Secondly, Mr. Bernstein has been helping me to sharpen my definition of "music," a seemingly elusive definition that burns a quiet hole into all of my music lessons (and I am a part of plenty). Bernstein takes a musico-linguistic approach to help answer the question, "Whither music?" for musicians and non-musicians alike (or, rather studied musicians and non-studied musicians possibly--semantics has for me become a wonderfully slippery river to try and map by only feeling its bed with my feet).
My first question regarded his decision to relate music and linguistics. Is it fair to place them on opposite sides of the equation? But that's where my thoughts end, for I haven't finished the lectures yet, and he makes many other remarkable statements using that method. So for now I am content with the benefit of the doubt and I can later turn trivial late-night musings to that question.
However, in this relationship he relates music to poetry in the sense that poetry is language that has gone through a series of transformations into meaningful ambiguity that turn it into art. Here is Bernstein's exquisite illustration.
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry.Here is Shakespeare's first line from his sixty-sixth sonnet. This is a beautiful line, and I won't bore you with a discussion on just how his use of iambic pentameter is genius in itself, but we must know that language has four levels: chosen elements (letters, symbols, sounds, phonemes), underlying strings (a deep structure that forms meaning--one of the strings here might be "I am tired"), then prose (the surface structure as Bernstein calls it), then poetry (the super-surface structure). For language to make it from one level to the next it must go through a process of transformation. Essentially, Bernstein proposes this prose-level version of the line:
I am tired of life, so many aspects of life, that I would like to die--in fact, I cry for death--because death is restful, and would bring me release from all of life's woes and injustices, which I shall now enumerate.All of these thoughts are constrained within Shakespeare's singular line "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry" and have been thereby transformed from prose into poetry, from simple communication into aesthetic [communication?].
Music is the same, but with sound. This is the rub that brings me to my first question, since language is also sound--Bernstein declares that language can have two purposes, communicative and/or aesthetic, but music only has one, aesthetic. But anyway, you get the point.
A musician I highly respect once defined music as organized sound. Based on Bernstein's conclusions, I might extend that; music is highly purposeful (and thereby organized) sound? A better definition would include the audience, wouldn't it? Is music defined by the listener, or by the performer, or by both simultaneously? Maybe I'll find better answers (and less questions, though that is hardly ever the course of academic inquiry) as I continue with Bernstein's lectures.
