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Dear Reader,

I write to clarify my thoughts, to focus my ideas, and to remember to pack toothpaste. In recent months, I’ve been thinking about what writing and music might have in common, a topic so thoroughly overwrought that I took an entire class in college which we made its way through ONE red book of writing about music.

I’m less interested in writing about music, and more in what writing can teach us about music. Let’s start with what writing and musicking have in common.

First, great performances and great writing is specific, transparent, opinionated, and stylistic. Strunk and White, whose Elements of Style (another red book) is a model of clarity about writing and writing about clarity, agree. “The greatest writers…. are effective because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.” They are”specific, definite, and concrete,” and “place themselves in the background”

One of my favorite writers is Elmore Leonard, whose character-driven writing leaps off the page with efficiency and color. Check out this scene from Get Shorty, a mostly-accurate rendition of the book:

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Mobster Chili Palmer, frustrated that his beloved coat has been sold, asks the concierge, “well, do you see a black leather jacket, fingertip length, like the one Pacino wore in Serpico? ‘Cause if you don’t you owe me three seventy-nine dollars.”

This is specificity! Not short: “fingertip length.” Not any cut—Al Pacino’s style. Not $400, $379. One paragraph tells us so much about the character. He's deliberate, methodical, thrifty, maybe a little crime-obsessed.

In fact, Travolta only agreed to do the film adaptation of Get Shorty if Leonard’s dialogue, which had been revised for the screen, was restored. (This was the revision: “Where's my coat? You better find it. It cost $400.” That’s as powerful as cream of wheat.)

You know what else is specific and transparent? The first phrase of Leon Fleisher’s recording of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto:

It’s Beethoven, not Fleisher. But Fleisher is pointing towards the most important ideas. The voicing, carefully regulated, that heavenly scale upward to a held breath. Strunk and White note that “a single overstatement…has the power to destroy… the object of your enthusiasm.” None here!

Another set of examples, both of Bach’s A Minor English Suite (BWV 807):

Leonhardt pushes and pulls with the rhythmic fabric of the music, but Bach’s counterpoint are crystal clear. It’s music of sentences: rhetorical, concerned with details, a wonderful story.

Here’s a VERY different version. Get ready, A is now 440 hz!

• Poetic/Conversational
• Impactful/Conversational
• Accurate/Free
• Stylistic/textual

These are the binaries that drive great performances and great writing, no?

Elements of Style

Writing and music making are linked by their qualities. They’re also linked by how we do them. More specifically, they’re linked by how we learn to do them.

At our last Learn with Mike meeting (check out the recording here), I touched on some of the ways in which the steps to good writing are roughly homologous to the steps to learning music.

• Framing/contextualization: knowing one’s audience, knowing the style of the domain
• Planning: great writers and musicians think about both what the thing they are creating might be like, and how it will be created. They divide a larger task into smaller chunks
• Create material
• Seek Feedback from self, peers, coaches
• Revise like crazy

Writing and music rely on the same multi-sensory framework, operating continuously. Writing as you learn, just like sharing as you practice, is most powerful because it facilities autonomy, authority, and feedback, all essential components of mastering new skills.

Likewise, both domains couple high level performance with rock-solid fundamentals, learned through deliberate practice, exposure to great exemplars, and what Daniel Coyle would call “ignition points,” those transformational moments that create autonomy and authority. A writer is an interpreter, one who takes a text and brings it to the reader in a certain way, situating the ideas in a costume, a framework, a context (paperback or hardcover, illustrated or plain Granjon?)

Similarly, both require incubation time. Setting aside a project and picking it up with some distance always brings fresh ideas and an increased desire to “ruthlessly delete the excess” as Strunk and White say.

Great! But what do we do with this information. The key lies in style and analogies.

Style is not Just a Garnish

Words and sounds both take on this nebulous concept of style. What is style? Can you just slap a baguette on something and call it French? A lot of people argue that style is the last step in creative or recreative process, the peak of a pyramid which includes “must haves” like fundamentals at the bottom. An accent instead of a language.

Style can’t help a bad idea (I had a colleague who complained about our propensity as academics to “polish poop”) but style is not something to be added to the end of your project, “a garnish for the meat of the prose” as Strunk and White say. Style frames a work within its historical context. Were there a lot of books like Don Quijote at the time Cervantes wrote it? What was the significance of being a knight in Cervantes’ time? How about the genres Cervantes’ narrator embodies? Is this an era-appropriate helmet?

