By Frank J. Oteri

Wednesday, July 13, 2005, 1:56:41 PM

For the last three weeks, Randy, Molly, and I have been engaged in an intense debate as to whether or not music has any meaning and whether or not that meaning can be conveyed to a listener exclusively through music.

Call it the post-post-modernist version of the timeworn classical vs. romantic debate. Although I’d be loathe to describe any of us as classicists or romantics, for the sake of argument I’ll call Randy—who doesn’t believe in musical meaning—a classicist, and myself a romantic since I buy into all sorts of musical iconography. (Ironically he’s the more intuitive composer making him a romantic, and I’m obsessed with form and structure making me a classicist. But we have the same fights about uptown and downtown. See how foolish categories are!) Molly, always the level-headed journalist-type, maintains a cautious middle ground.

To temper this debate, I’d like to suggest that music can have profound meaning, but it requires a contextual framework in which to understand it which is usually the result of a process of acculturation, much like learning a verbal language.

In Modal Subjectivities, a recent book about 16th century Italian madrigals, the always provocative UCLA-based musicologist Susan McClary asserts that Monteverdi’s compositional process is “nearly as organic as any by a latter-day serialist, except that he has a commitment not only to the saturated integrity of his piece but also to the conventions that make it publicly intelligible.” (emphasis added).

Is this fair? Can the compositional process of any music, from 12-bar blues to spectralism, be “publicly intelligible” without some kind of grounding in its conventions? And, once you are grounded in those conventions, couldn’t even the music of Brian Ferneyhough make perfectly simple sense? Similarly, if you’ve never heard a nursery rhyme in your life (difficult I know, for arguments sake imagine an extraterrestrial sentient being), wouldn’t it seem baffling on first listen?

As I read McClary’s pronouncement on an overcrowded subway this morning, several lightbulbs went off. I wanted to scream “A-ha!” to nearby passengers but that probably would not have been advisable in a climate of “Orange Alert.”

Whether or not music can be publicly intelligible has also played a role in a chain of emails I’ve been having with composer Christopher Adler which he has published on his web site. Chris had issues with some of the comments I made last year about his Tzadik CD and assumed they were the result of my lack of familiarity with the traditional Lao-Thai khaen (mouth organ) music that inspires him. Ironically, while I’ve never studied it formally, this is music I’ve heard a fair amount of and I even possess a khaen (although I usually get hopelessly out of breath after only a minute of trying to play it). My tête-à-tête with Adler would seemingly prove Randy’s contention. I thought I understood Adler’s music but without sufficient explanatory words to guide me, the music was not able to convey its meaning on its own. Before I generate another downpour of emails, I am not implying here that this is the fault of Adler’s music.

I would contend that any lapse in understanding between music and its listeners is partially the result of our over-dependence on verbal language and our automatic assumptions derived from experiential memory. These alone cannot provide immediate acculturation any more than reading a Berlitz book can keep you from being snubbed when you try to speak French in Paris. Verbal language can only go so far in expressing the meanings that music can convey. However, as primarily language-based communicators, we’re stuck with words for everything we do. Randy would say that explanatory words are a waste of time and that they get in the way of the musical experience which is ultimately not about comprehension on any level, but something else. But without some attempt at analysis (which unfortunately will inevitably have to use words at some point), how can we make sense out of anything?

When I listen to music, any music, I usually respond to details I am able to analyze. Despite my admiration for Brian Eno, no music is ambient when I listen to it. All music is foreground, even the horrid MuzakTM I was subjected to on the phone earlier this week while on-hold in which a series of parallel thirds caught my attention. I can’t turn off this mode of listening. It is how I process music and that processing is why I am perpetually fascinated by music. But I also know all too well that my methods are far from universal. So is anything about music universal?

What does McClary mean by “public intelligibility”? Is it the Common Practice-era cliché of major means happy and minor means sad? Could most angular twelve-tone music be turning potential listeners off because trichords that reject major and minor implications sound frustrated and angry? (Despite my wishes for the contrary, most people listen to music just to relax.) How far can you go with a compositional process and have listeners know what you’re doing without having to explain it by other means?

