Steve Schwartz replies to me:

>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.

I should clarify my position by rejecting not only the idea that a language
must have words but also any definition of language that requires universal
structural grammatical principles (e.g.  that a language needs a basic
subject, object and verb form etc) in order to qualify as being a language.
That was my point about the subject-object difference being an "accident"
of verbal language much as pitch and duration are "accidents" of musical
language.

>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.

I don't think my train of argument necessary runs into this problem.  In
fact the notion of grammar does not necessarily enter into my ideas on
"language".  To paraphrase in my owns words what Heidegger said about the
nature of language when he said "music is the language of Being", I would
say language is shared meaning.  More specifically it is shared HUMAN
meaning.  That means that a Messian composition based on birdsong is music,
whereas birds "singing" to each other for the sake of territorial claims,
courtship etc is not.  However the birdsong can have a human meaning.  The
bird that sits perched on the tree on a sunny morning can give me great
pleasure quite different to that intended by the bird.  That is more of an
exploration of the interface between music and noise.  While listening to
alleatoric electoacoustic music by Stockhausen I have heard birds singing
and traffic noises "mistakenly" taking them for part of the "score".  I am
sure Stockhausen would have probably been delighted and said "why of course
it WAS part of the score - my 'score' IS the whole universe".  So even
alleatoric music is not just noise to those of us who can understand this
stuff.  It is a world in which even what may initially seem like noise does
not preclude the opening of the forum of "shared meanings" - language.

>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 tend to think that sines, cosines, square roots, and integration
signs etc in mathematics have a clear enough a meaning without having an
intuitive verbal equivalent.  Music too should be allowed to have its own
musical meanings which do not translate into verbal ones, or at best do so
in only severely limited ways.  That is why when you "understand" the most
seemingly wild alleatoric composition it strikes you as being "meaningful"
rather than mere noise.  In fact any composition (whether by Ockeghem or
Nono) which does not grip me on first encounter can strike me as being mere
noise - I fail to "understand" it.  Greater familiarity gradually reveals
that these apparent noises are "meaningful".  Only then does the work seem
to "speak" to me, and the forum of shared meanings opens itself to me.  In
fact even Cage's 4'22 can be understood in this context.  It is only a
composition ONLY in so far as that silence is presented in the same forum
of shared meanings.

Rail as you may, as many theorist in the last one or two centuries have,
against the alleged vulgarity of the notion of music as language it
nonetheless persists.  I don't think you will ever manage to get rid of
the idea.  I just cannot even begin to start to think about music without
thinking about it in such terms.  Not only that, but read Harnoncourt on
rhetoric in early music and you will see how deeply rooted the idea of
music as a language really has been through the centuries.  It is only with
the advent of the 19th century idea of Absolute Music that it ever became
unfashionable.

>Well, you've got me there.  I've always thought Derrida either way beyond
>my intellectual capacity or a trivial bullshitter par excellence.

Derrida has inspired a lot of trendy academic crap written by idiots.
Popularity has it's downsides.  He is terribly difficult to read unless you
already know your Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel and Kant well.  He seems to
write as though he expected you to know this background already.  The fact
is that most of these English department people don't have this background
and so are only facile bandwagon sorts who pretend they know their Derrida
in order to look the part.  However what is seemingly overwhelmingly
difficult is not necessarily rubbish as the German cultural contemporaries
Webern and Heidegger show.  I will limit my comments except to where it is
relevant to music.

>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"

Let me try to put it in a fairly simple way, avoiding too much
philosophical ontological analytics.  I do not think the Beethoven 6th can
be separated from the whole social phenomena of music making - of concerts,
orchestras, teaching, and of course of the listener too.  The work neither
exists in nor is comprehensible in a vacuum.  This socio-musical phenomenon
is a unitary Whole which cannot truly be divided from the milieu into which
it was born.  Verbal language however relies on division to articulate
meaning/ideas - it needs to break up the Whole.  Sentences need the
subject-object division in order to make sense.  That does not mean that
this "division" introduced by the dictates of verbal language has some sort
of metaphysical unquestionability to it.  I am listening on my computer to
some English consort music.  My most fundamental awareness is not that of
"me" and the "music" as separate entities.  I experience them with a
simultaneousness which precludes any division.  The division only enters
out of pragmatic necessity when I attempt to verbally articulate the
experience but this does not grant the division metaphysical absoluteness
(of the sort that Descartes wanted to grant it).  Enough of this sort of
thing now!!!

However on the subject of Derrida I think that it would be fascinating
to know what he thought about music.  There is much in his writings on
signs and their meanings.  A repeat mark in a score is a sign.  How to
take that, whether to observe it always or not, is a question of textual
interpretation and Derrida's central obsession.  The whole issue of textual
interpretation of early music, and Harnoncourt's concerns with music as
rhetoric sound fertile areas for someone like Derrida to comment.  Some
of the period performance lot have got themselves into the rut of textual
literalism/ objectivism and again Derrida would have much to deconstruct
in their approach to textual interpretation.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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