Re: On the Grammar of Music

[Tom Brennan <g_brennantg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Martin, was it not you who in an earlier post was discussing what you
perceived as an incorrect note in a Mozart piece?  Lest we go down a side
road, let us avoid saying anything like that was melody rather than chord
structure since melody must follow cord structure or we could comfortably do
something like play Led Zeplin and Bach together and have them successfully
blend if we alter tempo appropriately.

As to meaning, languages use the dictionary to convey meaning and gramatics to
people and we learn gramatics and syntax as well as some pragmatics in school.
 Very little such is taught concerning music so it seems more likely that what
we have is a "language" which is not very well spoken my most and spoken
little enough that there is no agreed upon specification for gramatics.  This
does not preclude its existance particularly at the neural level.  After all,
all of this is ultimately a series of neural events and what does or does not
exist in terms of the above is determined by the brain; at least in as far as
we understand things at present.

Tom
On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Martin Braun wrote:

> Odd Torleiv Furnes wrote:
> "You might like to know that my bookshelf contains several books about the
> chordal treatments in Bach, Hindemith, Bartok and Oasis to name a few."
>
> Reply:
>
> Fine. Then you will surely agree that there is so much variation in the
> chordal treatment within the work of each composer that they were obviously
> not following any grammar.
>
> A grammar of chords could only exist, if there were at least a few chords
> that had a meaning. Such a meaning would have to be the same for composer
> and audience. We don't have such things in music. The examples of possible
> meanings of chords, given by Julian Vrieslander earlier today, clearly show
> that an agreement on meaning is not possible in this field. Ask ten persons
> what they think the difference between A-C-E and G#-C#-F is. You'll get ten
> different answers. And there might not be any correlation whatsoever between
> the answers.
>
> Martin
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: O.T.Furnes <oddtf@imt.uio.no>
> To: <AUDITORY@LISTS.MCGILL.CA>
> Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 8:21 AM
> Subject: Re: On the Grammar of Music
>

Tom Brennan, CCC-A/SLP, RHD
web page http://titan.sfasu.edu/~g_brennantg/sonicpage.html
web master http://titan.sfasu.edu/~f_freemanfj/speechscience.html
web master http://titan.sfasu.edu/~f_freemanfj/fluency.html