This is my first post, so please bear with me.  I’m calling my blog “Dancing About Architecture”  in part because it IS about architecture...and music and urbanism and sustainability and climate change anything else that I think is important enough to write about.

OK, there’s another blog called “dancing about architecture” and that guy actually has the “dancingaboutarchitecture.com” domain. That blog seems to be mostly about current American popular music. I don’t like much current American popular music; there’s so much more interesting going on musically in the world. But that’s another post.

The name fits for this blog so I’m going to use it.

The quote, “Talking (or writing) about music is like dancing about architecture,” has been attributed to Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Thelonius Monk, Laurie Anderson,  Clara Schuman, Igor Stravinsky, Steve Martin, and Martin Mull among others. Elvis Costello is quoted in a magazine interview  as saying “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture; it’s a really stupid thing to do.” (1) Elvis, though, has said he doesn’t remember saying it. We may never know where it started.

I don’t think writing about music, or dancing about architecture for that matter, is a stupid thing to do.  It’s probably more productive and definitely more interesting  to make or listen to music, or to design or experience architecture, but occasionally things need an explanation. And words and pictures are the ways people explain things. So writing about music and architecture and all those other things, with occasional images and audio clips, seems like a good idea.

There is truth, though, in the implicit absurdity of the statement, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.  Music, architecture, dance, art in general are much better experienced directly that written or talked about.  I’ll try to point out ways and sources to get to those direct experiences in future posts.

For now please see the web links elsewhere on this site, listen to my radio show, Musical Journeys on 30A Radio from 10 to noon Saturdays, Central Time and look for future posts to this blog.  You can subscribe to “Dancing About Architecture at the RSS link on the main blog page.

Thank you.

Frank Greene

(1) Timothy White,"A Man out of Time Beats the Clock." Musician No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52.