Music, autism and the limits of language

... and why a choir in Somerset and The Cure's Just Like Heaven take us into what lies beyond mere words

At one side of the chapel, a small choir was rehearsing. Blue sky beamed in through a stained-glass window just behind them; they had an an accidental audience of four. But the sound they made was incredible: elegant and perfect, full of a deep and inarticulable sense of mystery - and, even to an agnostic like me, proof that whoever wrote it had possessed a strong ability to evoke the divine.

James and me were in the gardens of Wells Cathedral with the photography club he goes to every other Saturday, and this was what we had accidentally found. He was as amazed as I was: as the choir sang, he suddenly took my phone, and started silently filming what they were doing.

In a break, I asked the choirmaster what their chosen genre was, and he briefly explained the wonders of Tudor choral music. Hesitantly, I then told him that James is autistic, and that part of his neural wiring is an amazing sensitivity to sound which means he hears songs and pieces in a way most people don’t: he had already whispered to me that the last piece they had sung was in F sharp. The choir - about ten of them, mostly of retirement age – nodded and smiled appreciatively, and then began their next piece: Ave Maria, which once again stunned us into rapt quiet.

How does this happen: human voices and arrangements of notes and chords that somehow confront you with life, death, loss, bliss, the possible existence of God, and even more? More to to the point, why is it that music seems uniquely able to work this magic, and thereby confront us with the limits of language?

I wrote about some of this in my second Substack post, and it’s a big theme in Maybe I’m Amazed, complete with academic research that explores some of these questions through the prism of autism. I’ll leave it to the book to explain the latter – which is fascinating – but it basically boils down to this: though many autistic people have issues reading both their own emotions (this is called Alexithymia) and those of others – via conversation, tone of voice or facial expressions – there is strong evidence that they find music to be a much more certain and dependable indicator of people’s inner states. In other words, holding up an image and asking how the person in it feels might draw a blank – whereas a song or piece that conveys sadness, joy, aggression or euphoria will hit home in an instant.

But we all know that, don’t we? It’s why experiences like our one in Wells affect people so powerfully, alerting us to an emotional terrain that seems beyond words, and is all the more potent because of it. The questions this poses stray into the realms of evolutionary psychology, and whether human beings made music before they came up with systems of words; they are also profoundly philosophical, in that they ask what perception and experience actually are, and if language is our only means of describing them.

There is one emotional register that pop excels at: happy-sad music, which conveys a state most of us are deeply familiar with, and music brilliantly captures. You hear it in no end of songs: to take a random handful, The Four Tops’ Reach Out (I’ll Be There), Amy Winehouse’s Tears Dry On Their Own, Fleet Foxes’ Ragged Wood, The Smiths’ Ask, Dolly Parton’s Here You Come Again. The subject returned to my thoughts the other day, when Spotify randomly flipped into one of the all-time greatest examples: The Cure’s Just Like Heaven, which nudged me into something comparable to what had happened in Wells: a real moment of jaw-drop epiphany, which still happens whenever I hear it.

I think I can explain the basics, just about. That beautifully tumbling-and-soaring guitar figure captures the deep intensity of human experience, and the way it sometimes rollercoasters. Robert Smith often sings in a nearly-cracking register that suggests something close to crying, and here fuses tone and substance pretty much perfectly: it’s a song about being hopelessly in love, how that sometimes feels like clinging on, and the way it propels people from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other, at speed. That happens in the chorus (“You/Soft and only/You/Lost and Lonely”), which bounces from a major to a minor chord and back again, and thereby instantly evokes the happy-sad condition’s two sides.

Mere words can’t do these things – but the second verse gets close to articulating those two halves, and how love weaves them together:

Spinning on that dizzy edge
Kissed her face and kissed her head
Dreamed of all the different ways
I had to make her glow
"Why are you so far away?", she said
"But won't you ever know, that I'm in love with you
That I'm in love with you?"

That’s brilliant. In the context I’m writing about here, the dizzy edge sounds like a reference to the divide between what Lou Reed termed thought and expression, and the occasions when what we feel is so overwhelming that words fail us. Because of his autism, this happens to James quite a lot; I use language to make a living, but when I hear some of the best music, the exact same thing happens to me.

Maybe I’m Amazed events
I’ll be talking about Maybe I’m Amazed and what’s in it – autism, music, Kraftwerk, The Clash, Special Needs parenthood and more – at various places throughout the spring & summer. These dates are already in:
London Rough Trade Denmark Street with Miranda Sawyer, Monday March 31st, 5.30pm: tickets (including a book) and details here.
Manchester Deansgate Waterstones with Dave Haslam, Wednesday April 16th, 6.30pm: everything (tickets with book and without) is here.
Rock’n’Roll Book Club in Walthamstow with Keith Cameron, Monday March 24th. Tickets available from 8am on Thursday February 20th here.
There are also dates about to be announced in Sheffield, Derby and Swansea: follow me on Bluesky for annoucements, or check back here.

Current listening!
Tracks: In The Air by SAULT, 2022; Bells by Phil France, 2018
Album: Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, 1963