In my post Follow your heart?, I argued that, contrary to the opinion held by many of my colleagues, I do not consider music to be a universal language. In order to clarify this position, however, we must first do what constitutes the foundation of any discussion: define our concepts. Without clear definitions, misunderstandings are inevitable.
What, then, do we mean when we speak of language, music, and musical language?
Language
There is widespread agreement that music is a language, and we can therefore begin by proposing a definition of language. The dictionary offers two principal interpretations of the term:
- In older or literary usage, and occasionally also in contemporary common usage, the same as language/tongue, understood as an instrument of communication used by members of the same community.
- In a broader sense, the capacity and faculty peculiar to human beings to communicate thoughts, express feelings, and, more generally, to inform others about their inner or external reality through a system of vocal or graphic signs; and the instrument of such expression and communication itself (understood in a generic sense, without reference to historically determined languages).
Here we begin to see some clarification. Language understood in its second sense, in the “generic sense, without reference to historically determined languages,” is indeed universal, as it is a faculty peculiar to all human beings. In other words, every community throughout history has made use of language, and language can therefore be regarded as universal.
However, when a person speaks, they use a historically determined language which, by definition, is limited to the “members of the same community” and is consequently particular rather than universal. In order to communicate with a speaker, we must therefore be able to understand that particular language—their specific linguistic system.
At this point, it is difficult not to agree with the following proposition:
Language is universal as a category of thought, yet particular in every concrete form it takes.
Let us keep this concept in mind and now turn to a definition of music.
Music
A commonly used definition describes music as an art consisting in the conception and production of structured sequences of sounds.
This definition clearly has its limitations when we consider certain contemporary repertoires, in which the mere production of unstructured sounds may already be considered music, or even the absence of sound altogether, as in J. Cage’s 4’33”.
Let us nevertheless examine whether, and in what way, this definition can be applied to our understanding of music during the period from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century.
Around 1317, Marchetto da Padova published his Lucidarium in arte musice plane, one of the most important and comprehensive works of the fourteenth century. In the Tractatus primus, he provides a remarkably thorough description of what music is and of the categories into which it can be divided.
For Marchetto, music, when considered as a category of thought, is “a wondrous and gentle art, which resounds in heaven and on earth” and is therefore universal and divine. At the same time, however, music is a product of human activity and, as such, can be measured, analysed, and understood in its practical application. It is therefore simultaneously “a science consisting of numbers, proportions, consonances, intervals, measures, and quantities.”
There is consequently no contradiction between the unfortunately recurring “reasons of the heart” and “reasons of the mind” in discussions of music, between “gut” and “brain,” “instinct” and “rationality,” and therefore between “art” and “science.” The notion that art, unlike science, should not be analysed, understood, and interpreted, but merely left to the workings of an uneducated intuition, was unknown to the authors of the period under consideration. The conception of music as a science is reflected in the organisation of the study of the artes liberales, in which music, as a “science consisting of numbers,” formed part of the quadrivium, alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy.
This definition of music as simultaneously universal and particular, and as a union of art and science, is taken up by several subsequent authors and retains its validity over the centuries that follow.
In 1558, Gioseffo Zarlino explicitly considers the dual definition of music “in general” and “in particular.” In the former sense, he states that music “is nothing other than Harmony; and we may say that it is that strife and friendship […], that is, a discordant concord, namely, the concord of various things that may be joined together.” Music considered in particular, by contrast, “is a speculative mathematical science, mistress of all songs, which, through the senses and reason, considers sounds and voices, numbers, proportions, and their differences.”
Lorenzo Penna, too, writes in 1684 that “the Music of Heaven originated in the creation of the angels, who, at the first dawn of their existence, sang praises to the Most High with musical instruments,” while emphasising the importance of “bringing light to the blindness of the intellect, which lives among the darkness of ignorance, entirely buried in our music.”
In 1722, Jean-Philippe Rameau returns to the same conception of a harmony between the two aspects of reason and the senses:
“We can judge music only in relation to the ear; and reason has no authority except when it agrees with the ear; but nothing should convince us more in our judgement than their union: by nature, we are satisfied by the ear, and the mind by reason; we should therefore judge by nothing other than their mutual concurrence.”
Finally, in 1785, Joseph Haydn writes to Leopold Mozart about his son Wolfgang:
“[…] I tell you before God, as an honest man, that your son is the greatest composer I know, either personally or by reputation: he has taste and, above all, the greatest knowledge of composition.”
Let us therefore establish another principle:
Music is simultaneously art and science, and admits of no division between heart and reason.
Musicality can consequently be understood as the capacity to recognise and experience this union of knowledge and emotion.
Musical Language
In light of our definitions of language and music, we must conclude that, during the period under consideration:
- music consists of sounds structured according to patterns;
- consequently, not every sound constitutes music; in other words, producing sounds does not necessarily mean making music (we will explore this concept in greater depth in a future post).
The analogy with spoken language allows us to understand that:
- musicians employed structures shared with their listeners;
- listeners, in turn, were aware of these structures and responded to them according to conventions shared by members of the community.
A failure to understand these structures and conventions makes it impossible to make music. At most, one may produce sounds that are more or less pleasing, like a “trained little bird,” to quote C. P. E. Bach. Such sounds, however, would be devoid of meaning and incapable of communicating the profound emotions of the human spirit.
There is therefore an abstract conception of musical language that is common to all cultures. This language is concretised within each community through a particular musical style, characterised by specific rules and patterns that make it comprehensible to members of that community. This is precisely analogous to the abstract conception of spoken language, which is concretized, in the present post, through the use of English—a language governed by rules and patterns that make it comprehensible only to readers who speak Englisch.
The confusion between these two meanings of language is certainly one of the factors that leads many of my colleagues astray when they claim that musical language is universal:
Musical language is universal as a category of thought—because it is present in every population throughout history—but, whenever music is performed, it becomes historically determined by a particular style and is therefore limited to the members of a given community.
For example, this was true of nineteenth-century Viennese listeners who understood that anticipating the second beat of a waltz produced a sense of elegance, lightness, and a particular momentum that invited dance. It was likewise true of jazz musicians in the 1920s, who knew how to perform eighth notes in order to communicate to listeners the “swinging” sensation they sought to evoke. Eighth notes performed evenly are not swing; they did not belong to that particular language and were not—and still are not—accepted by the community.
Knowledge of the musical language employed by a particular composer is therefore the conditio sine qua non for initiating the interpretative process that will ultimately lead us towards a particular performance.