Satoshi Akima:

>I feel strongly that it is simply not true to say that a language must
>consist of words in order to be a language.

No, I don't think that's what Stirling is saying.  If music were a language
(and I mean human music, not what birds do), then it must have a grammar,
which is simply a description of how language means.  This leads to all
kinds of trouble in the case of music, particularly with avant-garde and
even not-so-avant-garde music.  The idea of music as language gives all
sorts of permission to say that this kind of music is incoherent, because
it hasn't a grammar.  Knowing something of your musical tastes by now, I
don't believe you really want to say that.  My own feeling is that the idea
of musical "meaning" is so vague and so vexed that grammar is not yet a
valid notion until the other is settled.  I can say that music is a system,
several systems, or systematic without having to admit that it's a
language.

>The same thing could be said of mathematics - that it too is a
>language.

Some math is.  Some isn't or only metaphorically, as far as I'm concerned,
evinced in the fact that computers can do math without knowing meaning.

>The answer to the question as to what language is, is nowhere
>near as cut and dry as some musicologists seem to think.  The traditional
>objection to the idea of music as a language came late in the 19th century
>with debates about absolute and program music.  However to say that music
>is a language does not mean music tells a word-story in code form.  To
>define language as something with nouns, verbs etc is just way too
>simplistic.

No, the problem really comes down to what you mean by "musical meaning." I
have no idea what anybody means by the term.  I'm willing to be vague and
let it slide.

>The philosopher Martin Heidegger said, "language is the
>house of Being".  Stravinsky said "musique c'est l'Etre".  If so music
>is the house of Being, music is a language.

How about "If life is thought and breath, And the want of thought is death,
Then am I A happy fly, If I live, or if I die." Or

If, as Shakespeare said, man is "a piece of work," and a shirt is a piece
of work, is a man a shirt?

>There will now be those who insist that verbal language points to solidly
>existing entities "out there".  A word is a representation and thus
>introduces the subject-object difference.  That, it will be said is the
>very essence of language.  Music contains within it no subject-object
>distinction.  Yet the necessity of the subject-object difference to
>language too is a profoundly naive, if still universal assumption, which
>also has been questioned at a fundamental level by Derrida most explicitly
>in his book "Of Grammatology".

Well, you've got me there.  I've always thought Derrida either way beyond
my intellectual capacity or a trivial bullshitter par excellence.  Of what
I've read by him and by people influenced by him, I'm strongly inclined to
the latter view.

>Take this "thing" music.  We cannot agree what it is, where it came from,
>let alone where it going.  Yet we call it the "object" of our discussion.
>This "object" without object, which we can equally agree is so very much
>a part of our very Being and essence that we cannot separate it from
>ourselves as "subject".

Speak for yourself.  I know the difference between me and Beethoven's 6th.
I'm the one that doesn't go "Dee dum de dum dee dee dum de dum de dum dee
dee dummmmmmm"

>All separation of subject and object can be easily shown to be much more
>questionable than may first meet the eye.  Subject and object are an
>accident of verbal language, as pitch is of musical notion.

It sounds to me as if you believe that you can't distinguish between when
you hit the ball and when the ball hits you.

Steve Schwartz