Chapter 46Culmination
Song
Speech says what is the case. Song says what cannot be finished being said.
Az yashir. Why the tradition’s highest moments are sung rather than stated, and what dissonance is for.
אָז יָשִׁיר־מֹשֶׁה וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵלThen Moshe and the children of Israel sang.
The response to the sea was not a statement.
Then Moshe and the children of Israel sang.
The response to the sea was not a statement.
Az yashir — then he will sing. The verb is in the imperfect, which has occupied commentators for centuries, and the plain reading is enough for this chapter: at the sea, the response to what had happened was not a statement.
What song does that speech cannot
Speech is optimised for finishing. A sentence delivers its content and ends, and a good sentence ends efficiently. This is what makes speech the faculty of malchus: it transmits, and transmission wants to complete.
Song does not finish in the same way. It repeats, it returns, it holds a syllable past the point where the information has been delivered. Anyone who has sung a niggun without words has done something that speech cannot do: sustained a relation to something without asserting anything about it.
Speech
Delivers content. Ends. Optimised for transmission. Can be summarised without loss.
Song
Sustains relation. Returns. Optimised for dwelling. Summarising it destroys it.
You cannot summarise a niggun. That is the entire point of one.
Dissonance
A musical tradition that only used consonance would have nothing to say about exile. What makes resolution meaningful in music is that it resolves something — the tension is not a defect in the piece, it is the mechanism by which the piece means anything.
The Chassidic niggun is unusual among religious musics in how much unresolved material it carries. Many of them are in minor modes and stay there for long stretches. The joy in them is not the absence of the minor; it is what the minor turns into without being denied.
The song of the future
The Levitical service in the Mikdash was musical, and the sources describing the future service keep the music — including the eighth string of the previous chapter.
אָז יִמָּלֵא שְׂחוֹק פִּינוּ וּלְשׁוֹנֵנוּ רִנָּהThen our mouth will be filled with laughter, and our tongue with song.
Then — not now. The tense is the argument.
Then our mouth will be filled with laughter, and our tongue with song.
Then — not now. The tense is the argument.
And the verse from Tehillim pairs laughter with rinah, song. Not with explanation. The resolution the tradition anticipates is described in the register of music rather than of argument, which is a claim about what kind of resolution it is.