Charles Dalmas wrote:

>I have had frequent debates on whether or not music is a language, and I
>have decided after very careful study that it is NOT a language.  Written
>music itself is mathematical and spatial code, with the rhythms standing in
>for fractions, and the notes indicating a certain sound's place in space
>(the rhythm indicating a note's place in time).  Written music is therefore
>four dimensional, having duration as well as length, breadth, and height.

Difference between duration and length???

>This code, by itself, cannot communicate anything.  Even if you read music,
>you cannot glean any useful information about a message or statement from
>the printed page.  You know what the music is conveying only if you know
>the piece, and have heard it before.

Others have raised against this statement.  I understand you to mean
that you have to know a work by its sound before you can know what it
is conveying.  You must agree that the music is conveying SOMETHING but as
you later say that something cannot be foxes, dogs, the Dow-Jones average,
or orgasms,* par exemple.  The printed page is a set of symbols that map
one-to-one with the actual sounds of a work more or less, just as the
printed words map the sounds of speech (more or less).  As others have
pointed out, one can "read" music like one reads a book.  However there
is an important distinction that perhaps has been overlooked: You can go
directly from the words to their meanings and bypass mentally recreating
their sounds (subvocalizing reading excepted) but IMO it's not really
possible to do that with music.  One MUST mentally re-create the sound
because it is the sound that embodies the meaning.  OTOH it's perfectly
possible to ANALYZE music by sight--point out fugal entrances, note cadence
points, sectional divisions, and so on.  But that is not the same thing as
re-creating the music in one's head.

The idea (expressed by Stirling Newberry) that music does not express
emotion was most notoriously promoted by Igor Stravinsky, of course, in
his Poetics of Music, now known to have been (I believe) ghost-written
(possibly with S's approval) by Robert Craft.  (Corrections to this
statement welcomed.) My copy isn't available to me at the moment but I
recall the sentence reading something like "Music is powerless to express
anything at all." In spite of my attempts to refute this over the years I
have not been able to do so.  But I think there is a way out of the impasse
(not an original thought by any means--see Langer, Cassirer, Zuckerkandl et
al.) and that is to suggest that while music doesn't EXPRESS anything it
can nevertheless REMIND us of things--and therein lies much of its power.
I mentioned *orgasms above.  The Tristan prelude is not itself so much
an expression of an orgasm as a piece of music that works powerfully
because it imitates a very basic human psychophysical process.  Now don't
interrupt!  I'm not finished...  from the physical standpoint, all orgasms
are pretty much the same.  Yet two "orgasmic" pieces of music can be
totally different (another that comes to mind of course is Bolero).  This
suggests a couple of things...  1) other ideas besides the physical act
are embodied or suggested in the music and 2) if the sole purpose were
to express or embody a physiological process, there would be no point in
re-creating that in an endless series of pieces.  Creativity demands that
music be perceived on many levels, but the primary level must always appeal
to what Edmund Gurney called "the musical faculty," i.e., a unique part of
the mind that interprets music on its own terms.  A roundabout way of
saying that in essence I agree with Stravinsky/Craft.

Chris Bonds