Words & Music – Three

“I want someone to make me music I can live in like a house.”
The Cock & The Harlequin, Jean Cocteau

Most musicians, I think, would prefer to have the house. Whether or not they get it depends on enough listeners paying rent in the tower of their songs or their passing a civil service aptitude test. Either way, the songs will continue to be written, so long as there is a roof, a boxcar ceiling or a forest canopy over their heads.

The songwriter writes and, for them, the song is an end in itself, a solid collected in the crucible, after inspiration, effort or desperation have evaporated. What they do with the object afterwards is their concern: they may sell it, foist it, plug it or hide it, but their aim was always, first and foremost, to draw together the elements of the song into a demo or a record or tight live arrangement.

The listener comes to the song only when it is objectified and they cannot be blamed if they treat it as if it were a mere object, assessing it for functionality, economy and attractiveness all at once. Ideally, it will be multifunctional, so that they can drift through its many rooms as if it were a house; dancing in one place, when they need to dance; crying in another, when they need to cry. And if, as to a house, the majority of us could commit ourselves to only one song, the listener would take all these things into account and consider them more carefully, as one does when appearing on Desert Island Discs.

In Tunesmith, Mr. Jimmy Webb’s book on song writing, the author makes an analogy between building a house and composing a tune; one must consider its middle eights as vestibules and its choruses as parlours, some parts should lead you to other parts, some should only bid you welcome and sit. The structure of a song, like the structure of a building, should make worthy use of the space that it occupies. His suggestion, though, is that in crafting a song this way, its brickwork should not be visible; that, in fitting it together properly, it becomes more of a whole. But this is like looking at a house only from the outside.

This way, some songs hide their functionality better than others or there functionality is obscured by the fine craftspersonship. Still, whenever somebody begins to play a record, they seek, consciously or subconsciously, to put the record to use: to distract them, to remind them, to drown out one thing or soundtrack another. Where the songwriter began by trying to force the song into an object, the listener tries to force the object into their life. The physical realisation of the song (the record, the sheet music, the live concert) must be slotted into one’s life wherever it may fit. In reality, one cannot live in it, like one lives in a house; it is too small. At best, it can live in one’s life, standing rigidly on a shelf, if it can, or fading into memory, if it can’t.

The thing about a house is that one invests a lot into it: time, money, sacrifice. In most instances, one gives up a house in exchange for another; they are not collected together on a whim. Music seldom ever asks that much from us. M. Cocteau may have desired a single piece that would have endured his lifetime and that, in so enduring, could house his experiences and shelter them, that could hide his private moments and accommodate his communions. No single piece of music could do all this; not even all three sides of Sign O’ The Times. M. Cocteau probably hoped more for a music collection.

Pop music, as a recorded canon, became a sort of music that we can live in. Music had always functioned on a communal level, bringing people together at specific times and regulating season or ritual. But pop music, as a recorded object that could be owned by the individual, began to be organised around or to organise individual lives. Music moved from the spectacle of church and concert hall to the seclusion of the home and, finally, the trouser pocket, from public sphere to private.

But, oddly, as the musical object becomes less of a physical object, it becomes more like a house. Unconstrained by cost or space and untethered from specific plots of earth, the collection can grow astronomically, tending not to be fluid, but being, instead, extended and converted in all directions. The digital music collection is monolithic (black and shiny); it is rigid and mostly only added to, seldom diminished or demolished.

So much music is available and so easily, that it is difficult for one to get a view of music as a whole or how it may be enjoyed by the many – it is not. For most, it is easier simply to take up residence inside one’s own music collection, building outwards when one needs the space. The MP3 player is the house of which M. Cocteau spoke and it can be all too cheaply furnished with musical doodads; your playlists are its many rooms, divided up by function, aesthetic or ambiance, and you may drift through them as you please, living your life here. Even as you leave the house to go to work.