The origins of this quote have long been shrouded in mystery and controversy. When I first did a thorough Web search for an answer, wa-a-ay back on December 30, 1996, most instances didn't have any attribution at all - and those that did credited one or more of a dozen different people. It's certainly not my own - I lay no claim to it whatsoever. If you ever see this quote attributed to me, it's more than likely just someone's sloppy reading of this very web page!
The situation hasn't gotten much better in the intervening years. Alert reader Mark Turner (nugroove@pacbell.net) has kindly provided the earliest solid citation I've seen so far, for any variant:
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's a really stupid thing to want to do."
--Elvis Costello, in an interview by Timothy White entitled "A Man out of Time Beats the Clock." Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52.
This is the earliest verifiable source I've ever seen for this quote, and it's absolutely real - I've seen the article myself. It raises the bar; any future contender for ultimate attribution must be both verifiably earlier and at least this solid, as far as I'm concerned.
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However, it's not the final word on the subject by any means, even leaving aside the mutation to (or from) the more common and euphonious "Talking about...."
For example, I've been told quite definitely by author Rafi Zabor that David Breskin, undoubtedly a talented man of many hats (poet, musician, journalist and novelist) who was involved with Musician magazine at the time of the interview quoted above, was the source of - or at least an early and vigorous vector for - this quote. I am still trying to get more information from or about Breskin's role.
I am also told (by Australian music journalist Michael Dwyer, based on an interview Dwyer did with Elvis Costello in October 2005) that Costello himself doesn't remember having said this, and that Costello would attribute it - at least tentatively - to Martin Mull.
Martin Mull shows up in quite a few attributions, actually. Another correspondent, Barry Gilbert, writes (quoted with permission from email 4/19/2002):
I remember hearing it while in college in upstate NY. When I told this to a couple of friends, we decided to see if dancing about architecture was really so strange. We decided to do an improvisation at our campus's open mic night. My friend Tom improvised on acoustic guitar, while my friend Don improvised poetry about architecture, and I interpreted it in "dance". It was altogether weird. I left school in spring 1981, so I can be 100% sure that I heard this quote prior to that. I also remember, at the time. reading it quoted from Martin Mull [emphasis added]. I was a big fan, at the time, of his comedy/musical recordings and read everything I could find about him. I'm not 100% sure that he is the first to ut[t]er this quote, but I know he used it.
Songwriter Jimmy Webb begins his excellent book Tunesmith (itself quite a dance about the architecture of music!) by attributing the quote to Martin Mull... though without any specific source. Thanks to Bob Bennett for pointing this one out.
Another correspondent named Julian tells me that he clipped a copy of this quote, attributed to Martin Mull, from the Village Voice in 1982 or 1983. However, Julian was unable to tell me a specific issue to look for, and I have not seen it myself, so this attribution must remain tentative at best.
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Journalist and film music historian Jon Burlingame once asserted another, much older possibility: the 19th-Century composer and pianist Clara Schumann (thanks to Alan Kay, whose own contender is Igor Stravinsky, for the link, and to Seth Orbach for the pointer to Kay!). Unfortunately, Burlingame didn't include a specific cite, and I have so far been unable to locate the quote in my own perusal of the - ironically - voluminous diaries, letters and the like in which Clara Schumann wrote about music.
Also, I have myself seen (independently corroborated November 2003 by Alec McLane on the Usenet newsgroup bit.listserv.mla-l) that the Clara Schumann attribution may just be an artifact of a Google search result for this site, which lists a different quote from Schumann just above a cite (naming Laurie Anderson) of "Talking about music..." in a way that led Google to display it with Schumann's name above the quote and Anderson's omitted.
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For some reason, David Byrne and even Frank Lloyd Wright have been mentioned to me of late as sources, though so far without any specific citation. While they've certainly been around long enough to be possibilities, I find myself wondering why they weren't mentioned earlier...
Correspondent Maggie Mortensen remembers having heard the quote in the 1970s, attributed to Thelonious Monk. Attribution to Monk also appears in a book called Quotations for Artists, Performers, Managers & Entrepreneurs, edited by Chuck Suber, though unfortunately only with the notation "[??]," which I am told means "missing data. [Readers, please assist.]" - not very definitive.
The same goes for Frank Zappa, another long-time contender - plenty of assertions, but never any specific citations.
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So the mystery continues. Further comments and, especially, information are always greatly appreciated. In particular, if you know how I could get in touch with any possible primary sources who're still alive, please let me know at ascott@pacifier.com.
Here is the full list of candidates I found in 1996, most frequent first, for "Talking about music..." (which I now think may be the later variant):
The most frequent attribution, but most definitely incorrect. Anderson's video Home of the Brave (Warner, 1986) contains this quote; that's in fact where I saw it first. She also ripostes, "How about a square dance?", which I think is pretty funny.
However, Anderson herself attributes this quote to Steve Martin in Mark Russell's book Out of Character (Bantam, January 1997), as Ponty Lox informed me May 30, 1998. This was enough to get me to pull the quote from my section on Laurie Anderson's quotes. Then Thornley Jobe sent me a link to the listeners' mail section of National Public Radio's Morning Edition for January 14, 2000, in which they speak with Anderson herself and she confirms her belief that Martin said it. And the NPR commentator even mentions the existence of this page!
These attributions specifically mentioned the version "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
If you came to this page directly, please feel free to peruse the rest of my site - there's a lot more here!
My heartfelt thanks go out to the many kind correspondents, both named above and not, who've provided or tried to provide information to me about this quote over the years. Without you this page would be a lot shorter.
visitors since 3/5/2004.
©1996-1998, 2000-2006 Alan P. Scott. All rights reserved.
Last updated August 25, 2006.
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ascott@pacifier.com