Re: On the Grammar of Music

[John Croft <mfmxhjcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 28/4/01 13:34, O.T.Furnes at oddtf@IMT.UIO.NO wrote:

> If I present myself saying: "hello, I'm Odd" - I'm afraid many would agree to
> that - not in the Norwegian meaning of the word though. If English were
> "techno" and Norwegian were "bebop" - a C7#5b9 would in techno sound odd in
> the english use of the word and would in jazz sound "odd" in the norwegian
> denotation.

I think one has to be careful with analogies like this -- it would be easy
enough to make an immediately acceptable piece of music with elements of
techno and bebop -- this kind of this is done all the time, and it is
usually fairly easy to accept as music, in a way that a spontaneous hybrid
of Norwegian and English would not. In other words, stylistic variation in
music is (potentially) continuous -- it seems to me that this is a
significant disanalogy with linguistic grammatical correctness.

John


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