You May Ask Yourself

How Music Works
By David Byrne

A couple of years ago I saw something online about how Byrne had been commissioned to create some artistic bike racks outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I saw some photos of the racks, and I thought they looked pretty cool, but I was a little confused. Why, if you needed bike racks, would you think of David Byrne? Is he a bike rack designer? Is he known as a designer at all? Sure, he likes riding his bike, but does that qualify him to design bike racks?*

Why Byrne? The answer is that almost everyone agrees that David Byrne is awesome. Of course he will come up with something interesting. Byrne gets to put on site-specific sound sculptures in which visitors get to listen to the sound of a building. He gets to publish a books of musings or photographs. He gets to direct movies, or make art from PowerPoint.

I suppose there are people who look at this list of accomplishments and think Byrne is a dilettante or jack of all trades and master of none. My friend Anu Kirk harshly criticized Byrne last year after the Guardian ran a Byrne essay lamenting the low pay musicians receive from Spotify and other streaming services. (Byrne's essay appears in similar form in my copy of the  revised edition of "How Music Works.") Personally, I don't really care for Byrne's solo work. Still, I respect Byrne and I expect that just about any new work from him is worth some attention. I think most people in the arts and music feel the same way.

"How Music Works" has the heft of a magnum opus, or a grand summation of Byrne's life work. Really, it's best understood as just another of Byrne's projects. But like almost everything else he does, it's worthy of your attention.

How Did I Get Here?

The book begins with Byrne writing that he had "an extremely slow-dawning insight about creation." To paraphrase this insight: The context of artwork determines the form of the artwork. He admits that it doesn't seem like much, and then goes on to spend hundreds of pages writing about it. Takes some nerve, huh? Thing is, he's such a charming writer that it he manages to convince you that his insight is more profound the more you think about it.

As Byrne explains it, we like to think of Great Artists expressing something unique inside their souls when they create a work of art, what they're really doing is working within a limited form that has been largely determined by a pre-existing context - standard formats that were developed out of practical considerations and audience expectations.

To give a simple example from music: The early 7-inch 45 rpm singles could only hold about four minutes of music. Thus, the basic template of all pop songs ever since has been built around a song that lasts somewhere between three and four minutes. Individual artists and individual works may push against these restrictions, but only to a limited extent.

Byrne explores this idea further, with some interesting bits about how music changed once it started being recorded. Conductors worked to get long pieces of music to fit comfortably on sides of records that held only so much room. Players and singers started using more vibrato in order to mask pitch problems that never bothered audiences when they could only hear music live.

And Byrne goes much farther than that, delving into, among other things, architecture, sound technology, neurology and psychology. Still, the aspect of the book I enjoyed most was plain old autobiography.

For example, when Byrne is writing about how the architecture of the venue dictates the kind of music that is played there, he explains how the cramped confines of CBGB's worked for the kind of stripped-down, loud and non-theatrical music that early punk bands (and Talking Heads) played. He even includes some crude illustrations he drew to show what the layout of the club was like to show how it worked. This kind of music would turn to sonic mush in a Gothic cathedral, he notes. Likewise, the music played in a Gothic cathedral -relatively slow choral and organ-based pieces - evolved to sound good when drenched in reverb.

I think the personal details fit his writing style as well. If anyone else was writing a book about the same subject matter, they would introduce people: "Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth"; "producer Brian Eno" and so on. Byrne presumes you know who he is and have some familiarity with his career, and so he often doesn't bother with last names. I think if it were anyone else writing this book, I might expect more original research and tighter structuring.

But it's not anyone else. It's David Byrne, and David Byrne is awesome. I want to read what he has to say, don't you?








* The idea of Byrne's bike racks struck a nerve with me, as it reminded me of a case in which a federal court held that a bike rack design could not be protected by copyright law because its design was purely utilitarian. When I studied that case in school, I was kind of angry about it. The bike rack design at issue in the case looked nice, and lots of bike racks don't. I had a good conversation about it with my professor in which he said maybe this mentality explains why so much of the design we see in America is ugly, because our system really doesn't care about making utilitarian things look attractive.