Light music brings classics to the masses
By Carolyn

English conductor Anthony Inglis rehearses with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Australian Air Force Band for the Spectaculars at the Rod Laver Arena.
Photo: Ken Irwin

Five years ago, Raymond Gubbay applied for the job of head of the Royal Opera House, London. Given that he had spent 35 years promoting popular classics concerts and musical theatre, the application was not taken seriously by the music establishment.

He didn’t get the job, but Gubbay hardly went away and cried – he is laughing all the way to the bank, having invented the Classical Spectacular franchise, which has become an international success in 16 years. Two concerts at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena today will be among the 30 Classical Spectacular concerts Gubbay will produce this year in Europe and Australia.

The formula is simple. Take the world’s most popular classical pieces – from Nessun Dorma to the Swan Lake Finale, Blue Danube Waltz and the Can Can theme. Engage a 90-piece symphony orchestra, 100-piece choir, military band and soloists to perform them. Package it with synchronised lasers, lights and fireworks. Put them on stage in an arena packed with 10,000 people, and your bank manager will be popping champagne and whistling the 1812 Overture.

Gubbay says the concerts introduce classical music to mainstream audiences, who often go on to patronise the likes of the Royal Opera House.

Gubbay says rock concerts, with their dry ice, lasers and pyrotechnics, were the inspiration for the first Classical Spectacular at London’s Royal Albert Hall in October, 1989.

A capacity audience of 5000 turned up to hear the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Band of the Welsh Guards, and the London Choral Society perform a classical greatest hits.

Singing, humming and clapping along was encouraged. A second show was added, then two more. This year, Royal Albert Hall will host two, six-show Classical Spectacular seasons.

Manchester and Birmingham have been added to the calendar, as have Dublin, Scandinavia, Germany and Switzerland. There are two concerts in Sydney next week, and plans for other Australian capitals next year.

The Melbourne concerts feature the English conductor Anthony Inglis, the 90-piece Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, 100-voice Melbourne Chorale, and the Royal Australian Air Force Band.

Local tenor Rosario La Spina and baritone Jose Carbo will sing arias such as La Donna e Mobile and Nessun Dorma.

The show does not have a chronology or theme. The conductor makes light banter with the audience, but information on the pieces and composers is confined to the program. Asked why the formula has been so popular, Gubbay says: “I think it’s just struck a popular chord with people.

“Classical music can be fun, and a pleasure to listen to. It’s just a great, fun night out. It’s not stuffy, it’s not starchy . . . we’re just saying, come and enjoy yourselves.”

Syntactical Gothicisms of the Mind
The OnlyOneNativeSpeaker survey of Constructed Languages

Language is parasitic, not on the human body as William Burroughs suggested, but on the world around us: it feeds on the output of the sensory apparatus and leaves behind hideous carcasses. Language whiplashes the mind when we speak it, poisons our blood when we write it down and heats up the earth when we print it. Language is to reality what your lungs are to oxygen, but whereas growing a lung of ones own remains problematic, inventing a private language seems to be an option as viable as building your own backyard bunker to survive nuclear holocaust. Invented languages, implying a deep dissatisfaction with the world as-is, are grotesque creatures providing a unique instrument to create, understand, describe and manipulate private realities and dark sensibilities. The following classification of constructed languages, like half-opened Venetian blinds, give partial perspective to the mind-states that haunt the language inventor/innovator.

1) Utopian communications: transnational auxiliary languages are a typical late 19th century outcome of the dreams of universal brotherhood held by pacifists and free-masons. Esperanto, developed in 1887 by LL Zamenhof, still attracts followers, other once prominent examples like IDO, Volapuk and Interlingua have disappeared in the mist of time.

