Conlanging and music (was: Results of Poll by Email No. 4)

Peter Clark reported:
>>>
Christophe Gran[d]sire elaborates: "Music and conlanging are both arts, but
that's the only connection. Conlanging is much more than putting notes
together. In fact, the musical equivalent to conlanging would be to invent
your own musical scales (a thing that quite a few conlangers do BTW). Music
is more like poetry: like you need an already defined language to make
poetry in it, you need an already defined musical scale to compose music
with it."
<<<

Absolutely not!  That's just the point I was making in my poll reply (which,
to be fair, you hadn't yet read :) )  Messiaen, Bartok, Stravinsky,
Schoenberg, even Debussy for goodness' sake, all used their own versions of
tonality (or 'scales' if you wish), which may be difficult to approach at
first, precisely because their 'language', or perhaps dialect, is not
congruent with those with which the listener may be familiar.  The point
goes deeper than that, though - to me, the personal style of any great
composer counts as a personal language, in the sense of an idiosyncratic
medium of communication.  The fact that Poulenc wrote many works in a
largely diatonic idiom doesn't mean that the language of those works isn't
importantly different from Haydn's.

</rant>  Wouldn't you say?  :))

Jonathan.

'O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages...'
Auden/Britten, 'Hymn to St. Cecilia'