Steve Schwartz replies to me: >If music were a language (and I mean human music, not what birds do), >then it must have a grammar, which is simply a description of how language >means. I should clarify my position by rejecting not only the idea that a language must have words but also any definition of language that requires universal structural grammatical principles (e.g. that a language needs a basic subject, object and verb form etc) in order to qualify as being a language. That was my point about the subject-object difference being an "accident" of verbal language much as pitch and duration are "accidents" of musical language. >The idea of music as language gives all sorts of permission to say >that this kind of music is incoherent, because it hasn't a grammar. I don't think my train of argument necessary runs into this problem. In fact the notion of grammar does not necessarily enter into my ideas on "language". To paraphrase in my owns words what Heidegger said about the nature of language when he said "music is the language of Being", I would say language is shared meaning. More specifically it is shared HUMAN meaning. That means that a Messian composition based on birdsong is music, whereas birds "singing" to each other for the sake of territorial claims, courtship etc is not. However the birdsong can have a human meaning. The bird that sits perched on the tree on a sunny morning can give me great pleasure quite different to that intended by the bird. That is more of an exploration of the interface between music and noise. While listening to alleatoric electoacoustic music by Stockhausen I have heard birds singing and traffic noises "mistakenly" taking them for part of the "score". I am sure Stockhausen would have probably been delighted and said "why of course it WAS part of the score - my 'score' IS the whole universe". So even alleatoric music is not just noise to those of us who can understand this stuff. It is a world in which even what may initially seem like noise does not preclude the opening of the forum of "shared meanings" - language. >My own feeling is that the idea of musical "meaning" is so vague >and so vexed that grammar is not yet a valid notion until the other >is settled. I tend to think that sines, cosines, square roots, and integration signs etc in mathematics have a clear enough a meaning without having an intuitive verbal equivalent. Music too should be allowed to have its own musical meanings which do not translate into verbal ones, or at best do so in only severely limited ways. That is why when you "understand" the most seemingly wild alleatoric composition it strikes you as being "meaningful" rather than mere noise. In fact any composition (whether by Ockeghem or Nono) which does not grip me on first encounter can strike me as being mere noise - I fail to "understand" it. Greater familiarity gradually reveals that these apparent noises are "meaningful". Only then does the work seem to "speak" to me, and the forum of shared meanings opens itself to me. In fact even Cage's 4'22 can be understood in this context. It is only a composition ONLY in so far as that silence is presented in the same forum of shared meanings. Rail as you may, as many theorist in the last one or two centuries have, against the alleged vulgarity of the notion of music as language it nonetheless persists. I don't think you will ever manage to get rid of the idea. I just cannot even begin to start to think about music without thinking about it in such terms. Not only that, but 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, you've got me there. I've always thought Derrida either way beyond >my intellectual capacity or a trivial bullshitter par excellence. Derrida has inspired a lot of trendy academic crap written by idiots. Popularity has it's downsides. He is terribly difficult to read unless you already know your Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel and Kant well. He seems to write as though he expected you to know this background already. The fact is that most of these English department people don't have this background and so are only facile bandwagon sorts who pretend they know their Derrida in order to look the part. However what is seemingly overwhelmingly difficult is not necessarily rubbish as the German cultural contemporaries Webern and Heidegger show. I will limit my comments except to where it is relevant to music. >I know the difference between me and Beethoven's 6th. I'm the one that >doesn't go "Dee dum de dum dee dee dum de dum de dum dee dee dummmmmmm" Let me try to put it in a fairly simple way, avoiding too much philosophical ontological analytics. I do not think the Beethoven 6th can be separated from the whole social phenomena of music making - of concerts, orchestras, teaching, and of course of the listener too. The work neither exists in nor is comprehensible in a vacuum. This socio-musical phenomenon is a unitary Whole which cannot truly be divided from the milieu into which it was born. Verbal language however relies on division to articulate meaning/ideas - it needs to break up the Whole. Sentences need the subject-object division in order to make sense. That does not mean that this "division" introduced by the dictates of verbal language has some sort of metaphysical unquestionability to it. I am listening on my computer to some English consort music. My most fundamental awareness is not that of "me" and the "music" as separate entities. I experience them with a simultaneousness which precludes any division. The division only enters out of pragmatic necessity when I attempt to verbally articulate the experience but this does not grant the division metaphysical absoluteness (of the sort that Descartes wanted to grant it). Enough of this sort of thing now!!! However on the subject of Derrida I think that it would be fascinating to know what he thought about music. There is much in his writings on signs and their meanings. A repeat mark in a score is a sign. How to take that, whether to observe it always or not, is a question of textual interpretation and Derrida's central obsession. The whole issue of textual interpretation of early music, and Harnoncourt's concerns with music as rhetoric sound fertile areas for someone like Derrida to comment. Some of the period performance lot have got themselves into the rut of textual literalism/ objectivism and again Derrida would have much to deconstruct in their approach to textual interpretation. Satoshi Akima Sydney, Australia [log in to unmask]