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Humming What I Don’t Understand

Europop, Kierkegaard, and the Necessity of Listening to Music in Foreign Languages When You Have Literally No Idea What’s Being Said

By Katie AlafdalPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Humming What I Don’t Understand
Photo by Jamakassi on Unsplash

“I am like a young girl in love with Mozart and must have him placed highest whatever the cost… I shall beg Mozart to forgive me because his music did not inspire me to great deeds but made a fool of me — I, who through him lost the last grain of reason I possessed, and now spend most of my time in quiet sadness humming what I do not understand, haunting like a ghost what I cannot enter into… To take him away, to efface his name, would be to overturn the only pillar that hitherto has prevented everything collapsing for me into a boundless chaos, into a fearful nothingness”.

–Soren Kierkegaard

I’ve spent the majority of the day listening to the latest release from Kynda Gray and RIN. “Ayo Technology” is an electronic-synth techno pop bop written primarily in German, with a music video that uses mixed media from live-action to anime to convey its message. What that message is exactly, is not for me to say, seeing as I do not speak German. There seems to be a few English words thrown in there, or maybe I just hear what I want and expect to hear, playing a game of familiar aural associations.

I started listening to music in foreign languages in middle school. My French teacher would assign contemporary, theoretically innocuous, French song songs for us to translate into English to improve our fluency.

Tragically, I’ve always been a bit useless at languages. After pasting the French lyrics into Google Translate and changing a few things around, I would consider myself done with the assignment, and settle in to an evening of mindless listening. I would play the song over and over again, sometimes while I did other bits of homework, sometimes as I lay on my bed with my eyes closed. Listening to words I did not understand. Attempting to sing along, with no comprehension of what exactly I might be saying. At some point when I genuinely began to learn French, this became a less pleasurable exercise. I shifted my listening habits to German rap and Spanish pop.

Music, like certain existent visual arts (i.e. painting, abstract sculpture, etc.) has the unique ability to bypass conscious thought. Through melody, a channel is established between the material world and the perceiving unconscious—a channel, which does not necessarily require the interference of language (in seeking to convey the perfect ideal—some fragment of emotion or experience—language will always fall short; it is involuntarily reductive, outside of its poetical potentialities).

Unlike certain aforementioned visual arts, music is indelibly intertwined with chronology—it cannot be absorbed all at once but requires a certain progression. Despite this grounding in linear time, music has the ability to make us into time travelers, as melodies trigger associations. Adding a foreign language into the already deeply subliminal and incomprehensible world of melody only serves to heighten the dissonance of the listening experience. Here are notes, going somewhere, and words that do not even sound like words, but must be, and I am replicating them in my mouth, and thinking a thousand things that never solidify.

So what is the point of music? It is that it is perfectly useless. This is hardly a novel idea.

Oscar Wilde articulated it first in his Preface to the aesthetic tour de force, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”.

“All art is quite useless”. Perfectly superfluous. Flagrantly unnecessary. An exhibition of auditory opulence.

In a letter following up on this seemingly inflammatory claim, Wilde articulates, “Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression”. To experience art then, is the only thing that can be done with it. Any other actions taken in response to art are unnecessary.

James Holt McGavran elegantly articulates, “one’s understanding of the natural world, is never entirely determined by material conditions but is always at least partly constructed in the mind”. The same might be applied to one’s constructions of art, however materially entrenched that art might at first seem to be. Charles Hoffmann by way of Alfred N. Whitehead expresses, there is a, “discrepancy between a poet’s awareness of nature and the view of nature held by scientific materialists” (Hoffmann 258), a discrepancy further extrapolated by contemporary psychoanalytical discourses. For as Whitehead elaborates, “the poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, coulourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly”. What we are left with then, is the understanding that beauty is but a mere projection—the interiority of the speaker or singer or artist onto an external landscape or soundscape. Hence, there is no meaning to anything aside from what the viewer or listener herself already understands and encompasses. We are never really learning anything new, just remembering and resonating with the repressed.

But Proto-psychoanalyst Karl Robert Eduard Von Hartmann disclosed that in his study of botanicals, that a certain unconscious and indecipherable “impulse to beauty” might be observed, however difficult that might be to explain in terms of Darwinian theories of natural selection. Here, the idea seems to be that even if beauty does not make any sense, it exists anyhow, accusation or otherwise. Perhaps not understanding it is part of the point. For my part, I will continue to hum what I do not understand.

Maybe not understanding is the beginning of a profound recognition.

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About the Creator

Katie Alafdal

queer poet and visual artist. @leromanovs on insta

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