Is Music a Language?

Most often when “music” and “language” occur in the same sentence, it’s an assertion that music begins to speak where language leaves off, or something of the kind. Putting such observations aside, it’s not difficult to sense that music and language have some deep affinities, but it’s notoriously difficult to tease out just what those affinities might be. The essay on punctuation marks by Theodor Adorno referenced in a Comment  on the previous post in this blog (Solstice Epiphany) gives some tantalizing clues. And the moral of the story may be that rather than inquiring whether music is a language, we should perhaps be trying to understand how language is a music…

Adorno’s essay is a delicious read. It can be accessed as a five-page PDF file via a link in this Open Culture article  [thanks, fdodgson!]. According to Adorno, punctuation marks are “marks of oral delivery; … they serve, hieroglyphically, an interplay that takes place in the interior of language….” He likens punctuation marks in language to notations in music which indicate phrasing: “only a person who can perceive the different weights of strong and weak phrasings in musical form can really feel the distinction between the comma and the semicolon.”

For Kurt Vonnegut semicolons were “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing,” but for Adorno they are particularly significant. “Theodor Haecker,” he writes, “was rightfully alarmed by the fact that the semicolon is dying out; this told him that no one can write a period [sentence containing several balanced clauses] any more.” This matters deeply, because “The sacrifice of the period leaves the idea short of breath. Prose is reduced to…a mere recording of facts, and when syntax and punctuation relinquish the right to articulate and shape the facts,…language is getting ready to capitulate to what merely exists…..It starts with the loss of the semicolon; it ends with the ratification of imbecility….”

In the realm of language, imagine a complex period: a sentence comprising several clauses, balanced in weight and rhythm, set off by suitable punctuation: semicolons, commas, perhaps dashes….

And then imagine a “paragraph” of serious music: a passage comprising several phrases, some long, some shorter, but balanced and related somehow, set off by suitable phrasing and articulation indications: slurs, caesuras,…

In both cases the marks (of punctuation, of phrasing) separate the components (clauses, phrases) in a way which simultaneously indicates their relatedness and interdependence. The components, while separable, are also inseparable: they converse with each other to create a whole. Marks of punctuation or phrasing indicate both the divisions and the points of connection.

So, is music a language, or is language a music?