Adam Neely | A Song Without Words @AdamNeely | Uploaded 5 years ago | Updated 7 hours ago
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...
youtu.be/CItQgMAQBcg
Felix Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words
youtube.com/watch?v=y1uvYdW8MSk
Mainly an excuse to read from W.A. Matthieu's the Musical Life
amzn.to/2DjZJDi
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.
(⌐■_■)
⦿ Adam Neely T-shirts! ⦿
teespring.com/stores/adam-neely-merchandise
⦿ SUPPORT ME ON PATREON ⦿
http://www.patreon.com/adamneely
⦿ FOLLOW ME ON THE INTERNETS ⦿
http://www.facebook.com/adamneely
http://www.instagram.com/its_adamneely
⦿ Check out some of my music ⦿
http://sungazermusic.bandcamp.com
http://insideoutsidemusic.bandcamp.com
http://adamneelymusic.bandcamp.com
Peace,
Adam
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...
youtu.be/CItQgMAQBcg
Felix Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words
youtube.com/watch?v=y1uvYdW8MSk
Mainly an excuse to read from W.A. Matthieu's the Musical Life
amzn.to/2DjZJDi
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.
(⌐■_■)
⦿ Adam Neely T-shirts! ⦿
teespring.com/stores/adam-neely-merchandise
⦿ SUPPORT ME ON PATREON ⦿
http://www.patreon.com/adamneely
⦿ FOLLOW ME ON THE INTERNETS ⦿
http://www.facebook.com/adamneely
http://www.instagram.com/its_adamneely
⦿ Check out some of my music ⦿
http://sungazermusic.bandcamp.com
http://insideoutsidemusic.bandcamp.com
http://adamneelymusic.bandcamp.com
Peace,
Adam
