The 'Language' of Harmony

Somewhere I made the claim that music is not a language despite many assertions that it is. I think there is at least one book titled The Language of Music. But, as with phrases like "the language of love", this is just a metaphor. As someone once said, if music is a language, what are the words and where is the dictionary where I can look up what they mean?

But that being said, I was musing over a comment and my response to the last post on cadences and I realized that, while music is not a language in the sense of being able to communicate specific concrete meaning, it does have language-like aspects. Music has a 'vocabulary' that is learned. Harmony, especially, is something that one only becomes familiar with over time. Counterpoint is another. Melody and rhythm do tend to have a more direct impact, but it is perfectly possible to listen to music having only the sketchiest notion of harmony and counterpoint.

One implication of this is that music is not a 'universal' language. Even Esperanto has to be learned. If you want to really appreciate the drum music of Ghana or the gamelan music of Bali or the mbira music of Zimbabwe, then you need to learn the 'language' just as you need to learn the harmonic 'language' of Haydn to really see what he is up to in a sonata movement such as the one I put up in the previous post.

That being said, it is also true what my commentator was mentioning, the fact that consonance and dissonance are related to certain acoustic properties. The relation between the frequencies of C and G is a simpler one than that between C and F# which is why the interval C-G sounds 'pure' while the interval C-F# sounds harsh. But the fact that harmony is based on certain acoustic properties does not mean that all the possibilities and developments are perfectly obvious. The Prelude to Tristan und Isolde is based on simple acoustic proportions, but it extends and expands the implications to an amazing degree. For many minutes it simultaneously implies a tonic chord, while doing everything it can to avoid it! Enjoying and understanding this takes quite a bit of exposure to harmony as practiced in Western Europe for a few hundred years.

And here is a little mbira music: