Satoshi Akima to Steve Schwartz:

>(...) 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, Western music has been always linked to speech language.  In fact,
our first system of rhytmic notation came directly from that partnership.
But those links doesn't means that both have the same essence.  Many
structures of speech language were, in the Middle Age, Renaissance and
early Baroque, just devices for musical teaching and transmission (remember
the famous "Ut queant laxis...").  Since the IX century, or earlier, we
find the notion that "notes are to music as letters are to written
language", but that concept had just a practical purpose:  to make easier
the identification and handling of musical notes, associating them with
another known system.  The concept of "modus" in the notation of Notre
Dame had the same purpose:  it was easier for those men to identify
different arrangements of accented and non accented pulses by an analogy
with the ancient metrical schemes of classical poetry.  Theorists developed
later many aesthetical links between speech language and music (mainly
concerning musical form and figures derived from ancient rhetoric and
oratory).  They are wonderful, but they are only analogies.  When one read
some of these theorists one get convinced of everything except that music
IS a language "sricto sensu".  This polemique between Steve, Satoshi and
other listmembers is very interesting.  However, I think that the problem
here lies in the definition of language.  There may be two rude ways to
define it:  a strict one and a broad one.  The first one proposes that
language is a system with elements of cultural codified meaning and rules
for arrangement of those elements (syntax, semantics, then, a grammar, and
then, rhetoric).  Music has almost all this, but that little lacking part
makes a dramatic difference.  The second one proposes that a language is
simply a "way of communication between human beings".  Then, everything
subject to social interchange is a language, or a part of it.  Then, music
belongs certainly to this category, but the problem now is to define
"communication".

Pablo Massa
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