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

[Dan Goncharoff]

I just thought I should point out that, if Martin Mull said it and lots of
people heard it, he may have said it on one of his albums from the 70s.

DanG

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Garson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Garson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Quote: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture
>              (close variant attrib Martin Mull 1980 July)
>
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>
> 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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