Len Fehskens (re the "language" metaphor):

>All you're really saying is that they're different.  The "language
>metaphor" adds nothing.

I find it useful.  There's a concept that I want to make clear:  that I may
fail to understand something, not because it's gibberish, nor because I'm
stupid, but because it assumes conventions I'm not in on.  If that's clear
anyway, then the language metaphor adds nothing, but if the language
metaphor helps make it clear, it's useful.

BTW, there does seem to be a misunderstanding about what languages are and
what they do:

>They are different, but not in the same sense that French differs
>from English.  They are stylistically different.  They are not different
>phonemic representations of the same thing.  They are not different in the
>same sense that the words "wine" and "vin" are different.

If that were all that languages do, it wouldn't be a good metaphor.
However, as well as having different words for things, even human spoken
languages differ in their concepts.  For example, I know barely enough
Welsh to read road-signs, but even so there's one striking difference I've
come across.  Welsh distinguishes people from places far more than English
does (e.g.  there are two words for "Church", "Eglwys" - church building -
and "LLan" - church congregation).  To point out that the "English" live in
"England" and the "Welsh" live in "Wales" appears so obvious as not to be
worth saying, but observing that the "Saesneg" live in "LLoegr" and the
"Cymru" live in "Gwlad" is another matter entirely.

The computer programming language "C" doesn't have a word for "wine" - wine
is not something computers are interested in.  It does have defined syntax
and semantics, in order that anything I write in "C" is unambiguous.

Tensors are a language.  I understand them only marginally better than
I understand Welsh, but people who understand them properly tell me that
tensors can express concepts that good old-fashioned vectors can't.

>So, if music is a "language", what is its grammar? What are its words? What
>do these words mean? How reliably does music communicate these meanings?

One that's relevant here is that dissonance represents strong emotion, and
loud dissonance represents violently strong emotion.  I didn't think it was
in doubt that when Schubert, in one of his piano sonatas, gets loud and
dissonant, it's a representation of violent anger.

Trying to understand a fifteen-minute atonal piece which is all loud and
all dissonant using the same convention just leads to the interpretation
that it's hysterical.  Either the composer is just screaming at the top
of his voice, or I'm listening using the wrong conventions.

Peter Varley
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