A couple of points to go with Bill Benzon's.
1. Music discourse (discourse on music) regularly uses vocal terms to
describe non-vocal features (instrumental "cantabile" and polyphonic
"voices", "screaming" guitars and trumpets, and jazz musicians
"testyfying"), and the voice is generally held as the paradigm for all
melodic playing (speaking of Western practice). The word "mel-ody" itself
is of course etymologically tied to vocalization. I believe this is one of
the reasons that we are motivated to hear music as analogous to language.
If we could account for why we so often describe music in terms of
vocalization (without circular reasoning) I think we could begin to explain
the appeal of the language metaphor.
2. Susan McClary's work is very helpful in understanding meaning
construction in music, but one aspect that I don't think her work addresses
are the more basic motivations and constraints prior to, or at the original
moments of, the explicit association of words and music. As Bill suggested
with Disney's _Fantasia_ (if I'm not taking it too much farther than he
meant), we are not free to make any old associations we fancy (or we are not
really free to fancy any and all associations) - and this is not just
because of the codes that already exist. We have to look at the beginnings
of opera, when composers were deciding which kind of music to write for
which characters, in order to account for the logic of assigning certain
sounds to certain events and characters (and of course we'll probably have
to look earlier than opera).
3. I think that if we try to discover the ways in which music is (like) a
language, we will run into deadends, concluding as some have that, "well,
music is like language in these ways...and unlike language in these other
ways...." It may not really be a different angle, but it might be fruitful
to look also at how conceptualization of musical experience is like
conceptualization of interpersonal communicative experience. Armstrong,
Stokoe, and Wilcox's _Gesture and the Nature of Language_ provides one way
in. Citing Ulrich Neisser, they point out that in listening to speech we
are hearing evidence of specific motor activity, so that understanding
speech is at this level understanding the motor behavior of other humans.
Listening to music is in most cases listening to evidence of specific human
motor activity (if less so in recent years). Subvocalization studies for
speech and for music suggest that we draw on motor activity in comprehending
both speech and music, suggesting that speech and music are at this level
understood via much the same process: in terms of the motor activity that
produces each. This would appear to be a strong motivation for
understanding music as language.
Regards -
________________________________________________________________________
Arnie Cox
Visiting Assistant Professor Office (440) 775-8945
Oberlin College Conservatory of Music Home (440) 775-3174
77 W. College St. Fax (440) 775-6972
Oberlin, OH 44074 Arnie.Cox@oberlin.edu
==============================================================
Post Message: Send a message to artwithbraininmind-l@pks.bu.edu
Web Archive: http://pks.bu.edu/artwithbraininmind-l
Unsubscribe: Send message to majordomo@pks.bu.edu with
'unsubscribe artwithbraininmind-l' in body.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Jul 25 2008 - 04:03:01 EDT