end of Tracy K. Smith\u2019s \u201cWade in the Water\u201d seems to do.<\/p>\n
John Hollander offered us a historical view of the distinction between musica mundana (or speulativa) and musica humana: between the pure, abstract, even mathematical beauty of music, the music of the spheres; and the social life of music as it plays in our lives on earth, as it moves our bodies and booms from our car stereos and so on. The distinction corresponds to the idea of music as structure, and music as rhetoric\u2014as abstract form, and as something like persuasive talk, meant to communicate and move us.<\/p>\n
The basic idea: how the analogy to music shows poetry pulled in two directions, out of sense, into pure form; and back into the world of matter and meaning among people.<\/p>\n
In our discussion of \u201cWade in the Water,\u201d the refrain \u201cI love you\u201d was full of this question\u2014the ring song lifts up those repeated words until they are almost pure feeling (Sam suggested their coming around was a figure for an accelerating dance); but they had so much history to carry with them (as Aveneque pointed out, recalling how the spiritual was used on the underground railroad). The ending: \u201cO Lord\u2014O Lord\u2014O Lord\u2014 \/ Is this love the trouble you promised?\u201d It was not clear that Smith allowed us to separate the sound from its burden. (And \u201cburden\u201d is another word for \u201crefrain.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Keats\u2019 ode ends with a question, too: \u201cFled is that music:\u2014Do I wake or sleep?\u201d We read the poem for the turbulence of its mood. At moments, Keats (let\u2019s call the speaker \u201cKeats\u201d) seemed able to participate (Aveneque\u2019s word) in the nightingale\u2019s song; at other moments, the song was distant, and made a painful contrast with \u201cThe weariness, the fever, and the fret\u201d of the human world. He chases the bird ahead, so that he can follow; he discovers himself ecstatically to be \u201cAlready with thee!\u201d; he sinks back into his bower, \u201cTo thy high requiem become a sod\u201d\u2014a clod of unresponsive earth. The poem courts music and music escapes it, though we can ask, what music was in the poem all along. (Already?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What does music mean? Listening at the start, to birdsong, Charles Mingus, and plainchant, brought out a few possibilities. Music affects us by metonymy: we attach meanings to it according to where and when we hear it, what it is \u201cnext to\u201d in experience. So birdsong sounds peaceful, pastoral, springlike; Mingus communal, sociable; plainchant, pious … <\/p>\n