What Kind of an Art is Music? Deryck Cooke Answers in His Book The Language of Music PDF 31

The topics that Swain selects for his comparative study include syntax, semantics, phonology, language acquisition, language evolution, artificial languages and language-using communities. Their musical counterparts have all come under fire in times of revolutionary change such as the early decades of the twentieth century.

The semantics of music is something of a disaster area (but so, for that matter, is natural language semantics). Although a pastoral theme may well suggest the countryside, it cannot possibly assert that you are about to tread in a cowpat. But a ray of hope illuminates the attempt to assign meanings to vocal compositions, where the words and the music may be expected to tell the same story.

the language of music deryck cooke pdf 31

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The phonology of a musical language is properly concerned with the conceptual (phonemic) relations between the notes rather than their acoustic (phonetic) realization. The tonal relations of Western classical music, so economically represented by stave notation, remained basically unchanged during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 2ff7e9595c