Klarinet Archive - Posting 000068.txt from 2002/07

From: w7wright@-----.net (William Wright)
Subj: Re: [kl] Syntactical ambiguities, linguistic and otherwise
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 04:01:32 -0400

<><> Neil=A0Leupold wrote:
There was a cardinal rule in English composition classes [snip]
Avoid compelling a reader to pause and refer back to previous material
[snip] This relationship I'm drawing between music and language
[snip] The function of a chord is defined not by where it originates
but by where it is going

Neil, your question (greatly snipped, sorry) is an important one. I
posed it 6-9 months ago for exactly the same reasons that you have ---
when I was trying to compare musical language with verbal language. It
makes me feel good that someone else has seen the same question
independently.

Albeit you explained the question much better than I did. I spoke of
it in terms of expecting the listener to "suspend judgement" --- rather
than to think forwards or backwards.

Do the two types of 'language' (music vs. words) obey different grammars
because, in part, 'aural' short term memory extinguishes more rapidly
than 'ideational' short term memory? Is that why, in part, more humans
are verbally fluent than musically fluent?

Another issue is rhythm content and the oft-discussed matter of
'feeling'. In order to 'feel' a rhythm, you don't have much
opportunity to suspend processing (to push/pop a 'stack' in computer
terms), do you? This may be a quality that distinguishes poetry from
ordinary text, and, in effect, makes poetry more akin to music than it
is to ordinary text.

At the present moment, as part of Bill & Neil's Excellent Adventure, I'm
having to deal with exactly this question. So it's serendipitous that
you should mention it. How much can I expect the listener to suspend
jdgement and later to 'think back' a few measures while continuing to
absorb new melody? The easy answer is: "If the theme is strong enough,
the listener will recognize it many measures later." But there's more
to it than just the 'strength' of a few measures, I think.

Cheers,
Bill

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