Five Variations on Music’s Ineffability
Consider five variations on music’s ineffability:
Disjunction. Music can be magnetic—attracting very specific meanings and affects in one moment in ways that seem so right on—and in another moment, seem to be quite indifferent to those meanings and affects. In a scene from Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (1999), a fictional rock band named Stillwater, their roadies, and a 15-year-old journalist are riding a tour bus when Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” (1971) emerges from the stereo.
Spontaneously, everyone riding the tour bus begins to sing along with a sense of collective joy. In the middle of the sing-along, the young journalist panics to his tour-buddy Penny Lane (played by Kate Hudson) about being away from home for too long. She responds with intoxicating confidence: “You are home.” Two decades later, the US political press reported that another fan of Elton John was Donald Trump. He had been blasting “Tiny Dancer” in Air Force One and using it as part of his rally playlist. One night before a rally, in a particularly strange moment, a reporter alerted him to the news that the late supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had passed away. And what was playing in the background but “Tiny Dancer.” While the song was on, Trump seemed to be surprisingly worried and compassionate about her passing.
These are obviously very different contexts for “Tiny Dancer.” But the fact that it can fly into these dramatically different moments—different moments of politics, of meaning, of personal attachment or dis-attachment—exemplifies a telling symptom of music’s ineffability. It is not simply as if the song has no one meaning and that is the end of the story. As a circulating recording, “Tiny Dancer” is very much here and now and a part of our attachments. But it is also perplexing because it seems to attract all sorts of powers to it in one moment, and then in another, repel them, and be able to do it tirelessly and repeatedly.
Indifference. In an October 1985 interview for 20/20, when asked about the political efficacy of his music during the civil rights era, Bob Dylan responded to interviewer Bob Brown: “They might have picked up on it two or three years after it was done. That happens with a lot of my stuff. I’m not really one to say this one affected this or this song affected that. Once something gets done, it’s for whoever wants to pick it up. It’s hard to say what really causes anything to happen. I don’t know if a song can really do that. They say it might, I don’t know.” When asked about whether people would hear other meanings in his music over time, Dylan responded: “What deeper kind of meaning they’re going to carry over the years, I really have no idea, if any.” When asked about the multiplicity of interpretations of his music—many of which veer towards the personal—Dylan pointed to his work as all that matters: “Sometimes they write about me instead of what it is that I’m doing. But I don’t think it can be helped.” Back in a 1965 press conference, Dylan responded to another reporter skeptically: “What song has a message?” She responded: “Your songs are supposed to have a subtle message.” “Subtle message?” “They’re supposed to.” “Where did you hear that?” “In a movie magazine.” “We don’t discuss those things here.”
In footage for the 20/20 interview, when asked to explain how he would want to be remembered in history, Dylan replied: “I have no idea,” elsewhere noting that he never intended to be a star and cannot verify—in a personal sense—why his music is loved, or why anyone is attached to it. A questioner in 1965 asked Dylan what was more important: the sound of the music or its lyrical content. His response was neither and what really matters is the ephemerality of a real-time performance: “The thing that is happening there at the time. That is the most important thing that we do.” Earlier he insisted: “The songs are what I do.” “Anything else interferes with it. Anything else trying to get on top of it, making something out of it which it isn’t, it just brings you down. It just makes it seem all very cheap.” In each of these instances, Dylan evaded specific explanations of his music by foregrounding uncertainty, staging refusal, standing apart.
Communion. In 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z performed their On the Run II Tour at the US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. The stadium, with its closed roof, has a reputation for poor acoustics. It can be difficult if not impossible to hear lyrics or discern instruments with any clarity. I stood with two friends in the nosebleed seats, where there were empty rows around us giving us a clear view of other fans. Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s fans are diverse: black, white, brown, male, female, trans, big, small, short, tall, able-bodied, and less so, or without category. But one in every four of them was either dressed up like Beyoncé or dressed up as if they were going to meet Beyoncé. Or they were sexualizing their appearance in a way that would allow them to be with Beyoncé in some imaginary space and feel her music in solidarity with her persona. They sang along with lyrics, lyrics that were hardly intelligible from our seats. Her fans listened—with unfailing intentional and formal rigor—past the blur of the acoustics with an almost metaphysical sense of commitment.
This was no instance of mere identification; who exactly the fans were or wanted to be was not simply “Beyoncé.” It was a music-infused communion or commingling, the collective fabrication of a virtual fantasy. A whole universe of unspoken desires circulated inside: tens of thousands of vectors of imagining oneself inside, or outside their raced, gendered, sexualized, empowered, or disempowered being. After all, Beyoncé was there with them in the stadium. They were also virtually with her, behind her, next to her, substituting themselves for her and vice versa. It all took place in the course of a volcanic musical event, with tens of thousands of people being outside of themselves differently and similarly (and unequally, and in ways that are strange, and trigger ambivalence). It would be impossible to imagine this kind of collective ecstasy without the music’s oversize sensory impact: the singing, the beats, the sheer scale of it. It was a communal amalgam that resists explanation, a mix of drives and desires that cannot be presented as an object of conscious experience.
