But music also has set ways of expressing certain things. It has phraseology and idioms: We speak of musical phrasing but that is more a question of production.fingering on piano or guitar, or breathing and embouchure on a trumpet or trombone) is a skill independent of expressing the musical ideas contained in the notes. In music, producing individual notes (e.g.
We articulate sounds into words and words into statements at the same time but also seemingly independently of each other - we know this because we can be good at one and bad at the other (thus dual articulation). This is well-known about language (in certain circles).
It has dual articulation in that smaller segments like scales are organized independently of large segments. Bach’s variations are an example of this as is jazz improvisation. I can embed little segments of music in others indefinitely. But we have things like bars, stanzas, movements, etc. In fact, we talk about phrasing in music. It combines small building blocks into larger components that are like words, phrases, sentences and text. (Although I have argued elsewhere that language is not actually much like this, at all.) There are 12 notes (on the Western chromatic scale) that can produce an infinite variety of melodies just purely in their combination further enhanced by their combination with rhythms, tempos and harmonies. It can be described through a system of rules that operate on a limited vocabulary. 2 Music is NOT like (a) language in that:. (Note: After, I finished my list, I came across a Chomskean comparison by Jackendoff which has a slightly different focus but comes to the same general conclusion.) Here are some of the obvious similarities and dissimilarities. And obviously they are both universal human faculties - but looking for a musical essence in language or a linguistic essence in music is what a metaphor-aware approach to this question is hoping to warn against. That does not mean that a deeper investigation into musical properties of language and linguistic properties of music cannot be fruitful. We do not need to go very far into it to see where they are. We can find a number of mappings between music and language but an equal number of mis-mappings. Some people can get very exercised over this.īut it seems to me that a playing around with strengths and weakness of the music = language metaphor can help us come to grips with the question a bit better. Chomsky himself answered a question on this in a not very satisfying manner. MUSICALITY OF LANGUAGE SERIES
Leonard Bernstein even recorded a series of lectures applying Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar to music. People often talk about music as if it were language.
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