Fascinations

On songs, songholders and other objects

Nov 10, 2023

Welcome to Songs and Objects. This project exists as a set of connected written posts and podcast episodes that focus on the materiality of song. It stems from a set of fascinations I’ve had for as long as I can remember but which I started focussing on more regularly in 2017. In this post. I’ll focus on three aspects of this: songs, objects and songholders.

Songs

One of my fascinations is song. I’ve been fascinated with songs since I was a child, not only for their qualities of concise beauty, catchiness, singability or for the sonic pleasure they provide, but also because I’ve long believed that valuable life lessons are conveyed through song in ways that no other pedagogy touches upon.

While I’d been an avid fan of pop music since before I left primary school, it was later in my teens and early adulthood that I really started to notice how many of the songs I was listening to were offering life lessons of some kind. Sometimes the experience and wisdom emanating from songs touched on something I already knew, but perhaps more often I felt I was recognising things that I hadn’t yet experienced.

At the time, my way of trying to capture that feeling was to talk, whenever I could, with my closest friends, the ones I had made mostly because we’d found we had the same experience with music, shared many favourite examples of songs, artists and genres, and wanted to share more with each other. Even then, I remember thinking that this sense of what song was teaching us would continue to matter to me for years to come.

Epiphanies and the unthought known

Music has continued to sustain me in one way or another ever since my teens. It has always been there as something to turn to, to learn from, to try to make, to respond to or to work with. Ways I’ve worked with music have varied over the years, from working in music retail in my twenties to my current work, which involves teaching and researching in a university Music department and writing books and articles that are mostly about songs of one kind or another.

During that time, my understanding of what songs were communicating to me has not fundamentally changed, but I’ve encountered different ways of trying to explain it. When I was listening to a lot of country music and watching a lot of westerns, I might think of that revelation of experience (whether lived or still to come) as the ‘yup moment’, referring to the kind of minimal utterance-cum-gesture that you’d typically find in those genres (‘yup, that about sums it up’). When I was a regular reader of The Wire magazine, I might think of it in terms of epiphanies, like those fragments of life writing that appeared at the end of each issue and reported each writer’s experience of ‘music’s transformative powers’. More recently, having discovered the work of the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, I might think in terms of ‘the unthought known’. This is a concept that Bollas uses to explain how ‘evocative’ and ‘transformational’ objects help us to realise and work through ideas which we have already anticipated in some manner but not yet articulated, or had articulated for us. The epiphanies we find in art often allow us to find ways to represent the things we have already sensed.

I still understand songs in all these ways and will doubtless have more to say on each.

Serious play

My attempts to respond to what music means to me (and to others) have so far led to me writing five books, several academic and more informal articles, and chapters in books edited by others. For a while I tried my hand at reviewing music for online magazines, but it was hard to maintain that mostly unpaid work alongside the need to earn a living. Most of the things I have written have been about songs in one form or another, though I’ve also written about sound and music more generally and about things that have little to do with the sonic, at least at surface level. The closest I’ve come to doing justice to the idea of songs as experience is in my 2015 book The Late Voice, but even there I shied away from writing about some of the most personal lessons I’d learned from the musicians I’d spent decades listening to. Some of those tales exist as half-written drafts on computers and hard drives; some of them I plan to unearth in forthcoming books and articles. This space marks a beginning for that.

At the same time, a love of pop’s playfulness that I first felt as a child has never left me. That probably explains why the book I wrote immediately after The Late Voice was The Sound of Nonsense, an attempt to respond to some of the most playful aspects of popular music, as well as sonic aspects of literature and other forms of seemingly ‘non-musical’ communication. These days I feel I’m often shuttling between these (to me, complementary) responses to music, one moment revelling in the sheer sonic inventiveness of pop, the next hearing its lessons as profound reflections on life.

Objects

The other fascination driving my current work is objects: objects in and of themselves, objects’ relationship with other objects, the role of objects in humans’ lives, and whatever emerges from thinking about all of these. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in the properties of everyday objects and also in the ways that people use objects to anchor their life stories.

Many of the writers I’ve been drawn to over the years have shown a similar fascination with objects. Jorge Luis Borges—a writer whose work I grew to love in my twenties—would often use the example of traces left behind by people as ways of witnessing their lives. ‘What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?’, he asks in a short text called ‘The Witness’. He continues, ‘The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a red horse in the vacant lot at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulphur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?’

