You were talking recently about the meaning of our life, the unselfishness of art. Take music, for instance. It is connected to reality less than anything else, or if connected at all, it’s done mechanically, not by way of ideas, just by a sheer sound, devoid of any associations. And yet, music, as if by some miracle, penetrates into our very soul! What is resonating in us in answer to the harmonized noise? Making it into the source of the greatest delight, which shakes and unites us? What is its purpose? And, above all, for whom? You'll reply, "For no one and no reason." No. I doubt that. For everything, in the end, has a meaning. A meaning and a reason.
- Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
I.
I once wanted to write about music. I wanted to write about the music. I had come to realize that most writing about music is really about things that aren’t the music. I came up with two planes that described what all this music writing is actually about:
Objective Historical: What are the conditions under which this music exists? What is the relationship between this music and other music in terms of influence, people, style, etc?
Objective Analytic: How does the music compare to an objective standard of quality? How good is the songwriting, production, performance, etc?
I wondered, is there an escape from this trap of writing about the history or analyzing the music? What if these two planes were made subjective rather than objective?
Subjective Historical: The personal history. Played out in all manner of Pitchfork-esque thinkpieces.
Subjective Analytic: Rather than relating the music sensuously to an objective standard, the subjective analytic would unfold the music on an experiential level. It wouldn’t strive to compare the music to a standard for all music, but instead to isolate the particulars of the listener's experience of the music, as determined not by history or external association (other music, other experiences), but at the level of here and now. It would be a reflection on the music as it relates to the body and psyche itself, rather than at the level of knowledge.1
Of course, this is what I wanted to write. But it’s not easy.
II.
How does one write a subjective analytic?
It is difficult, because of an inherent tension of language. We use words with some expectation of universality, however we are striving in this subjective analytic form to capture and relate the absolutely singular. Thus the style necessitates some quality of the poetic, whereby the experience is illustrated rather than directly related. For one can say, “the tree looked a certain way at a certain time”, but this fails to capture the subjective dimension. Superlatives like “beautiful” and “sad” only deal in the broadest of strokes, offering a cast of color rather than producing an image. The risk of falling back into the objective dimension is always present, as the creation of structure which contorts the work it attempts to elevate.
The closest I’ve seen is a friend’s writing, where he uses a gestalt of image-nouns, one thing after another. The writing comes across as absolute associativity, purely visual, lacking in any sort of sense or meaning. And yet, the associations somehow circle around the object, locating it within a synesthetic context, a cultural field.
We must remember that music itself is nothing but an unfolding of sound in time, which captures or ensnares us for some duration, until we are released into that absence of intent and/or structuring known as silence. Music thus transcends the symbolic, the referential. This synesthetic context is perhaps the only way to capture the Subjective Analytic, as the writing-down of the experiencing of the music itself, as it flows through the body and inspires the senses beyond hearing.
This is an old form. Harmony, melody, rhythm were known and used and given meaning before they were isolated, transcribed, manipulated with symbols, although the development of music surely co-evolved with the symbol once the symbol was invented. The prayer may well be the purest, most primitive form, the connection of music directly to the divine. Perhaps it was symbolic manipulation itself that permitted those critics and artists from certain eras to aspire to a universal, objective perfection, as if breaking the prayer into pieces, and then trying to put it back together again.
Writing about music takes place in a plane of abstraction above writing music, which takes place in a plane of abstraction above music itself, which has a tendency to spontaneously emerge from time to time. And unlike the visual arts, the absolute impossibility of eternalizing music—via holding one’s gaze—renders music far more difficult to contain within the similarly eternal medium of text.
Within the space of reading this post, I could've shared a song instead. You would’ve enjoyed it more viscerally. That would be low engagement, though, because music today is an intensely private thing. I never figured out how to write the thing I once set out to write. I no longer feel a need to try.
(Were you expecting a longer post? I’ve decided given my time constraints and interests that I want to post briefer, less edited notes, and shift the burden of elaboration onto the reader, rather than trying to imagine and draw out what “someone might want to know” about the ideas I play with from time to time. Expect more like this in the future.)
If I were to give these categories or planes more psychological names, I would draw from Jungian functions. I tried to track the historical vs analytic distinction in line with the original Jungian notions of thinking and feeling:
The historical dimension is about the production of rational associative judgments, which is the aim of the thinking function.
The analytic dimension is about the production of rational moral or aesthetic judgments, which is the aim of the feeling function.
The objective vs subjective dimensions exactly parallel the Jungian extraverted vs introverted.
Thus we end up with Objective Historical as Extraverted Thinking, Objective Analytic as Extraverted Feeling, Subjective Historical as Introverted Thinking, and Subjective Analytic as Introverted Feeling. Oversimplification, as anyone can write any of these modes, but it was a tool that helped structure my divisions. Ignore this entire footnote.
I love that you wrote about sharing songs, because to me, during my intense musical listening phase, was the most important genre of musical "writing". Charts, top lists, discographies of bands and books were the best things to read about music.
Other than that, the only piece of subjective analytic that I really enjoyed was in Kierkegaards Either/Or where he talks about Mozart operas.
Where can we read your friend’s synasthetic stuff?