Evan Zelermyer wrote:

>"People often complain that music is too ambiguous; that what they
>should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone
>understands words.  With me it is exactly the reverse.  . . . The
>thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too
>indefinite to be put into words but, on the contrary, too definite."

And then from Stravinsky:

   "The over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression)
   was simply a way of saying that music is supra-personal and
   super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal
   descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of
   music is in reality a transcendental idea "expressed in terms
   of" music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact
   sets of correlatives must exist between a composer's feelings
   and his notation. It was offhand and annoyingly incomplete, but
   even the stupider critics could have seen that it did not deny
   musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal
   statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark,
   incidentally, though today I would put it the other way around:
   music expresses itself."

Are both composers suggesting the specificity of music on its own terms?

Karl