Silent to the oppressing cloud,
   heavy from basalt and lava
   even to the enslaved echoes
   [by a horn without virtue

   What sepulchral shipwreck (you
   know it, spume, but slobber there),
   most superb of the wrecks
   destroyed the denuded mast

   Or that which aroused for want of
   some supreme damnation
   the whole vain abyss deployed

   In the so white hair that trails
   greedily will have drowned
   the childlike lap of a siren]

      Stephane Mallarme

Len Fehskens writes:

>But the fundamental question for me is does it [music] mean the same thing
>to everyone who listens to it?  I would argue that the extent to which the
>"meaning" of music is consistently shared is considerably less than other
>forms of language or communication.

The whole question of 'meaning' itself - whether musical or otherwise -
is truly a profoundly vexed issue.  I would disagree that the notion of
meaning was EVER cut and dry, regardless of whether we were discussing
Bach, or Shakespeare let alone Mallarme.

The lack of razor sharp mechanical specificity in musical language is no
more an argument against it being a language than it is an argument for
music being "meaningless".  If such specificity is the first prerequisite
of a language then mathematics would be far more worthy of being called a
language than English or French.  Yet even in mathematics we have the
example of irrational numbers such as the square root of a negative number
- an example of a profoundly abstract mathematical concept with far
reaching consequences (as shown by fractal geometry and chaos theory).

Any notion that a language has to operate rigidly within the subject-object
differentiation in order to be worthy of being called a language is a
prejudice that must be laid to rest.  For a language to be a language it
need NOT be slavishly subordinating itself to a concretely defined external
entity to which the language "points" in order to become the undistorted
reflection of that external reference point.  Music as a language need not
be subordinating itself to such an external reference point - namely a
"program" - in order to convey it's meaning.  That music operates outside
of such subject-object differentiation does not make it any less a
language: it requires no "object" of its discourse.  That is to say
"meaning" is not slave to the subject-object differentiation.  Meaning can
be conveyed complete in itself without an external reference point.  To
repeat: the subject-object difference is every bit an accident of verbal
language as pitch-duration is of musical language.

The consequence of this is it means nothing that some people may see
a piece of music as being "happy" whereas others see it as "sad".  That
it conveys meaning first and foremost in its OWN terms is what matters.
How people attempt to translate that meaning into another language such
as French or English with expressions such as "happy", "triste" etc will
reflect the limited translatability of the musical language to a verbal
one.  That fact neither robs music of its status as a language nor renders
it meaningless.  In short music conveys its "meaning" musically.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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