“James Baldwin and Dancing about Architecture”

An oft-quoted warning—which I’ve always attributed to the American rock critic Lester Bangs, but whose origins are apparently murky, and might have originally been said by Martin Mull, Laurie Anderson, Steve Martin, Thelonius Monk, or Elvis Costello—holds that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Writing is one kind of art form, music another, and the effort to try to account for the effects of music in language is inherently doomed to approximation, vagueness, and failure. Or it could be just saying that writing well about music, in an illuminating way, is really, really difficult. Either way, the phrase has stuck so well, been recirculated so many times that no one knows who originally said it, because it clearly holds true. The experience of listening to, being moved by, music surpasses our ability to articulate it.

James Baldwin writes about music throughout Going to Meet the Man: the singing during the revival meeting in “The Outing,” the gospel songs performed by Pete and the narrator in “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” the mention of specific musicians and singers like Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker, the protest songs sung by the activists in “Going to Meet the Man,” which upset Jesse so strongly (and, grotesquely, the songs he remembers the “picknickers” singing at the lynching his father takes him to at age eight). Music is a part of the world his characters occupy, and Baldwin makes their listening to and performance of music central to these stories.

In “Previous Condition,” we sit with the narrator as he listens to “Ludwig” (van Beethoven) on the radio in the apartment downstairs from the one his white friend rented for him, terrified that he’ll be discovered in this white-only building. Baldwin represents what the narrator is hearing as a visual imagining of the orchestra’s performance, as if we are listening with him:

            I sat with my knee up, watching the lighted half-moon below, the black-coated, 
            straining conductor, the faceless men beneath him moving together

            in a rhythm like the sea. There were pauses in the music for the rushing, calling,

            halting piano. Everything would stop except the climbing soloist; he would reach

            a height and everything would join him, the violins first and then the horns; and

            then the deep blue bass and the flute and the bitter trampling drums; beating,

            beating and mounting together and stopping with a crash like daybreak. (90)

The music sets the mood for the tense scene that follows, as “below the music” he hears “footsteps on the stairs.” There’s irony, of course, in this Beethoven-appreciating theater-geek being miscast as a threatening, dangerous black man by the racist landlady and her racist tenants just as he’s miscast as Bigger Thomas in Native Son. (Not as if her eviction of him would be justified if he’d been listening to Charlie Parker or James Brown, but Baldwin emphasizes how badly she misreads him by making him a fan—and careful, informed listener—of the quintessential Western classical composer.) But Baldwin doesn’t just narrate that his narrator listens to Beethoven; he walks us through the performance, as the narrator hears it, in a very active way. The different parts of the composition are joined together (“orchestrated”?) in a single sentence, linked by semicolons, to reflect their working in concert together. His language is figurative and evocative—the pit musicians moving together “in a rhythm like the sea”; the “rushing, calling, halting piano”; the “deep blue bass” and “bitter trampling drums.” The performance is active, in Baldwin’s narrative, as is the narrator’s listening.

The tour-de-force of “dancing about architecture” in this book would be “Sonny’s Blues.” The title of the story holds two simultaneous connotations, both of them reflected in the quintessentially American musical form of the blues: Sonny’s personal struggles, his suffering, his demons, his addiction to heroin, and the music he produces in response to that human condition. He “has the blues” and he “plays the blues,” and his performance of music serves as the pivotal scene in the story. The culminating scene—where Sonny has invited the narrator to come out and see him play at a jazz club in the Village—represents both a personal form of communication between the narrator and his estranged brother and a more complex form of reflection on African American history and cultural resilience (which jazz itself represents, with each new performer adding to that story in some way). The scene makes for one of the most satisfying, moving endings to any story we’re going to read this semester, and I often cite it as one of the best examples of writing about music that I know.

