Music and Language

I continue to be amazed by the ongoing stream of responses (41 at last count) to an essay I posted two weeks ago. Admittedly I was hoping to generate some lively debate, and the topic I wrote about—the alleged use of music in interrogating possible terror suspects—was a very loaded one. But what triggered all the back-and-forth turned out not to be the main topic I wrote about, but rather my implication—from the tone of what I wrote—that music was somehow inherently a force for good and therefore, by further implication, that music means something.

What followed was an elaborate and seemingly irreconcilable argument between people who believe that music is not a language and those who believe that it is. One of the respondents, Ryan Tanaka, characterized the discussion that ensued as a schism between “abstraction” and “representation” theories of music, which reminds me of the Brahms contra Wagner debates that raged between adherents of absolute music and program music in the late 19th century.

I’ve always wanted to have my cake and eat it too, so to speak. So while I’ve always reveled in formal musical designs which refer directly and only to musical materials in the abstract, I’ve always wanted music to say more than it might ultimately be capable of saying—so I struggle with titles, have frequently set texts, etc. But even though I’ve personally struggled with the ambiguity of musical meaning, I have to acknowledge Phillip Blume’s assertion that “every listener’s reaction to every piece of music is a valid reaction.” Perhaps it’s why I spend so much time communicating with words, although it’s pretty clear that words can also be interpreted in a variety of ways.

One of the most fascinating books I’ve read this decade is Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, in which Mithen posits that at some point in human evolution music and language were once one and the same, but then they split. Equally compelling, though a much more difficult read, is Aniruddh D. Patel’s Music, Language, and the Brain, in which the formal structures of music and language are rigorously explicated and compared to ultimately reveal dissimilar purposes. Despite their similarities and seemingly parallel development, music and language serve very different functions and are perceived quite differently. This is empirically true, even though societies around the world have developed such remarkable music-language amalgams as the talking drums that Chris Becker referenced. Most of the world’s musical traditions in fact point back to language and the voice. One of the most succinct analyses of the linguistic derivation of musical syntax is John Hazedel Levis’s now sadly out-of-print Foundations of Chinese Musical Art (1936).

So this is an age old argument, but one that I’m sure will continue to spark heated exchanges as long as we continue to use language and make music.