In Praise

Unlike writing, which runs with its own irregular pulse, music has a regular rhythm with a steady downbeat. Musical meter controls time completely: This allows harmonizing singers and instruments to pursue separate agendas and yet still pleasurably coincide. But music also depends on phrasing, which is more subtle and varied than meter. A musical phrase lasts for about as long as a person can sing, or blow a wind instrument, in a single breath. What phrasing does to music is more like what a sentence does to words.

A skilled singer can make the phrasing, the sentence structure of a song, work with or against the meter.

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Pub crooners and karaoke singers never sing in sentences. They focus too much on lung power and hitting the notes and not enough on the words. They just belt it all out, taking gulping breaths midline, killing the meaning and the mood. But skilled singers know that the words matter. They might hold a note for effect, or add a bit of melisma, but mostly their phrasing will mirror the way the words of the song would be spoken.

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Songs are written in sentences, and phrasing is about singing in sentences, not song lines. A phraseologist like Sinatra overlays the meter with something like confiding speech. He is all about the lyrics—you can hear him enunciate every syllable—and it feels as if he is saying as well as singing them to you, stretching out and twisting the pitch of words as we do in speech.

Sinatra sings in sentences. Even a great phrasemaker like Chuck Berry has to make his sentences fit the backbeat. Another unfashionable singer filed in the same section, and whom I unfashionably loved, was Karen Carpenter.

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Singing for as long as she does on one breath, in complete sentences over twisting melodies, is an amazing feat—not just of lung capacity but of tricking her throat into thinking that she is not about to swallow. By the end of a Carpenters song you feel wrung out, as if someone has emptied their heart in front of you.

All that has happened is that you have been sucker-punched by the dexterity of a technical virtuoso, effortlessly unspooling a long sentence. Easy listening is hard singing — and easy reading is hard writing. Every writer is a poet by default and every sentence a little poem. The longer the sentence, the more closely it resembles poetry, or should do.

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A good training exercise for the long-sentence writer is to read some of the countless poems written as one long sentence, often just a simple collection of modifiers. American poetry, from Walt Whitman to Amy Clampitt, offers a vast lending library of these one-sentence poems that pile up free modifiers parted by commas. So many poems work as long, loose sentences — running over many lines, or the whole poem, and inviting us to wonder at how much they can fit inside themselves, and whether they will ever be an adequate vessel for all that needs to be said.

In fact a long, loose sentence turns into a poem if you just add line breaks: T he London Underground marks the hardest of borders between tourist and native: Poems , like songs sung well, are made of sentences as well as lines. For many poets, the unit of composition is not the line but the sentence spoken in a single outbreath.

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Meter, like rhyme, is so strict that it has to pull against something to create its agreeable tensions. Without sentences, poetry would just be sing-song. Think of a long sentence as a poem and it will always be clear, because each part of it will unravel in little musical phrases, with all the different parts coloring one another without it ever feeling discordant.

The one indispensable quality in a long sentence is that it must divide into these smaller pieces to be chewed and swallowed one at a time , and still always be moving, with each short phrase, towards completion. A long sentence should feel alive, awake, kinetic, aerobic — like a poem. For the American writing teacher Francis Christensen, learning to write was also about learning to live. Spoken by a restlessly darting, apprehensive voice, they live inside their slowly cumulative sentences, loose trails of words full of qualifications, self-corrections and second thoughts.

Bishop also thought of the long-sentence writer as an aerial artist. I like this metaphor but am not quite persuaded by it. Is the writer of a long sentence really like an acrobat? Should a long sentence be as showboating as the turns and tumbles of the trapeze artist? A trapeze act is all jumpy, interrupted suspense — the somersault over as quickly as it is seen, with that awkward smack as the anchorman grabs the forearms of his flying partner and the ropes quiver.

I am not sure I want to write sentences like that, more death-cheating jeopardy than unforced elegance. A better metaphor for the long-sentence writer, perhaps, is the high-wire walker. I know that will sound overblown, perhaps deluded. A writer is not risking all, as did the young Frenchman Philippe Petit one August day in , when he secretly strung a wire cable between the twin towers of the World Trade Center and walked across it in the morning rush hour, a quarter of a mile above a street in Lower Manhattan.

And yet Petit made the comparison himself. The trick, with both a long sentence and a high-wire walk, is to give off an air of controlled anarchy, of boundless freedom within clear constraints. Wire-walking may be a little more perilous than writing, but both are, ultimately, all about technique.

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Petit prepared like a scholar for his New York walk, studying photographs, calculating the effects of high winds and building sway, sneaking into the building to case the joint and recce the anchor points. But once he stepped out on to that thin steel cable he had to rely, like the sentence writer, on learned instinct, got through assiduous rehearsal.

He must teach his feet to land on the cable in such a way as to absorb its swaying and then coax his center of mass to move up to his torso, using his ankles as the pivot point.

He must know to pass the wire between his big and second toe, along the sole and behind the middle of the heel. A high-wire walk has the rhythm and momentum of a long sentence. It cannot be done all at once, and only succeeds if it is in constant motion. The high-wire walker must be ever alert and dynamic — although, like a sentence writer putting in a comma or semicolon, he can pause at the cavaletti, the anchor ropes that create little oases of three-dimensional steadiness and stop the wire swaying too much.

The distinction between original and copy is in its modern incarnation represented by copyright but is actually a consequence of industrial capitalism. This distinction is threatening to undermine the culture of the world and thus to marginalize other systems of reproduction. Boon uses examples from non-European cultures and especially from Buddhism to question the existence of the original in itself. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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