Mid October, I am gonna see him in person talk about his book (and I am really excited about it) but David Byrne is already revealing parts of what the discussion will be about, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
His book has the most promising and ambitious title, ‘How Music Works’, and if you just think that music works in mysterious ways, David Byrne has a much clearer explanation:
‘I think that when someone writes a successful piece of music, it’s like a drug or something that creates an emotion in the listener. And if it’s really successful, it seems like that emotion, the singer is having it at that moment. But obviously the singer’s not having that emotion every time they sing the song. It’s the song that brings up those feelings and you re-experience them, the way an actor would do. And so I feel like the song or some other kind of piece of music, if it does its job well, it brings back or recreates or digs out these emotions that are latent in us. To me that’s what happens, whether its dance music or folk music or hip-hop or whatever, when it really moves people, it doesn’t mean that that person is having that feeling, it means that they’ve managed to make a device that recreates that feeling in the listener.’
I like the way he makes the distinction between emotion and feeling, because this is exactly the same distinction used by neurobiologists: an emotion is an experience of the moment, an immediate reaction to what you are listening to, whereas a feeling is the memory of this moment left in your brain and that you are dying to re-experience… in other words emotions are bodies’ reactions and feelings are brains’ representations of these past emotions.
That’s why he says that ‘We don’t make music – it makes us’ to describe these emotions triggered by music and leaving a permanent neural map in our brains, sometimes changing them forever. Isn't it very deep and clear?
Byrne also evokes the idea that technology and societal norms shape music, which is not independent from the place where it is played, or from the audience present and the technology used. And if you have been to concerts for example, you have certainly experienced a bad venue or on the contrary, a very enthusiastic audience, and realized how much this had changed your experience with this particular kind of music… which proves that music is nothing like a pure force of the human spirit, totally isolated from the rest, it is deeply connected with its surrounding.
Interestingly, he is also pointing out that electronic music is changing the way we are listening to music:
‘If anything, a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home, hardly. It’s really only to be heard when everyone’s out enjoying it.’
But there is much more in the book of course, like his work with the Talking Heads and Brian Eno, a reflexion about the difference between high art and low art – which he says doesn’t exist – so this promises to be a very interesting talk, especially that Trent Reznor has been announced as a special guest!