This suggestion that history and biography are made up of seemingly unimportant details that have stubbornly persisted in memory is also taken up in texts like Joe Brainard’s I Remember and Georges Perec’s French version of Brainard’s project, Je me souviens. We also find it in Roland Barthes’s ‘biographemes’, a way of using discrete fragments in place of detailed chronology:

[W]ere I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: to “biographemes” whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion; a marked life, in sum, as Proust succeeded in writing his in his work.

When I started writing academic texts, this was very much the direction I chose to let my fascination with objects take me. Later, I came to see that there were many other things I was interested in about objects beside their power at evoking the past. I came to see objects as evocative of imagined futures and alternative possibilities. Objects could teach humans lessons about taking other perspectives.

‘Evocative objects’ is a term I first came across in a book of that title edited by Sherry Turkle and published in 2007, though it has a longer history in the work of Christopher Bollas. Turkle’s collection was based on the simple observation that ‘We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with’. Each contributor chose an object that allowed them to say something about their lives or that prompted observations about the world in general. Most chose objects that recalled aspects of their past, though there were also examples of how objects can help people create new ideas. Although not exclusively about tangible objects, most of the essays refer to physical things: a cello, knots, a laptop, ballet slippers, a rolling pin, a stuffed bunny, a glucometer, a yellow raincoat.

The idea that objects help us navigate the past, present and future is very much in keeping with Christopher Bollas’s earlier use of the term in his conception of ‘the evocative object world’. Bollas sees objects as both ‘transformational’ (meaning that we can use them to transform our experience and ultimately ourselves) and ‘aleatory’ (meaning that objects can take us by surprise and on unexpected journeys). While we can select objects for our strategic use (or according to our desires), we can also become subject to ‘aleatory objects’ which catch us unaware, surprise us and entice us.

Evocative objects are the subject matter of many songs and among those evocative objects are songs themselves. Songs about objects are often really songs about experiences, but these are experiences mediated through objects: both the objects the songs are about and the song-as-object. There are also the objects that songs get attached to and which I think of as human and nonhuman songholders.

Songholders

My ‘Songs and Objects’ project starts with two seemingly simple premises. The first is that songs are technologies for placing objects in our consciousness. The second is that songs place themselves as objects in our consciousness. The first premise relates to the content of songs, most obviously song lyrics and how they function in songs; the second relates to the form of songs, to their lives, afterlives and itineraries, and to their role in providing meaning for others.

The two initial aims can be summarised as ‘what songs do with objects’ and ‘songs as objects’. A third would be ‘what objects do with songs’. What kind of objects do I mean? Here things get slippery again, because one of my answers to this question is ‘humans’. While working on the project I’ve been thinking in terms of two types of ‘songholder’: the human and the nonhuman.

To a certain extent, human songholders can be thought of as tradition bearers, those who take song up, maintain it and pass it on. My use of the deliberately artificial-sounding ‘songholder’, however, is a way of connecting what humans do with song to what machines and other nonhumans enable songs to do. I also like the resonance with words like ‘torchbearer’, ‘keyholder’ and ‘skyscraper’. These words can be thought of as modern versions of kennings, figurative devices used in Old Norse and Old English poetry and also found in Icelandic poetry. Examples abound in classic texts such as Beowulf and in the work of the Viking skald (poet) Egill Skallagrímsson, who uses the wonderful term ‘song weigher’ in his poem ‘Sonatorrek’.

The most obvious connection between human and nonhuman songholders is that both allow songs to survive over long periods of time, often exceeding the span of a human life. Another reason for the artificial terminology is to put the emphasis on song itself as the thing that is alive, or that has agency.

Songs are things borne by singers and those who listen to singers. Singers and listeners witness, carry, store and pass on songs, acting like vessels through and in which song travels. Song enters and exits the body via the senses: sight, sound and memory most obviously, but also touch via sonic vibrations and the handling of instruments.

Songs are also things stored within other things: as ink on paper, as impressions of sound waves on wax or tape, as binary digits on computer drives, as samples and stems, as songs within songs, as streaming video data, as clouds of not-yet-song waiting for inspired songwriters to stumble into them.

Songs have biographies and travel on itineraries that take them far beyond the span of human lives.

Nutshell

In a 2008 review of Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects, the philosopher Graham Harman wrote, ‘Surely even the dullest of objects are laced with songs and legends that await their bards’. That, in a nutshell, is what my ‘Songs and Objects’ project is about.

Songs and Objects