All Art Wants to be Music
And how this idea helped me become a better writer
Most art forms - prose, poetry, paintings, dance, standup comedy and cinema represent a piece of reality in some way. Therefore reality - the world we live in - must exist for these art forms to exist. That is not the case with music. Music can exist without the world existing. One doesn’t need to understand the world to enjoy music. It is complete in and of itself. There is something inherently powerful about musical notes, arranged in certain permutations and combinations, that moves us in a deeply emotional way. How odd.
This isn’t a new idea. It is as old as Schopenhauer. Clearly, music does something to human consciousness that other art forms don’t. This special quality of music compelled Walter Pater, the British essayist to theorize that all art constantly aspires to the condition of music. Meaning, other art forms - novels, films, comedy, etc. - try to become better by achieving the physiological effect that only music has - that of pure ‘feeling’ without requiring ‘understanding’.
What precisely is this condition of music, that bypasses the mind, and hits the body directly?
In my view, it is effortlessness of consumption. One doesn’t need to think or work to consume music. It latches on to something deep inside us, and just flows. The simplest way to prove this idea is to observe how often we hum songs from memory without paying attention to the lyrics. Words are reduced to a mere carrier of the music, an empty placeholder functioning so that the mind can absorb the real essence - the music.
How can one use this special quality of music to write better? In the absence of any formal training, I follow one simple but effective rule to judge my own writing: if it is easy to read, it is good. If a sentence doesn’t roll off the mind and the tongue easily, like music, I rewrite it. I do it by reading my own writing over and over and over, not to check its logical flow but to feel its music. We’ve all had this experience of reading good writing - it is so effortless that it doesn’t require reading. It’s as though it is already inside your head and the page is just revealing it. In other words, try to make the consumption of your writing effortless, as effortless as listening to music. You’d be surprised to know how many professional writers depend on this simple technique. David Foster Wallace, one of the greatest prose writers of our generation, once said that he writes what ‘feels right to my stomach’, meaning if it flows naturally, if it has a certain rhythm. In other words, how close it is to music.
Chances are that you may have used the same technique before, unknowingly, in your own writing. We are writers, all of us. We may not write newsletters, essays or stories, but we do write emails, Instagram posts and text messages. You can dramatically improve your writing by just reading it over and over again before hitting Send. Our minds are hard-wired to sense music in non-musical media. Film editing, for example, is musicalizing of images. An editor cuts shots to slow down, pace up, heighten or suppress the emotion of the scene to make it effortlessly consumable. No wonder, film editors refer to it as the ‘rhythm’. Stand-up comedians perform a comedy set over and over again in night clubs, perfecting the ‘timing’ of a joke. The content of the joke doesn’t change but the delivery does - the intonations, the pauses, the repetitions, the emphases. Dancing is nothing but musicalizing of the human body.
Nietzsche, rightly said, ‘Without music, life would be a mistake.’ There’s music in everything, if one opens one’s ears, eyes and mind.
P.S. - If you are interested in the subject, I created a dystopian fiction podcast for Audible on this topic which you can listen to for free, here.