Quote: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture (close variant attrib Martin Mull 1980 July)

[Garson O'Toole]

The saying "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"
has previously been traced back to 1983. Numerous individuals have
been credited with this popular saying, e.g., Laurie Anderson, Martin
Mull, Frank Zappa, and Thelonius Monk. And one plausible candidate
with an early attribution, Elvis Costello, has oddly vociferously
denied connection to the maxim. Here is a new citation in 1980:

Cite: 1980 July, Black Music and Jazz Review, Volume 3, Issue 3, Page
24, IPC Specialist & Professional Press, London.

I'm not going to attempt to describe the magic here, you'll have to
check the record yourself, cos to write about this level of music is
(as Martin Mull so aptly put it) like dancing about architecture.

http://books.google.com/books?id=vitLAAAAYAAJ&q=Mull#search_anchor

A kind librarian at the University of Virginia has examined issues of
Black Music and Jazz Review on paper and verified that the snippet
displayed by the Google Books database (that contains the sentence
above) appears on page 24 of the July 1980 issue.

There was a discussion on the ADS list about this adage in January
2010. Here is a link to my previous post initiating the thread:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1001C&L=ADS-L&P=R28874

Thanks and appreciation to the magnificent librarians of the world,
Garson

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