Steve Schwartz:

>Again - to be stuffy and pedantic about it - grammar shows a systematic
>relation of parts that leads to meaning...Again, however, I don't really
>see this happening in music, mainly because I don't know what music means
>in an objective way.  ..What's the grammar of that meaning that allows us
>to say the music is really and not metaphorically a language...

Let's just say that music can be seen as a way of communicating that
anteceded today's fully fledged granmmatical language.  Bird song and
cavemen's grunts are/were ways of orderly, if limited communication.
They strike me as being closer to the mode of communicating by music
than communicating by a grammar of language comprising syntax, morphology,
orthoepy, orthography, composition, semantics and etymology.  The rules
that govern the composition and the proper perception of music are far
looser than those pertaining to language, proper.  But they are sufficcient
to the making and the understanding of music, which long ago was the
language we communicated with and which has been overtaken--usurped, if you
will-- by what we now accept as language, proper.  But music being what it
is and language being what it is, the only way to equate them is to accept
them both as useful, but different ways of cogent communication.  Both are
perfectly capable of transmitting both objective and subjective meanings.
(Which is why the surest way to explain musical meaning is via music.  Ever
hear a conductor, sometimes as a last resort, "sing" instructions to his
orchestra?)

Denis Fodor