David Runnion expressed very eloquently that a trained musician can glean
what the music sounds like from looking at the score.  This is true, and
something which I never doubted.  What I was implying is, you could net
get information such as grammatical constructs and definitions of words.

For example, let's say someone wrote a tone poem on "The Charge of the
Light Bridgade." We all know that wonderful poem (Half a league, half a
league, half a league onward, all in the valley of death rode the six
hundred...etc.  etc.).  No matter how vividly you paint the portrait
musically, the actual printed notes would not indicate "Half a league
Half al league Half a league onward."

You realize what the music sounds like from the printed page, but any
program attached would be dificult to glean without hearing the realization
of the printed notes.  I'm sure that a professional musician who by some
stretch of imagination had never heard Beethoven's Pastoral could say, by
humming a few ditties from the score, that the music was bucolic, but with
the exception of the storm, none of it is so precise in its actualization
of its program that you could look at the score and say:

That's 100 peasants dancing around in circles in the field.

Certainly, the printed notes themselves do not stand in for words in a
linguistic manner.  As I stated in my previous post, music IS communiction,
but more an object for a cryptographer than a linguist.  The code of Key
signature, Time Signature, Staff, and Rhythm give music its four
dimensional sound as we hear it, but it is merely code, and sterile.

I teach clarinet professionally, and I tell all my students that a page
full of black dots isn't music, and is, in and of itself, meaningless.
Musical expression comes from the heart and soul (you can have as many
crescendoes, decrescendoes, dolces, espressivos, cantabiles as you want,
but the soul still governs what you do MUSICALLY).  I could program a
computer (Vivace comes to mind) to play music, and program it with all of
the interprational markings, but it would still be a computer doing the
paying, and thus lacking in soul.  (Not knocking Vivace as a practice tool.
It is excellent, not to mention a hell of a lot of fun!) Vivace is a
program that allows you to play with an orchestral background at your
computer, and you can buy cartridges of any and all concertos for most
instruments.

Anyway, I hope this clarifies my position on this delicate, and not easily
expressed topic.  I still invite any and all comments...:)

Charles L. L. Dalmas
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http://www.winternet.com/~davion