We often think of music as a translation of emotional states. You know that a violin playing droopy phrases means you’re supposed to weep; you know that Sousa marches mean you’re supposed to feel exhilarated. But these conventional mood settings seem pretty vague. Can music aspire to more precise kinds of translation? Can sentences, stories, dramas be translated into music? If so, does the resulting music have any of the properties of spoken or written language? I want to discuss the ways in which music—instrumental music—has a linguistic character, as if it translated texts (real or imaginary) into wordless sound, and then to discuss the ways in which music resists any linguistic character, even proposes itself as an antilanguage incapable of translating anything. We’ll start with the first case.

Music as a Language

According to this model, music is the one universal language, a sort of pentecostal tongue of fire, in that it behaves as a language not learned systematically but understood intuitively by everyone. This model is in some ways obviously untenable: how could one say, “The persimmons are mottled but unripe” without recourse to spoken words? But it provides a powerful dream for activating certain potentialities of musical expression, even though it is most pervasive as a trope of comedy, as (for example) when Harpo Marx (in Duck Soup) carries on one end of a telephone conversation strictly by means of a bicycle horn. Still, a respectable case can be made for the thesis that music can operate as a complete language, since every formal property of speech—formal in the sense of nondenotative—can, I believe, be understood as a formal property of music.

Among the schemes for classifying the formal properties of speech are those based on small units, such as inflection and phoneme construction; those based on middle-sized units, such as syntax; and those based on large units, such as the structures of rational persuasion that we call rhetoric, or the structures of seduction that we call narrative and drama.