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Summary
Summary
"How is music like language, and so what if it is?" Using this double-barreled question as a starting point, Joseph P. Swain takes us to the fascinating crossroads where the philosophy and theory of music meet the worlds of linguistics, perception, cognition, meaning, and even poetry.
In Musical Languages, Swain revisits the age-old analogy between music and language in light of the latest advances in modern linguistics and cognitive psychology. The author examines the aptness of the analogy and the degree to which it can be stretched, not only demonstrating the essential similarities between music and language but also exposing where the analogy breaks down. This book picks up where Leonard Bernstein's The Unanswered Question leaves off, rendering the ubiquitous expression "musical language" fresh once again.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
An associate professor of music at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., and author of Sound Judgment: Basic Ideas about Music, Swain attempts to ask what music has in common with language. Touching on musical metaphor, musical semantics, syntax, artificial (computer) languages and more, Swain's survey of previous analyses and arguments is sometimes useful but, as is perhaps inevitable in a short (though expensive) book on this complicated subject, sometimes overly generalized or insufficiently explained for any but the specialist. Swain's style is also rather airless ("There is no context-free formula for friction. This is to say nothing of multivariable, chaotic systems when even the classical formulas cannot predict the emergent properties that arise out of weather patterns and such.") and he has an annoying tic of asking a run of several questions in breathless fashion, some of them rhetorical. Some definitions are odd: the translator and critic Eric Bentley is called a "drama theorist" while Verdi is praised for "songs that suited both Café and La Scala." Swain's viewpoint is sometimes very odd: he finds the writings of the eccentric French Boulez-worshipper Jean-Jacques Nattiez proof that the subject of music and language is very timely today, whereas it probably saw its day as a fashionable debate issue decades ago, when the ever-trendy Leonard Bernstein picked it up for the Norton lectures and the resulting book The Unanswered Question. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A dense, evocative, rewarding journey to the no-man's-land between the realms of music and language. Award-winning music scholar Swain (Colgate Univ.) has written a brave, boundary-breaking book for musical theorists and for those linguists with an excellent music education. Everyone else, however, will have to rely on their gut feelings that a great piece of music has spoken to them or that a poem in a foreign language had music that moved them--two points well explored here. Swain builds an eloquent case for comparing music and spoken language, establishing ""how musical elements are gathered and understood like speech elements; how that understanding is specific to a community of speakers and listeners; how the meaning of music may now broaden and now narrow, ever responsive to its context; how composers can use that context to teach their listeners to hear syntax that endures but for one piece, an ephemeral syntax that is music's answer to metaphor; how composers have imitated linguistic idealists in the production of artificial systems in our century; how music and language have similarly evolved."" Swain's sentences are not usually this long, but this opening of his eighth and final chapter encapsulates much of the ambitious theorizing that goes on here. Just when we feel the author is stretching a point, he strikes a familiar note with insights such as his observation that we ""are much more forgiving of syntactic errors in the performance of natural language than in music."" Swain also scores points when comparing the untranslatable quality of musically significant poems to the ""formless, unpredictable blur of sound"" of a foreign musical language. Such high-altitude mountain climbing is not for everyone, but this is a landmark expedition in the exploration of the upper reaches of human communication. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
Questions of meaning and reference have long occupied philosophers of language, particularly during the last 200 years. The irresistible comparison of spoken word to uttered sound has led philosophers and others to extend such questions to music. Swain (Colgate Univ.) does so with more tautness and precision than many others who have attempted to specify what music and language have in common. He looks at the subject in the light of the most recent findings in cognitive psychology and linguistics. Taking an analogical approach, he examines in detail syntax, semantics, and metaphor as proper concepts to apply to the experience of music. Further, he examines the implications of artificial intelligence and muses on the effect of cultural context on the evolution of musical languages. Swain begins each of his eight chapters with intriguing questions, some of which he answers in the subsequent text, and ends each with a helpful summary. However, Swain's examination raises more questions than it answers. The thorough chapter notes and bibliography for further reading range from Adorno to Wittgenstein, encompassing philosophers, psychologists, and music theorists. Despite an appendix intended to help nonmusicians, much of this theoretical work will be accessible only to those well trained in traditional Western tonal harmony. Upper-division undergraduates and above. M. Neil; Augustana College (IL)