Wynton Marsalis has been hosting a series on Public Television in which he
creates musical objects (or at least he created some for me).
In the session I saw he was demonstrating the link between certain jazz
forms and the sonata form. He was insistent that form was a product of
repetition (which strikes me as a deep insight). If I remember correctly he
showed, by stopping and starting and thereby isolating portions of the
music, two themes in two opening portions of several different sonatas. And
then showed how they combined in a middle "fantasia" (which is where I
heard something I had never heard before as an object) and then resolved
the themes in a final portion of the piece.
Perhaps a Bakhtinian analysis would be useful. That given a genre (form)
any particular utterance, (movement, section) only takes place in the
context of the larger genre. A particular musical object can emerge against
this background. (Ah, we say--there is the fantasia.)
A "musical language" would require a series of genres that constrain the
appearance of particular musical objects which appear within each musical
genre's confines. (I suspect that I would not hear a fantasia outside of
the constraining context of a sonata.) The productive part of language
would be the ability to "quote" or "refer to" various objects in other
contexts. Which may have been the ultimate point that Marsalis was trying
to make when he hooked it up to jazz.
Perhaps the way in which language and music are alike is in the way that
they both refer back to a common "sense-making" mechanism which shapes
their similarities.
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John St. Julien (stjulien who-is-at uiuc.edu)
Department of Curriculum & Instruction,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
1310 South Sixth Street, Rm 388
Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 333-2319
http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/stjulien