Re: Music and language

Keith R Sawyer (sawyer who-is-at cats.ucsc.edu)
Thu, 19 Oct 1995 11:27:50 -0700 (PDT)

There is a long tradition of comparing language and music, both within
and outside academia. I'm most familiar with these efforts within
semiotics and ethnomusicology, beginning with transformational/structural
approaches in the 1960s (with deeper roots in the formalist aesthetics of
the Prague school, perhaps). You can find good reviews of this stuff in
Feld's 1974 article in Ethnomusicology, and Powers 1980 in the same.

I have an article in press in _Semiotica_ which argues that these
comparisons generally are unsatisfying when they focus on syntax or
semantics as the basis of comparison. I instead focus on the pragmatics
of both music and language: the situated/socially contextualized nature
of performance in both modalities; the importance of the interaction
between co-performers; the role of the audience.

I'll be happy to provide more detail to those interested,

Keith Sawyer
UC Santa Cruz