13. Songs Without Words

Rises

Welcome back again. This week I’m talking about the thirteenth track to be released from ‘You Could Be Happy’. It’s called ‘Rises’.

Happiness

After last week’s bumper edition of odd topics and trivia, it might be nice to start with where we get to with the story this week. Don’t worry, we can’t really avoid the trivia, so that’ll be back a bit later.

If you’ve been following where we got to so far, our main character has succeeded in their quest, largely due to the support, encouragement and intervention of the story’s hero, an angelic figure represented by the orchestra. This is, obviously and unashamedly I think, a love story. The main character found their happiness. From the inside this looked like an epic and difficult quest, and indeed it was. But from the outside this looked like somebody getting a lot of help, and slowly realising they might be able to return the love that the hero showed them in the earlier parts of the album.

This third sequence of the album is therefore an odd ‘story' in the literary sense. It does move through time, but there isn’t really any tension and release any more. This might be a more vertical than horizontal story at this stage, in that it’s mostly about the happiness we have discovered as a result of the first two parts.

‘The Best Years of Your Life’ was a rediscovered childhood, full of wonder and magic. The novelty of this world of happiness was tinged with nostalgia for the future, or maybe the sadness of the lost years of being unhappy. This track, ‘Rises’, is about a different sort of happiness. It’s just pure joy, the feeling of flying, of unencumbered lightness. True happiness of the moment. When you listen to this track, you will notice the ‘hope’ theme again, but maybe more integral than it has been to any of the other tracks in which it has featured. And also the other basic cues with which we are familiar - the main character as a solo line, and the orchestra being stupendous and heroic as always.

And musically, as with the cover, we might be a little bit back in the world of Vaughan Williams, which feels a little like coming home. The bird, ascending, shooting for the sky, rises.

Stravinsky and meaning

This week’s update could be seen as a part 2 to last week’s part 1. You might remember an argument between the forces of magic, extolling the power of symbols, and Wittgenstein noting that words don’t even mean anything taken on their own terms. The next question therefore is - how does this relate to music?

Enter stage left Igor Stranvinsky, one of the 20th century’s greatest musicians (by which I mean top spot is a toss up between him, Brian Wilson, and John Coltrane - i.e. he is one of the greatest musicians of all time). He is quoted in his autobiography as saying -

“Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all”

I tend to agree with this idea. Or my interpretation of this idea. We’ll have to use my interpretation because two volumes of Stravinsky’s ‘Conversations’ with Robert Craft lie shamefacedly unread on my bookshelf, so honestly I’ve got only the most superficial idea what he meant, gleaned from Google, and that feels a little like cheating. Plus he was infamous for telling a different lie every time he was interviewed on the same subject, a quality I find very attractive, and something I plan to emulate if anybody ever tries to interview me.

Allons-y. My interpretation of Stravinsky’s comment is that there is nothing axiomatic about music. By this I mean that music is the ultimate Wittgensteinly language game object; by its nature it contains no information within itself to assist with interpretation. It’s just sound. We learn what those sounds mean to us, and paint them with our own interpretations. What sounds sad to somebody might sound joyous to somebody else; what sounds ponderous to some will sound vital to others, and so on and so forth. Or a practical example; what sounds out of tune to people used to a scale with twelve notes in it (I assume the majority of my readership here), might sound sublime to people used to dividing their scales up into more notes, such as certain Arabic and Indian traditions.

I have told you that the music on this album tells a story. But there is an argument to be made that it only really tells a story because I decided that certain musical ideas meant certain things. And then I told you about them.

Bach and joy

Anybody talking about music has to talk about Bach sooner or later. You got some parentheses earlier on the 20th century’s greatest musicians - and now we’re on to the greatest musician ever. Bach is absolutely the ultimate musician, certainly as far as Western art music is concerned. Regardless of what you think of Western art music, he is also clearly one of the finest minds ever to walk the planet.

Because I seemingly enjoy absurd challenges, I’ve now backed myself into the corner of explaining what’s great about Bach in 200 words or fewer. The starting point is really the thing that Stravinsky said, turned into a strength. Bach’s music isn’t about anything, other than itself. At its best, it isn’t happy, or sad, or mournful, or wistful, or any transient experience. Something like the preludes and fugues of Das Wohltemperierte Clavier are just extremely pure expressions of music and nothing else.

Back wrote a lot of fugues. A fugue is a particular structure for a piece of music that has certain rules attached to it, and Bach was a master of these rules; never breaking them, but constantly bending them into all sorts of odd shapes to create ever more pure, ever more brilliant music. One of the last things Bach wrote, The Art of Fugue, unfinished at his death, wasn’t actually written for any particular instruments. I strongly suspect that, being the practical working church musician that he was, he just hadn’t got around to writing the instruments on the manuscript. But it’s hard to escape the idea of a composer who had become so brilliant that his music had transcended sound itself and ascended into the realm of complete abstraction, sort of like when alien species evolve into energy-based lifeforms in science fiction stories.

And what does this ever more abstract and refined music sound like? Well, to me, it sounds like joy. Pure, unconstrained, unrefined joy. I linked to the Glenn Gould recordings of Das Wholtemperierte Clavier above, not only because they’re brilliant, but also because you can hear Gould singing along to his own piano playing at some points. You just listen to that and think ‘well, yeah’. There’s no other rational response to such direct unrefined joy.

Choose your own adventure

Joy therefore seems to be the ultimate magical-Wittgenstein resolution. It is expressed best by things that seek to express nothing but themselves. It expresses itself in its lack of meaning, and exists in the place where you’re deliberately not looking because you’re too busy just being. If I was an 18th century essayist, I could probably spin that insight out into an 800 page book on why joy is the best emotion, but honestly that feels like stretching the point a little. Joy doesn’t need me to make arguments for it.

Because I’m not Bach, Rises expresses joy very imperfectly, and through a lot of quotidien and worldly musical metaphors. And so while Wittgenstein wins in theory, magic wins in practice. The rest of this album will live in the world of magic. But we can accept one last gift from Wittgenstein before we say goodbye to him.

Because meaning isn’t intrinsic to anything, I don’t have a monopoly on the story of this album. If you have been listening to this music and have created a different story, or different characters, or thought totally different thoughts, or felt totally different feelings, well that’s just fine. Keep them. They’re precious. Your stories are just as important and valid as mine, and if my music has led you into a different and unique world of your own experience, well. What an amazing privilege for me as an artist to have helped take you there.

What next?

Glad you asked! Firstly, thanks for reading this far. You’ve already been part of the creative journey of this album, and I very sincerely thank you for paying attention. All I’d really like is for people to listen and be part of what I’ve made. Job done. However, if you have friends or people you think would enjoy this, please encourage them to sign up to these updates via www.thesixteenth.net. It would mean a lot. And maybe actually listen to the songs in whatever way you enjoy!

You can listen to the music here, or through the links below.