Dancing about Architecture Is a Reasonable Thing to Do: Writing about Music, Meaning, and the Ineffable

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

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.