Re: musical talk?

At 05:24 PM 10/24/98 -0400, Sally Caves wrote:
>Drat, this was a concept I had many many years ago, and people went...
>"huh?"  My notion was that it was chords that expressed grammar--and
>INTERVALS--whether it was a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth or a sixth
>in the succession of notes or chords.  It is easier to hear intervals
>between notes than specific notes by themselves.  By "two notes," I'm
>assuming, Nik, that you mean two notes played together?  Or two notes
>played in succession?
>
I think in Solresol it was two or more successive notes that defined a
morpheme; it was melody, not harmony.  The idea was that one person should
be able to sing it.  However, your idea of harmony being grammatically
significant is interesting.  I've actually thought about aliens whose vocal
apparatus is such that they can sing in harmony with themselves, and what
kind of musical language they could develop.  (The idea of a strictly
melodic language, sort of like birdsong but much more complex, is fairly
old, but still IMHO interesting.  Although a lot of people have talked about
it in general terms, I'm not aware of anybody -- except the inventor of
Solresol -- who's actually tried to work it out in detail.)

(I know that it's possible for humans to sing more than one note the same
time.  Tibetan Buddhist monks do it in religious chants.  The technique is
interesting but pretty limited; I think that for a language based on harmony
to be feasible, the "speakers" would have to be non-human.)

>
>Hasn't it always been _sol_, Nik?  Except in _The Sound of Music_, where
>it's thought to be "sew... a needle pulling thread..."
It is _sol_.  Those syllable names come from the Latin text of a Gregorian
chant that at one time was so familiar that it could be used as a mnemonic
device for assigning names to notes.  (The first one was originally "ut"
rather than "do", and in some European languages "ut" is still used.)
>
>Yeah, this could make for some pretty atonal music.  The idea that
>really grabbed me, and you mentioned it above, was that a choir could sing
>these chords using words that contradicted the meaning of the music.  But
>I never could put it into any kind of system, since my musical sense
>demanded a certain aesthetic.  Majors and minors already encode a kind of
>meaning in western music, interestingly.  So do certain rhythms.
I've long been curious about whether there are any "musical universals"
comparable to language universals.  As an undergraduate, I took an
introductory course in ethnomusicology, which was interesting but not very
helpful in answering that question.  But that's getting pretty far off-topic.
-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
-- The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939)