Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do
Writing about Music, Meaning, and the Ineffable
Imprint: Cascade Books
Writing about music, far from being the specialized domain of the rock critic with encyclopedic knowledge of micro-genres or the fancy-pants star journalist flying on private planes with Led Zeppelin, has become something almost any music lover can do--and does. It's been said, however, that writing about music is a difficult, even pointless enterprise--an absurd impossibility, like "dancing about architecture." But aside from the fact that dancing about architecture would be awesome, what is that ineffable something that drives people to write about music at all? In this short, insightful book, Joel Heng Hartse unpacks the rock writer Richard Meltzer's assertion that writing about music should be a "parallel artistic effort" with music itself--and argues that music and the impulse to write about it is part of the eminently mysterious desire for meaning-making that makes us human.
Touching on the close resonances between music, language, love, and belief, Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do is relevant to anyone who finds deep human and spiritual meaning in music, writing, and the mysterious connections between them.
Joel Heng Hartse is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. His music criticism has appeared in Paste, Geez, Image, the Stranger, Christianity Today, Christ & Pop Culture, and many other publications. He is author of Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll (Cascade, 2010) and co-author of Perspectives on Teaching English at Colleges and Universities in China (2015). He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and sons.
“This book is very engaging! Joel Heng Hartse gives a heartfelt apologia for writing about music. He suggests that the writer is not merely a commentator but an artist himself crafting and responding to the art with something new and creative. . . . An inspiring book. I strongly recommend it for music fans and musicologists alike.”
—Christopher Foley, Bass Player, Luxury
“I enjoy Joel’s thoughtful perspective and casual profundities, of which there are plenty. But to me, what makes Joel a great music writer is the fact that he spent an entire semester abroad hunting down a single used CD from an obscure indie band. It’s what any reasonable person would do.”
—Drew Dernavich, Cartoonist, The New Yorker
“This book is about the love of music. At times, it is a love poem to music. . . . At other times, it is an exploration of our humanity, why and how we seek meaning through music. Above all, at a time when we are overwhelmed with musical content and noise, Heng Hartse’s book grounds the reader with a tangible sense of the richness and wonder that is music.”
—Alan Noble, Oklahoma Baptist University
“In this wide-ranging book, the relation between criticism and composition . . . is set aside for something emergent and difficult. Something verging on ineffable. The lack of aesthetical pretension, the presence of real examples and first-person experience—all of this and more make reading this book, as a scholar and musician, exciting and, dare I say, joyful. The meaning of the word finds itself ‘worlded’ within its own being, told to us in witty, warm prose.”
—Sam Rocha, University of British Columbia
Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do
Sects, Love and Rock & Roll book launch (2010) from Joel HH on Vimeo.
Related Titles
