Text/Sound/Music.3

Can't seem to move fast enough to stay ahead of one Mr. Will Belew (see comments to last post).

If you have absolute, or "perfect", pitch you are likely to talk about individual pitches having colors, or characters, or qualities as distinct as color or surface texture or taste might be to someone else. Pitches in this case have both an identity and a quality, perhaps analogous to the way words have a denotation and a connotation. For poets, they probably have texture and taste and color as well (then you have the problem of figuring out whether the color or 'red' is, in fact, red). But, as Will pointed out, there are so very many more words, in any natural language, as there are notes in any traditional musical system. One could, of course, create an infinite number of notes by dividing up frequencies in the audible spectrum (or even the inaudible spectrum for that matter), but one has to assume that there are good historical reasons why the conventions of most traditional musics severely limit the number of notes in use.

1:1 relationships of notes to natural language units (whatever they may be) are unlikely to express the range of meaning in that language. As Will argues below, this relationship will also likely limit the meaningfulness of the musical system: "In western music, although there are accepted devices (antecedent and consequent phrasing, song forms, cadencing, etc) there is incredible range for meaning in that tonality only has meaning in aggregate, and then only very subjectively." Why keep pursuing it? My answer right now is that I think this approach might uncover two things: how poetry and music parted company (not necessarily historically, though we certainly need that information as well, but more how they came to be fundamentally different in so many practices); how the semantics of each might be understood by the others example. If we take Will's suggestion, you are not going to get to the meaning of a piece of music by reducing it to a symbol system (where notes are symbolic of something else) but only on its own terms. What might those terms be?