The Sacred Texts: How Music Works, by David Byrne

How a book about the history and practice of making and recording music changed the way I think about film history and art in general

While I’ve been a long-time fan of David Byrne, specifically of his work with Talking Heads, I only heard about this book less than ten years ago after reading one of those puff pieces where a celebrity talks about their favorite things, or the things they can’t live without, or whatever. Usually these are predictable (a copy of Catcher in the Rye or On the Road, a point-and-shoot camera, a ball point pen) or ludicrously out of touch (an Hermes scarf or a $750 face serum) but this one, featuring QuestLove, highlighted this book; he mentioned that he carried a copy with him in his bag whenever he traveled. I filed this away somewhere in the back of my mind, and then later when I was in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris in 2018 I saw a copy and decided to buy it. Once I started reading, I understood why QuestLove considered it such a precious object. The book is a very unique look at music – as a naturally physical phenomenon, its history as a means of cultural expression - as well as something of a guide to how to live a musical life in addition to being a look at Byrne’s own life and his creative and songwriting processes. Part memoir, part anthropology, part criticism, every page pulses with keen insight and deep passion for the subject at hand, and it’s written in a very direct and plain-spoken way that makes it as accessible as it is probing. It quickly became one of my favorite books of all time – not just for how it changed the way I thought about music, but in the way that it, like all great works, completely changed and clarified the way I looked at and thought about everything.

How a Book on Music Changed my Understanding of Film History

One of the major takeaways from the book for me was how Byrne frames the history of music as an art form, as a phenomenon, separately from recorded music. It’s an obvious thing in hindsight, but the idea that how we engage with music as a species changed completely once we started recording and packaging it got me thinking about film. There’s no comparison here – music was influenced by and evolved according to the invention of recording technology, whereas movies could only begin to exist once the requisite technology was developed.

Where this does come into play though is in question about what cinema even is. Most would define it in some way as a narrative medium, and that’s certainly the most common iteration – certainly in the commercial sphere, at least. But aside from being creatively and intellectually limiting, this also fails to account for the fact that cinema cannot be limited to a definition that purely considers it as narrative when those narrative forms existed before cinema in the form of theatrical presentation. If we’re going by this definition, then movies are simply an evolution of theatre; and while they often are or can be in that very specific sense, they can and should also be so much more.

It's fascinating and rather appropriate in this context that the other book I picked up when I bought Byrne’s was Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph. Bresson was a narrative filmmaker, ostensibly, and yet he rejected the notion that cinema was a dramatic art form. In both his style and specifically in the way he used actors, he dispelled the idea of cinema as a representation of lived or even emotional reality and saw it instead as a purely photographic medium that just happened to employ movement. In this way he was working to conceptualize cinema as what it was - a completely new medium with all the potential that status offered - rather than merely an extension of pre-existing forms like literature or drama.

I was aware of and had been teaching all of the immediate pre-cinema implementations of moving images prior to buying either book – magic lanterns, the zoetrope, Muybridge’s zoopraxoscope – but it was after reading How Music Works that I started to really consider what fundamental expressive urge in the human consciousness cinema fulfilled, and it ultimately led me to tracing cinema back to the cave paintings of Cheuvet. I’m not the first or only person to make this connection, but it’s one I came to on my own without knowing of any of those forbears. And of course, even still we have to consider how and to what extent this links cinema inextricably with previously-existing visual art forms and languages (everything from painting and photography to hieroglyphics and pictographs¹).

What these explorations into its pre-history ultimately suggest however, particularly in the dead-ends or circular loops that they lead to, is that we have been selling cinema short by inhibiting it to a predominantly narrative medium. If cinema is truly new, then perhaps the function it needs to serve (not just aesthetically but socially and culturally) can still be completely rethought and moved beyond the limited scope within which we’ve pigeonholed it.

Finding the words

How does one balance intuition with careful consideration? Should one even bother with the latter? Can the two even co-exist?

To me writing is like composing (blech, I know) in that I’m at my best when I’m throwing words on the page and trying to find ways to make them work together and flow into some overall unified and satisfying whole. I’m not a songwriter, but it seems as if the process of noodling with a specific riff or melody until you figure out how to carry it into a bridge or into different movements is similar to the way I craft any kind of written piece. I often start with a line, an image, a circumstance, a character, or even a collection of words that I think sound interesting together and go from there.

I have always connected more with the way that musicians write songs - taking stray bits and fragments and following them wherever they lead, until you get enough raw material that you can then start sifting through and finding patterns and through lines that cohere into something more complete and finite. And just like you can’t really write the song until you sit behind the piano or pick up the guitar and physically start working it out, I don’t actually start figuring out what I’m writing until I pick up a pen or open up the laptop and start scribbling or typing.

I had read about the process by which Byrne wrote the lyrics for the Speaking in Tongues album - the melodies were written first, and he originally sang nonsense words to find the shape of the lyrical lines before then finalizing them into their finished form. It’s right there in the title, ultimately. Though as Byrne details in later chapters of his book, he basically carried this process on from that point.

So much of the learning process of writing, of the work of developing one’s voice and style and even approach as a writer, is getting to a place where you can justify the processes that come naturally to you. You can learn and apply discipline and habit, you can set aside time to dedicate to working, but you can’t change who you are. I wasted…no, spent, rather, a lot of time trying to mold myself into a version of what I thought a writer was not only in terms of style but in terms of process before I finally let that go and decided to just follow and trust the process that came naturally to me. It’s what enabled me to finally start writing and publishing this newsletter. And what I came to was that for me what works is just sitting down and writing; letting it flood onto the page and either work itself out in the moment or through careful review and revision.

This is not a new or particularly revelatory insight. It is, in plain fact, how this shit has always worked. But I had to find my own way to it, and this book was a big help because it validated that process for me.

And of course I completely understand the irony of using someone else’s work and approach to justify and solidify my own self-discovered method.

Confluence

The ultimate takeaway for me may be the ways in which all forms of art and expression feed off of and are in constant dialogue with each other. One of the things I find most lamentable is when people dedicate themselves to their love of a single art form or medium to the point that they either exclude everything else or they filter it through that singular focus - film nerds who only read books about or based on movies or only listen to soundtracks, for instance, if I can rattle the cage of my own kin. Kurt Vonnegut once said that he felt as if aspiring writers should major in anything other than writing so as to free us from books that were only about and replicating the history of literature. I won’t go that far for film - my job would be on the line! - but I do think we limit ourselves when we are not open to the influence, no matter how direct or inferred, of other forms. I’m always less interested in films influenced by other films than I am in films influenced by music², or paintings, or even just fucking moods. We have the whole history of human art and creativity to not only build off of but go beyond and surpass. Why not use all of it? If the capitalist overlords are going to insist on squishing everything together into a bland and vaguely nutritional paste of content (a truly loathsome word) delivered by conglomerated services, then let’s beat them at their own game by taking influence from any and everything we can while also dictating our own terms for what form or outlet the resulting work takes or is distributed.

-cs

1. No coincidence that Eisenstein, in formulating his theories of film editing, looked to Japanese ideograms as a forbear of the concept of collision in montage.

2. I’m not only saying this because I used to write entire movies based on my favorite songs and albums in my pre-teen and teen years, though I’m not not saying it for that reason.