Pablo Massa writes his commentary in the cordial discussion between Steve
Schwartz and myself (though some might call it a polemic!) about music as
a language:

>>(...) 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.
>
>Well, Western music has been always linked to speech language.  In fact,
>our first system of rhythmic notation came directly from that partnership.
>But those links doesn't means that both have the same essence.

In fact I had in mind more 17-18th century ideas about music.  Harnoncourt
talks about musical rhetoric as having been synonymous with music as
speech.  He writes that the teaching of music and speech-rhetoric were
tied together for many centuries.  Up till the early 19th century there
were whole systems of conventions about agreed figures having an accepted
rhetorical significance.  Harnoncourt further reminds us that even the
idea of Sonata Form was originally based on post-Aristotelian ideas of
Classical rhetoric, where an Idea would be presented only to be questioned
for rhetorical effect in order that the original Idea be reinstated
("recapitulated") with even greater force later.  The explanation of sonata
form as a purely harmonic form only came retrospectively late in the 19th
century led by the likes of Schenker.

Only later in the 19th century, when the notion of music as a language
became closely associated with the program music vs.  absolute music
debate, did theorists object to the idea of music as a language on the
basis that the notion implied that music "said something" whose meaning
could be exactly translated into a word-based medium:  namely a "program".
I have shown that this is not the case, as the assumption of absolute
translatability does not hold.  Musical meaning (namely what music "says")
is expressed in musical terms that can only be at best imperfectly
translated to any other media.  This does not deny that relating a piece of
music to a poem, a novel, a painting, a drama, dance or even an important
life experience can deepen our understanding of a composition.  It is just
that it can never exhaustively translate the composition to the other
medium.  I call this the principle of limited translatability.

>When one read some of these theorists one get convinced of everything
>except that music IS a language "sricto sensu".

This in fact raises the crux of the issue.  It relates to the usefulness
of notion of music as a language.  The opponents of this idea will always
raise the objection that it is a useful fiction - nice but "sricto sensu"
utterly false.  In everyday use the pre-Copernican model of the solar
system with the sun revolving around the earth in a circular orbit is of
vastly greater practical utility than that with the planets doing an
elliptical orbit around the sun.  Ships navigate around the planet every
day using the ancient model.  When we try to find a constellation in the
night sky we use the pre-Copernican model.  By comparison the
post-Copernican model simply adds so much complexity as to render it
practically useless unless you are planning to launch some sort of space
probe.  The pre-Copernican model is therefore an exceedingly useful lie -
and every bit a lie as it is useful.  The question in our case is this:
is the notion of music as a language also just a useful fiction?

>However, I think that the problem here lies in the definition
>of language.

Again Pablo is absolutely right.  However it should be borne in mind that
the question as to how to define language is every bit as vexed as that
of how to define music.  What I say may conflict with certain linguistic
paradigms such as structuralism.  However structuralism is not per se
synonymous with linguistics any more than Schenkerian analysis is
synonymous with music theory.

Pablo also summarizes my approach to question of what language is.

>...language is simply a "way of communication between human beings".

Although not strictly incorrect, what I in fact said was that language is
"the forum of shared meaning".  That forum is also that of Being itself.
Language is the sine qua non of Human Being.  To me Nietzsche was also
right when he said, "without music life would be a mistake".  Music to me
is essential to that "forum of shared meaning".  That forum is also that
where we fret and strut our hour upon the stage before we too are seen no
more.  That stage is one upon which the lines are sung as much a spoken.
Music as a language then becomes something more of a virtual "a priori"
necessary ground without which it is scarcely possible to even begin to
think about music - and not just a "useful lie" that helps stop musical
theory from sailing off the edge of the world!

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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