2) Language as linguistic laboratory: a constructed language as the anvil for philosophic reasoning blacksmith-style. The logical languages Loglan and Lojban were designed to test the theory that the structure of language sets limits on the thinking of those who speak it.  

3) The languages of extrahuman intelligences revealed in trances: the Martian language of H??e Smith, Enochian the angelic language revealed to Edward Kelley while communicating with the crystalline netherworld, the ‘space-language’ aUI was taught John Weilgart when he was a boy by a little green elf-like humanoid from outer space.

4) Pastime languages: a mad collection of amateur syllable-pilots constructing languages for fun and self-education, playing games with them and translating the classics in them.

5) Machine languages: languages to communicate with machines, for now this category consists solely of programming languages though this does not need to be so in the future. Programmers tend to be partisan about the language they program in and debates between them can reach the same irrational fierceness that accompanied Esperanto vs. Volapuk debates from a century ago.  

6) Languages found or suspected: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence as it exists today could only emerge after it was established that the radio-spectrum could in principle transmit (intergalactic) messages. Once undertaking SETI the discussion soon led to problems concerning the boundaries of what kind of messages captured would still be considered as language. Valuable information about unacknowledged conditions for languages that could only come into view through practical experimentation. John C. Lilly, a brilliant brain scientist wasting his reputation on his attempts to decipher the language of dolphins, represents the dark side of this category.

7) Symbolic languages: dream interpretations are an essential part of folk cultures all over the world. Symbols are a concentrated pulse of meaning, the complexity of which need oracle power to be properly translated for the mere mortal. 19th Century symbolist literature created symbolic languages interwoven in ordinary language. Sign systems are a special class of symbolic languages.  

8) Fictional languages: invented languages as adding colour locale to fictional alien words in books and films. Science fiction and fantasy (Tolkien developed several languages in and outside the world portrayed in the dreaded pages of his horrid trilogy) are traditional suppliers of languages that sometimes manage to gain a relatively large numbers of speakers. But in the ‘serious literature’ of Thomas Morus and Nabokov fictional languages are used for the same reasons.

9) Ad-Hoc languages: words made up during drunken games of scrabble, or on intent in word games like Epram’s Game of Asparagus in which participants construct a language from words read in a jar filled with alphabet-vermicelli and then have to make polite party chit-chat in their new language.

10) Mathematics: a special-purpose rational language designed by humans to be complete and self-consisted has since long escaped human understanding.  

11) Classifier languages: taxonomical systems and other scientific domain-transcendent naming schemes are not a language in the strict sense, but they are relevant in this context because the fill the gap left wide open by language inaptness to identify the individual in multitudes of similarity. Colours, insects, asteroids, compounds and particles would fall from the edge of the world of knowledge if they would remain unnamed. The benefit of these systems is that each name contains meta-information immediately understandable to those in the know of the underlying key. Classifier systems solve a problem inventors of languages out-of-thin-air run into: it provides a framework that enables systemised forward-compatible naming of objects yet to be named.  

12) The recreation of a lost language and the search for the perfect language: the language of god disappeared from earth with the fall of Babylon some people believe. Each unspeakable sacred wisdom must go accompanied with a perfect language to match the divinity of its meaning is a parallel argument. Some people sought to reconstruct this perfect language lost from fragments found and the results are placed in this category. This is a muddled but well researched category including madcap geniuses like Bishop Wilkins and Giordano Bruno.

All these efforts, dreams and visions are the materials from which Borges weaved his universe of tiptoeing thinkers inventing compasses and flashlights to guide them through the sunless black box of reality where uncontrollable finiteness is the sea, ordered infinity the beach and your sanity breaks down a little bit more with each wave hammering down on the coastline. Language, Paraphrasing T.E. Hulme, is a gossamer web that has entrapped us:

