Songs without Words, or Linguistic Notes

Is music a language? a family of languages? It is regular, meaning rule-governed, without excluding inventions by all or any of its users. This reminds us of syntax. It is uttered in sound and written in signs. It also evokes and conveys feelings, moods, emotions; in fact it does this remarkably well. It is situated at a conflux of traditions, habits and cultural norms, just like the languages we speak. (One cannot sing in a vacuum.) But what human activity is not so situated? And what else does music do? Will humming a tune order my dinner? Will arpeggios get me to the church on time?

One can imagine a world just like ours, but wordless, where colour and duration of tone, serial or simultaneous vocalization, harmonization, attack, volume, thematic variation, sonata-form development, song structure, cadence and resolution, even degrees of formlessness or atonality, blasts, sighs and whispers, perform systematically the very functions English and Spanish do in our world. This puts the metaphor in perspective, though, doesn’t it? Mere words in such a world would be music to the ears. One wants to be careful with conceits.

To be sure, languages, natural ones anyway, have musical aspects. Consider Mandarin. Tone, volume and attack function in English too. Music and language overlap, then. That’s not saying much. Humming the chorus of ‘Hungry Heart’ to a waiter who knows Springsteen might indeed bring me a menu more quickly than not. This shows us something about language, not music: it is plastic and improvisatory. But so is music! So is everything, when related to human use. Blasts, sighs and whispers are meaningful. Any body part can be used to say something, any object, any sound.

Maybe what makes a language a language, or a piece of music a piece of music, is what we do with them. We do a number of things with music, but the range and complexity of what we do with language is staggering. Yes, Ludwig, this is rough ground!