Style, or more specifically gestalt, situates a work within the context of how it’s shared. Who is reading it, and why, where? Is the concert in a recording studio or a traditional concert hall? “The first principle of composition,” Strunk and White argue (well, they don’t really argue so much as intone), is to “foresee or determine the shape of what is to come and pursue that shape.” Beginning to learn a piece of music without an idea of where it might go is folly.

Style doesn’t come from Chicago. It comes from deep contextual knowledge, strong sense of text, and keen specificity. Sounds an awful lot like a mental representation, that multi-modal sense of what the project will exist as that vibrates with clarity and focus, driving the artist to both generate ideas and pinpoint mistakes with flow and verve.

Gestalt a powerful determinant of (a) quality practice. In “Optimizing performance through intrinsic motivation and attention for learning: The OPTIMAL theory of motor learning, ”Lewthwaite and Wulf argue that when honing a skill, we are motived by concepts autonomy and authority: it’s me doing it, and I’m capable and ready to do it. Thus, if one begins a project knowing what we want to create—with a strong mental representation of all its facets—one might have more autonomy and authority. Sounds simple, but a lot of times musicians don’t do this. We start from the atomic level, investigating every note of a piece to see what it’s made out of, only later standing back and squinting at what side of Lego set we have made.

Writing and Music-Making are Analogy Rich

At this point, it might be clear that music-making and writing are structurally related domains, and with homology comes analogy, my favorite tool.

I hinted at this in a previous newsletter when I spoke about Alfred Brendel’s three systems for interpreting music. The steps are analogues for the role a performer occupies at each waypoint of the learning process: the curator of a museum, the executor of a will, and an obstetrician.

Analogies are so powerful that Johannes Kepler used them to determine with great accuracy the orbital path of the planets. Key to analogies is schema abstraction: what Dedre Gentner calls “extracting common systems from representations” in order to promote “the disembodying of subtle and possibly important commonalities.” Analogies help us notice “alienable differences,” becoming aware of contrasts between the two domains through finding high-similarity pairs: the act of revising a performance and picking at that cover letter, or structuring a large writing project and planning one’s practice, to name a few.

1. Our brains are great at noticing relationships between systems (writing and practicing, perhaps). If there’s a blank spot or a change in one domain, an adroit analogist can connect another system, using structure-mapping to explain a mystery by comparing it to a pair in an analogous domain.

For Kepler, making analogies was a powerful tool to investigate the unknown. He posited an analogy for an unknown quality—the orbit of the planets, for example—and asked what this action might be like. I use analogies when learning complex new actions. How might this process be similar to something I do know?

• Could interpreting a solo work be like giving someone a tour of a city, highlighting one’s favorite parts rather than describing every intersection?
• Could developing multiple interpretations of a piece of music turn a performer from an ant to a taxi driver? Ants learn one specific way to traverse a dangerous journey.

One boulder in the way, no more journey.

• ​Taxi drivers, on the other hand, famously know many methods of making a journey. Great interpreters are taxi drivers, taking into account their audience, the physical conditions on stage, the acoustic, their collaborators, making constant adjustments as a matter of course.

1. Analogies help us solidify mental representations, that multi-sensory sense of when something is “right.” How? They provide LOTS of information in one sentence, in precisely the manner that performers might need. To name a more effective set of “high-similarity” pairs: How is playing a soft snare drum roll like going on a first date? Or how is practicing snare drum on a practice pad like singing in the shower (or those flattering mirrors at H&M)?

After surmising structural connections between two domains, the logical next step would be to use both domains. Fortunately, writing and performing are both of a type with advocacy. At their best, both are tools for developing connections, both through the work being shared, and, more importantly, through the space the work creates.

Speaking of Connections

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been hosting sessions about the multi-faceted learning that musicians do and the linkages therein. Our final session December 2 (today!) at 5pm eastern. If you’re interested, you can register here and I’ll send you a link to join and a recording if you can’t make it at the time.

Happy writing!

Mike

Some additional thoughts:

Follow rules, or don’t

Writing prose can have many rules. So many rules that they have been subsumed by a style . Just like music making, it’s great to follow rules, but it’s also great NOT to. Hamlet says excess partying is “a custom more honour’d in the breach than the observance.” Ditto “common practice” harmony. The exceptions to these rules of voice-leading, so numerous that Brahms made a notebook of famously good uses of these ‘mistakes,” often seem more interesting than the most dogmatic of passages.

By the way

Of course writing is a powerful career tool for musicians. Pitching an idea, funding ones work, writing program notes, all are supported by clear and powerful writing. As we’ve seen, the skills of writing are the same as the skills of music making, so time to get practicing!

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