I have to thank Brian Albright (my good friend and Music Guru) for introducing me to the famous Elvis Costello quote from a 1983 interview with Timothy White in Musician magazine: “Writing about Music is Like Dancing about architecture.” And although this part of the quote is fairly well known, Costello does go on to say “it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.”
However, that hasn’t stopped mutual fans Daniel Levitin and Oliver Sacks from penning best-selling books on the subject in tennis match like fashion, Costello be damned. Levitin, a former producer for Columbia Records turned neuroscientist explained the relationship between music and the mind in the LA Times book award finalist, This is Your Brain on Music which came out late last fall in paperback. Then there’s Sacks’ Musicophilia, a NYT best book for 2007, which turned the relationship externally citing neurological cases that involved their personal relationship with music and how it is altered by different conditions.
This August, Levitin volleys back with The World in Six Songs in which he shows how music and dance enabled the social bonding and friendship necessary for human culture and society to evolve.
While Levitin and Sacks have shown us that the brain’s relationship to music is fascinating (and lucrative), there are two wonderful blogs that show music can be the bridge connecting authors to readers.
The music blog Largehearted Boy which features daily free and legal music downloads as well as news from the worlds of music, literature, and pop culture has a Book Notes series in which “authors create and discuss a music playlist that is in some way relevant to their recently published books.” Their latest installment is Spencer Dew’s playlist to accompany his 9/11 short fiction collection Songs of Insurgency.
On Wednesdays, Dwight Garner’s Paper Cuts blog for the NYT (which Emily mentioned yesterday) is the delivery vehicle for Living With Music, “a playlist of songs from a writer or some other kind of book-world personage.” Today’s features Michael Walker, author of the Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood, and features songs written in or about Laurel Canyon.
Good thing Costello never said anything regarding blogging about music.