Len Fehskens:

>I wish people would stop using this extremely misleading analogy.

(ie, that music is a language)

>There is no "dictionary" for music.  There is no place one can "look up"
>a musical "word" (whatever that might be -- a note? a phrase? a rhythm?
>a harmony?), and find a "definition" of it expressed in music.

See Deryck Cooke's The Language of Music.  In it, he essentially lists
various conventions that help "locate" the emotional "meaning" of music
for us.  To take one extremely simple example, we tend to hear minor mode
as more emotionally complex than a major mode.  This is solely a matter
of convention.

>We learn a language by associating physical things, and later
>abstractions, with words.  We do this by experiencing these things and
>abstractions.  Only after we have developed a sufficient base of words
>and concepts can we "bootstrap" ourselves up by reading.

We learn the emotional meaning of music by associating rhythms, modes, and
so on with non-musical things.  For example, the rhythm, mode, and color of
Beethoven's Eroica funeral march probably comes from other funeral marches
and in turn influences the music of other funeral music.

If this were not the general case, movie music wouldn't work at all.

Steve Schwartz