A Song Without Words

A song without words - also, I talk about words and music on top of it. If you'd like to check out the song without words without any words, click here...

Felix Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words

Mainly an excuse to read from W.A. Matthieu's the Musical Life

LETTER FROM FELIX MENDELSSOHN TO MARC-ANDRÉ SOUCHAY, BERLIN, OCTOBER 15, 1842

People often complain that music is too ambiguous...whereas everyone understands words. With me it is .exactly the reverse, and not only with regard to an entire speech, but also with individual words. These...seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts that are expressed to me by music...are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite. And so I find in every effort to express such thoughts that something is right, but at the same time, that something is lacking in all of them...If you ask me what I was thinking of when I wrote [the song], I would say: just the song as it stands.

And if I happen to have certain words in mind… I would never want to tell them to anyone, because the same words never mean the same things to different people. Only the song can say the same thing, can arouse the same feelings in one person as in another, a feeling that is not expressed, however, by the same words.

CHAPTER FROM W.A. MATTHIEU'S THE MUSICAL LIFE: Listening to Evening

Let me tell you my big epiphany about language. I’ve always been a musician - I’ve spent fifty years practicing music. It never occurred to me to be a write, option or no, and only in the last five years have I tried to develop writing discipline. The more I wrote and played with language, the more absorbed I became in its delights and intrigues. At first I fully anticipated becing about to say what I mean, to so fill in the arteries with word blood as to sense the pulse of the hearts. Or something. Perfect clarity does occur in music - one learns to compose all of what the moment carries, even to spill some foam, so to speak. But I never feel that words completely say what aches to be said.

Last year I was sitting on my studio porch doing my favorite thing: listening, after an afternoon of music, to the evening. All across the sky was the flickering between two worlds (twilight means two-light”) When I looked up, I felt a pulse under my eyelids and thought, I know this dusk flicker and I’ll bet everyone else does too, but there are just no words to describe it. No way. Impossible.”

Perhaps especially owing to the sweetness of the hour, the inadequacy of language seemed like an abandonment, as though a good friend was letting me down. Then I found myself remember these words:

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.

I had been given ether as a child. I had been a patient etherized upon a table, had gone under and felt the twilight underneath... Now, as the childhood experience, the poem, and the present moment all came together, my love for language blossomed right there on the porch.

I saw that language is metaphor and simile, and that the operative word is like, spoken or implied. Words approach experience roundabout, pecking an jabbing at it from every side until eventually blow draws blood, then a vital cut, then experience flows red. It is like that, and like that, till we zero in on meanin impossible to articulate directly. I began to enjoy this kind of play, even thought it is more work than I bargained for. I began to appreciate the longing, in Rumi’s poetry, to be filled with love and emptied of words. I began to understand how words that are beautifully right can bring you so close to the edge that all you have to do is make a little jump - plink! - like a finch off of a wire.

Music is entirely specific: what you hear is what you get. Language is rich and various and inexact. You have to keep saying what is, a thousand ways, until someone jumps.

(⌐■_■)

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Peace,
Adam

[cocacraesh]

.... Sorry Adam, could you repeat that I wasnt listening

[RudyAyoub]

I dont remember the last time I listened to non instrumental music








i Am SoPhiStiCatEd LiKe ThAt

[mattdoesstuff]

Tbh I played more attention to the song then what was being said. That might actually go with the theme of this video.

[CoolspyGaming]

I stopped watching halfway through when I noticed how my ears had tuned out your voice to focus on the music.
*Was this another one of your tests, perhaps?*

[flhoneycomb]

You can feel the chord progression and melody.. making the song goes down to what you feel..

[felipemontero]

"There are two things that don’t have to mean anything in order to give us very deep pleasure: one is music and the other is laughter” - Inmanuel Kant

[AcornFox]

This is wild. Kind of explains why i can recall music really easily, but lyrics only with great difficulty.

[zozicuervo]

It's funny how my brain works while I watch this vídeo. When the music starts I perceive your voice as a texture or an instrument over this lovely and catchy music. Man, it's soo pleasing! But at the same time, another process tell me the meaning of the words. Maybe it hapens this way cause I live in Brazil and english is not my natural lenguage. I can feel these two processes happening separetelly.
It happens when I watch Carl sagan on Cosmos as well.

Great subject, by the way. As always.

[Sonic]

When I started composing back when I was 15, I remember those who heard my music "Where are the words?", I remember replying "Sometimes, you just don't need them."

[LienRanMizunagi]

The experience of music is like listening to different poems or literary pieces written in a language that you can't decipher while watching a fluent person act out the words but then you seem to understand it by giving it meaning through the actor's actions.

[garretkaplan]

Love this version and the sungazer version!

[jaredmeit]

Mind blowing. Especially the Mendelssohn quote.

[VelvetRobot]

As someone who listens to a lot of (and has an interest in composing) instrumental electronic music, this really speaks to me. People sometimes ask me how I can understand and connect with music that doesn't have any lyrics, and I never know how to explain that it's because of the lack of words that allows me to interpret it on a much deeper level. Music is a unique medium in that it transcends language barriers and generational gaps, it's nearly universally applicable and can convey meaning in a way that words simply can't; I feel like I understand music more than I understand English sometimes.

[NuclearHeadshot]

Seeing plenty of people lose focus on your words with music playing (me included, but that happens to me literally whenever music is played), it's a great way to experience how it feels to have ADD, your mind just can't focus on the words even though you hear him speak.

[denismarcorin]

My head kinda tuned your voice out the first time I watched, and had me listening to a wonderful tune.
Then I listened a second time, with a conscious effort to pay attention to your voice.
Then I listened a third time, realizing how greatly speech and music interact in this piece.
Lovely, man.

[ryanchadwick]

I think music is the ultimate language. You can watch a play and certain scenes, parts, characters and monologues, can make you feel happy, sad, anger, make you laugh, make you cry, but only in context to either the play/performance and if the writing/actor is good, also if you speak the language of the actors. But music man. That’s a whole different level. You can listen to a German composer, an African guitarist or an Italian violinist and immediately, you can understand what they are saying, go through the motions of hate, sadness, happiness or any emotion. You just understand. That’s why I think music is the ultimate language. Everyone just clicks.

[blackcat]

To me, all music is instrumental. The human voice is just another instrument, no different from guitar or violin, and the main purpose of lyrics is making it easier to sing along with the vocal melody. I rarely pay attention to the actual content of lyrics, not even in my favorite songs.

[horaciobotta]

As a Literature Proffesor and Musician, this is gold to me. Greetings from Uruguay

[xicaobass]

i once saw Gary Willis saying something like.. words are a limiter to music interpretation, today i can find this melodie sad, but tomorrow it can be happy.. with words you will feel the melodie as it is spoken!

[degenerateantics]

when an album or a compostion has callbacks to previous melodies, Its not that the callback has no meaning now without the original melody but the new context in the music it means more. Like how he was able to understand the words by relating it to an older childhood memory.