Music is a weird language...

For a while I was a Japanese language student, a ho hum student in my own opinion.  A strange aside, whenever I go to Argentina, all my Japanese comes flooding back.  No doubt a trick of the neural pathways as my brain tries to glean understanding in a foreign country.

To read the Asahi Shinbun, the news paper, you have to know over 200 kanji characters and something like 2000 "words" formed from those characters to be able to truly understand the paper.  I was always weak in my Kanji, I did ok with my hiragana and katakana.  Recently I have been thinking about music and music notation.  Tones, 12 tone music and modes etc.  Essentially, 12 notes in western music comprise everything.  It is about constructing sentences with those 12 notes, words,  and phrases.  It is amazing what we can communicate with them.  Minor, Major, happy, sad.  For me, I think I have a little synesthesia, so I get a little lightshow too.   I used to take lessons with Jim Robinson in the way back, he would comment that it was a little weird that I associated specific colors for sounds and sonic textures.

I once postulated what it would take to describe the deconstruction and assembly of a carburetor via music or tones when I was contemplating a Disquiet Junto project.  I guess if you had to do so, it would eventually approach the complexity of a language.  Right, Left, Up, Down, Forwards, Backwards, righty tighty, lefty loosey....

English has 26 letters and a certain number of phonic sounds all which can be used to convey meaning when assembled in a sequence. By themselves, the alphabet is pretty meaningless (though the ability to recall it is used as a simple means for determining brain damage or inebriation).  12 notes certainly doesn't represent the crazy number of phonic or tonal possibilities afforded to us by our mouth parts, yet I am quite happy to lay back, go running, drive a car or spend my day at the computer sending emails to a sound track of 12 notes of different flavors.

This completely avoids the conversation of why music is pleasurable or satisfying to have playing while working as background noise or why it is a very different experience when focusing on it.

Getting back to my original thought though, music as a language. Notes on a staff are profoundly different from the notes and tones that we hear.  Those written notes are so rudimentary as to be the grunts and howls of our long dead ancestors. It is exactly that simplistic nature which imparts artistry to music.  It is like comparing language to poetry.  I can communicate how to disassemble a carburetor (and reassemble it hopefully) using english written and spoken.  Doing it as poetry though, that is an entirely different animal.