Previous to Sonny’s performance, we have an extensive, very serious conversation between Sonny and his brother in which Sonny attempts to make his brother understand his heroin use, his music, and how they’re connected as a response to the “suffering” that is inherent to existence. Significantly, Sonny raises this topic after having listened to the singing at the storefront church service across the street: “When she was singing before . . . her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes. . . . Sometimes you’ve got to have that feeling” (131). Earlier in the story, the narrator sums up his failure or refusal to empathize with Sonny by telling his heroin-using friend, “I certainly didn’t want to know how it felt” (107). He’s much more comfortable judging Sonny, or simply remaining perplexed about “why” he would get involved with people who use heroin, than trying to understand what Sonny is going through, “what it feels like.” And even in this later conversation, there’s no clear indication that communication has taken place. “It can come again,” Sonny says to his brother, referring to his addiction and how the desire to relieve the suffering never fully disappears. “It can come again. . . . I just want you to know that.” The narrator’s response resembles his much earlier failure to really grasp his mother’s urge that he “be there for” Sonny: “All right. . . . So it can come again. All right” (135). “You’re my brother,” Sonny says. “Yes,” the narrator repeats, “yes, I understand that.” But it’s not at all clear to the reader that he does understand: he gets that Sonny is his brother, of course, but he doesn’t seem to get what Sonny is implying about brotherhood, and understanding, and compassion. He reaches out to his older brother and tries to honestly let him know about his experience, but his brother just says, “yeah, yeah, I get it.”

So when the narrator shows up at the club downtown, Sonny gets another opportunity to express himself, this time without words. It’s as if Baldwin were saying some things are better expressed nonverbally, musically, through the individual expression of improvisation in collaboration with other musicians. The narrator hasn’t “gotten” Sonny’s music since he first declared his intent to be a musician; he’s bewildered by Sonny’s early efforts to play piano, he is totally unfamiliar with the bebop style (epitomized by Parker) that Sonny loves, and he dismisses the whole downtown Village jazz scene as shady and morally suspect—just the kind of situation that will land Sonny in jail one day.

It’s a big deal, therefore, for the narrator to even be in attendance at this show. And because he’s the narrator, we experience Sonny’s performance in a very direct and personal way—we listen with the narrator, and Baldwin’s remarkable portrayal of the delicate negotiations of live improvised performance all reflect the narrator’s understanding of what Sonny is doing.

I would love to walk through the entire performance scene—which runs from page 137 to 140, and which I insisted on reading aloud in its entirety this morning in class—but this post is already running long. Baldwin presents the “thesis” of this scene at the start: “All I know about music,” the narrator says, “is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates music is hearing something else. . . . What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason” (137).

The music “has no words,” but Baldwin doesn’t spare any in the effort to represent the narrator’s experience as a listener. What he writes is not simply good musical criticism, like a skilled reviewer of jazz performance. The performance is action in this story, quite literally a form of conversation, and we watch as Sonny’s playing, and Creole’s orchestration of the band to allow for Sonny to express himself, and his gentle encouragement of Sonny, all registers on the narrator’s consciousness. He doesn’t “describe” the music; he narrates it. Observe the strikingly specific active verbs Baldwin uses throughout, and how few of them are typical ways to describe people playing instruments: the musicians on stage “say” things, and others “answer,” “listen,” and “comment.” Creole “remind[s] them that what they were playing was the blues” and “tell[s] us what the blues were all about” (139)—and he’s not stopping and lecturing from the stage. The language of verbal communication is deployed to depict the interaction among musicians and between musicians and audience. Baldwin describes Creole as gently leading Sonny out into deeper water, before allowing him to swim (or “speak”) for himself.

The final descriptive passage—“Sonny’s blues,” as “announced” musically by Creole—is remarkable, as we see both Sonny’s performance and the narrator’s very personal and specific “understanding” of what Sonny is “saying”: “Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his” (140). Sonny’s expression takes effort, takes suffering, and the narrator seems to “understand” this: “I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth.” The narrator sees his mother’s face again, and “for the first time” feels a deep empathy for her and her struggle. He sees “the moonlit road where [his] father’s brother died” and, heartbreakingly, “I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise.” (My own begin to rise just typing this line.) Sonny moves the narrator—from comprehension, to compassion, to an awareness of this music and its deep historical connection to their family and their race, to a powerful emotional experience of his own suffering, made beautiful through wordless music.

A pretty good dance about architecture, if you ask me.