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How to Lie with Writing on Music

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by Marcelo Pisarro

The first sentence of How to Lie with Maps, the 1991 book by geographer Mark Monmonier, should be recorded in the next edition of the annals of the best first sentences in books: “Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it’s essential.” It has the same effect as other great book first sentences. “I hate traveling and explorers,” for example, the first sentence of Tristes Tropiques, the 1955 travel and exploration book by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Or this one from Stephen King in On Writing, his 1999 essay on writing: “This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.” Actually, this isn’t the first sentence of the book but the first sentence of the second foreword. Still, it simply deserves to be.

Not only is it easy to lie with maps. It’s also easy to lie with writing on music. The excuse for considering it essential might be the same one that Monmonier used to explain—perhaps justify—why maps lie. If the goal is to prevent critical information from being buried under a fog of details, maps must offer a partial, incomplete, and selective view. This is the cartographic paradox: to present a useful and truthful image of the mapped territory, an accurate map must rely on white lies.

Writing about music is similar: you have to use white lies to communicate the surprise of the event. You have to rely on partial, incomplete, and selective representations. In music, and probably in anything else, ways of knowing aren’t independent of the material forms in which knowledge is acquired. When you write with that acquired knowledge, when you transcribe it, or inscribe it, when you move it between languages, those material ways of acquiring knowledge are absent from the reader’s experience. The writer’s task is to recover those conditions, or evoke them, keep them on the horizon, filter them by drops or toss them in a bucket, and manage to contain a texture, a quality, a feeling, a suspicion, a nuance, a timbre, or an inflection within a word. That’s why it’s often said that writing about music is impossible—that it’s like dancing about architecture, and so on. But come on. We write about subatomic particles, homeomorphism, chromosomes, quasars, and unique factorization domains. Writing about music shouldn’t be much harder. At least it can be done with less complaining. It’s the best job in the world. Or the second best. Subatomic particles can be pretty cool too.

This is a book about musical events: songs, atmospheres, traditions, anecdotes, symphonies, genres, voices, commodities, technologies, artifacts, displacements, sounds. The texts were written at different times and for different reasons, then cannibalized to reach their current form. They are texts that know each other. They live in the same building. Some arrived recently, others have been settled for a long time, sometimes they cross paths in the hallways or the elevator, and they know quite a bit about each other. Thus, there are reprises, repeated motifs, some common premises: to expand the listening context, enrich it, and enrich you, entertain, which should be noted above all, learn to listen to the way other people listen, not allow music, despite all the critical thinking you throw at it, to lose the ability to surprise you. Reflecting on her practice of sewing voodoo flags in 2020, anthropologist Elizabeth Chin highlighted the therapeutic power of doing, in general, which could well include the stitching together of texts about music: “It’s an exercise of sewing through the madness, fending off existential dread of facing the implications of everything our crappy species is responsible for, and continuing to work at creating beauty in spite of everything.”

That sets the bar impossibly high. But who knows. Our crappy speciiresponsible for many things. And one of those things is music. Anything can happen. And this—which may be a white lie or may not be—is more than enough to get us going.

So let’s go.

Introduction to Marcelo Pisarro, Pasajes Sonoros: Escritos sobre Música, Volume I, AZ, 2024. En español.

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