Unthinkability. Travel back in time to the early 1970s: you are sitting on a living room couch, and you take out a record, Alice Coltrane’s Universal Consciousness (1971), and put it on the turntable.
It is an aesthetic scenario, like being at a museum and looking at a painting. While listening to Coltrane’s record, you open up its colorful, psychedelic gatefold, and read this about the title track:
UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS literally means Cosmic Consciousness; Self-realization and Illumination. This music tells of some of the various diverse avenues and channels through which the soul must pass before it finally reaches that exalted state of absolute consciousness. Once achieved, the soul becomes reunited with God and basks in the Sun of blissful union. At this point, the Creator bestows on the soul many of his Attributes and names one, a New Name. This experience and this music involve the totality concept which embraces cosmic thought as an emblem of Universal Sound.
For Coltrane, the music is going to unify your consciousness with the whole of the cosmos and the whole of humanity. Yet the music that results when you put down the needle is jagged, atonal, and dissonant, filled with exquisite detail and ornamentation. What is Coltrane showing us music can do in this scenario? We might imagine John’s “Tiny Dancer” on one end of some continuum. Openly uplifting and magnetic, different kinds of things can be attached and unstuck to it endlessly and we can marvel at that. But Coltrane’s “Universal Consciousness,” released in the very same year at “Tiny Dancer,” is of extraordinary complexity and strangeness; in her liner notes, she is explicitly presenting us with ideas, visions, and paradoxes.
In effect, Coltrane is asking us to think the unthinkable—to imagine our consciousness as untied to us as humans and instead tied to the entire cosmos—a stretch of the imagination that is extraordinarily difficult to achieve. She hears music as a way to show us both how hard that is, and also how music can make it possible to go beyond the limits of what language seems to do. But when we get there, it is not that we just listen to the music, and we are there. When we use music to try to get to this place beyond language, we are even more perplexed as to where we are and what we might do with the space. Coltrane does not position music far beyond anything we are familiar with; she asks us to think of it as a portal to something that we cannot understand.
Desire. Paradoxically, it can be easiest to understand music when one is least positioned to communicate about it. There have been instances (thankfully rarely) when I am performing with collaborators and there is a conflict or even meltdown beforehand. The conflict is not always resolved before getting on stage. There could be a feeling of panic that the show is going to go down in flames in front of a large audience, that a whole project, a product of years of effort, is going to fall apart. One can be on stage, feeling anything from mild tension to a sense of looming disaster. And yet, the event of the music is still happening, sometimes with amazing success.
Conflicts, in particular their associated desires and commitments, can also infuse the creative process. In the studio, one might feel a palpable intensity of trying to figure something out and finding, after repeatedly grasping, a certain arrangement that really works, a great melody, or a breakthrough when mixing. The resulting sound does not exactly congeal or externalize the conflict, but the music has somehow come into existence through the entanglements of conflictual attachments. Entwined panic and excitement in these collaborative moments teeter between the risk of humiliation and ecstatic triumph. In these instances, ephemeral as they are, the being of musical sound feels exposed. The noncommunicative grip of entangled desire is the art. This, listeners intuitively know; the pathos of risk saturates the excellence of musical events and objects. Musicians endure and repress a lot of bad or underattended performances—because they know that every so often it will just feel great, as if we sense the Being that music releases, that for a moment, this is what life is all about.
In each of these instances (disjunction, indifference, communion, unthinkability, desire), one can detect within the praxis of social facts a reflection on music’s ineffability. I do not have a unified view of how these five variations—or the many other potential variations—might join together, or even how they might relate to one another. Music’s ineffability seems to resist schematism. It is certainly far broader and more variegated than the narrow fantasy of absolute music—a Platonic vision of its formal purity. But neither is it reducible to its purified opposite—the sheer immediacy of affective bliss, a pure excess, or a raw flux. Instead, music’s ineffability lives a complicated life, fueled by sonic inconsistency, inviting attention to such inconsistency, but without wholesale reduction to such inconsistency. It shimmers in between, in play, forever paradoxical, generative, breathing through structures, grammars, and patterns, dialectically alive. In this way, it flourishes ambivalently within the historical conditions of empire, capital, and social oppression. It can be a carrier of utopian hope just as it can act like a dangerous eraser. It bears a restless complexity. It can be a predicament of one’s desires and fantasies, an injunction to attend or be brought outside oneself, or an indeterminate locus of social imagination. It is in this sense that music’s forms—which include not only what is inscribable in scores, but all manner of decisions, habits, practices, experiments, uncertainties, and swerves of action—harbor philosophical weight. To work and to act, to discover, edit, and decide as a musician invites reflection on what the art form is about, on what the medium of sound is capable of as it is lived and finds electricity.