Novalis, poet and mining engineer, firmly believed that “men travel in manifold paths: who traces and compares these, will find strange Figures come to light; Figures which seem as if they belonged to that great Cipher-writing”.   Athanasius Kirchners thought he had deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs, but later it was discovered that his attempt though well executed and based on a reasonable hypothesis was entirely of the mark: unwittingly he had constructed a language by misinterpreting the source. Ever since Turing’s tigers mathematicians have found biological shapes that can be produced by formula’s to a level of stunning similarity, the question (despite claims made by some) what this means about both nature and mathematics is yet undecided. The perfect languages of Wilkinson and Bruno have fossilised the soft tissue of ideas. Jeremy Fodor postulated the existence of Mentalese, the native language of the brain (which is after all a symbolic processor) into which each incoming language is translated before being interpreted. Lincos by Hans Freudenthal is a thought experiment showing how an auxiliary language can be constructed from scratch in the process of communication with extraterrestrials. aUI, the established auxiliary language between space travelling communities from outer space, is (according to its only earth speaker Weilgart) due to its rational structure able to cure a person from irrational thinking patterns. Hildegard von Bingen, 12 century nun developed a secret language called “lingua Ignota”, she is best remembered for her advice to never drink water when there is beer available. The catholic priest John Martin Schleyer constructed his Volapuk because God instructed him in a dream to do so. Had he instead approached a psychoanalyst most likely he would have been told that the dream really contained symbols speaking of his unstoppable lust for catholic nuns. The popular programming language Python, named after Monty Pythons Flying Circus, has a mythical  version 3000 which is promised to sport a telepathic interface. Esoteric programming languages like Brain fuck or Ook! (meant for orang-utans) are wilfully obscure, impractical and frustrating to use; by aiming for the outer rim of possibility they reveal otherwise invisible norms of what constitutes a ‘decent’ language. Klingon, developed by a proper linguist is versatile enough to serve as auxiliary language during Star Trek conventions or to translate Shakespeare in. It is reported that one man tried to raise his child in English/Klingon bilingualism. Loglan was tailored for such an experiment, but Klingon is just as well suited for this job because it reflects the habits of a race quite different from humans. The Klingons equivalent to ‘hello’ is ‘what do you want!’ and you suspect this to create a unique Klingonian sense of reality in the speaker. Klingons have little awareness for interior design though and the bilingual experiment met with large practical problems: swearing is a fine art in Klingon, but ordinary things like ‘table’ go unnamed. To knock-out any last doubt about the seriousness of Klingonese: the name given to Klingon Worf certainly must be referring to Benjamin Lee Whorf, around whose hypothesis we are circumnavigating here:

“Thinking itself is in a language – in English, in Sanskrit, In Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationships and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of consciousness.”

Self-engineering a language cannot escape the patina of weirdness: the stereotypical image of programmers, sci-fi enthusiasts and pacifists as social outcasts does not help to debunk this myth in the eyes of those with too much confidence in their own reality. Maybe priding yourself on speaking fluent Klingon will stigmatise you as a nerd, but natural languages are not value free either: speech tainted by accent or dialect can be a definite disadvantage in life, while oppressive imperialist regimes do not hesitate to make minority languages illegal. If a language is outlawed only outlaws will speak it.
And why do you think that I write this in English instead of my native Dutch?

When I hear Moroccan men talk Berber, an oral language, every sentence seems to contain at least one Dutch word. By looking at the nature of these borrowed words one can get an idea about the everyday live of the people with whom the language originated. Samuel Delaney in his cult sci-fi novel Babel-17 puts it likes this: “Learning a language makes you see the universe through other people’s eyes”, when the other is an intelligent fishlike entity from a different solar-system the way this works is more obviously observed than it would when learning a slavish language spoken 400 kilometres to the east where conditions are similar. One last question: to what extent does learning a language makes you become the people speaking it?    
In the light of all this, in search for experiences only experienced when twisting your mind and your tongue in gargoyle shapes, getting better in it with each new language you come up with, the collaborative Babylon bonanza of OnlyOneNativeSpeaker project radiates it’s home brewed gothic tunnels of consciousness.

Send us your language at: info [at] socialfiction [dot] org.