Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do: Writing about Music, Meaning, and the Ineffable

Joel Heng Hartse

Feb 2022 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

About this eBook

Writing about music, far from being the specialized domain of the rock critic with encyclopedic knowledge of micro-genres or the fancy-pants star journalist flying on private planes with Led Zeppelin, has become something almost any music lover can do--and does. It's been said, however, that writing about music is a difficult, even pointless enterprise--an absurd impossibility, like "dancing about architecture." But aside from the fact that dancing about architecture would be awesome, what is that ineffable something that drives people to write about music at all? In this short, insightful book, Joel Heng Hartse unpacks the rock writer Richard Meltzer's assertion that writing about music should be a "parallel artistic effort" with music itself--and argues that music and the impulse to write about it is part of the eminently mysterious desire for meaning-making that makes us human. Touching on the close resonances between music, language, love, and belief, Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do is relevant to anyone who finds deep human and spiritual meaning in music, writing, and the mysterious connections between them.

About the author

Joel Heng Hartse is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. His music criticism has appeared in Paste, Geez, Image, the Stranger, Christianity Today, Christ & Pop Culture, and many other publications. He is author of Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll (Cascade, 2010) and co-author of Perspectives on Teaching English at Colleges and Universities in China (2015). He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and sons.