On Jun 28, 2008, at 5:26 PM, Daniel Shoskes wrote: > As Ray Nurse said yesterday (and I know he was quoting somebody else)
A quick web search will turn up attributions to Elvis Costello, Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa, Robyn Hitchcock, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis and (don't ask me why) Woody Allen and Steve Martin. > "talking about music is like dancing about architecture". Or more commonly "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." This strikes me as the second most useless remark ever made about music, well ahead of the third-place "opera in English makes about as much sense as baseball in Italian." (H.L. Mencken) In any event, I think it's properly understood to mean that using words to describe or analyze the music itself is a pointless exercise (whether this is true in any given instance depends on what ideas need to be conveyed, and the writer's facility with words--for some writers, writing about anything at all is as pointless and meaningless as dancing about architecture). But I don't think our anonymous pundit meant to dismiss discussions about execution. A teacher explaining to a student how to do something is not "dancing about architecture," and similarly a discussion of whether an apoggiatura should be half as long as the main note or twice as long as the main note is not "dancing about architecture." It's just detailed nuts and bolts if you're serious about the music, and trivia if you're not. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
