Music and Semantics

Excellent article on music and semantics.

http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans9/reybrouck.htm

I especially like the musical plots expressed as graphics where he "metaphorizes;"

music as an expression of being in a container, expansion of a container, a container in motion, as moving from one container to another, depart and return to a path, taking an alternate path, of reaching a boundary, of breaking through a boundary, of breaking into another container, etc...

Hmmm... Music in a container would be in a certain form such as a passacaglia and perhaps stay in the same mode.

Moving from one container to another would be like changing in the middle of a passacaglia to a Red Hot Chilli Peppers type of tune.

Any other ideas?

Reaching a boundary might be like music developing but stopping short of the next expected development, but still one which might be considered outside of that particular form.

Such as music "progressing" from tonal to rapid changes of tonality, to atonal, to serial, perhaps not finally progressing to microtonal.

Any further suggestions?

I also just read another article about how in language parts of a sentence agree and in music the next motif or phrase will be in the same mode aka in agreement.

In language words can be plural and in music there are repetitions. That is the strategy for making words plural in Bahasa Indonesian. The word for child is anak and the word for children is anak-anak.

In language there are cases and in music there are prefixes, infixes and suffixes which may be similar to expanding or agglutinative transformations.

Another similarity is "dative": object toward which an activity moves. I think of goal tones in jazz.

Conjuctions are formed by transformational similitude.

In my notes I copied that verbs are represented in music by horizontal activity and that in music a noun can be seen as vertical activity.

But upon reflection that seems backwards. A chord has function the way a verb does and has an intrinsic action. That would be vertical not horizontal although chords eventually move horizontally.

I can’t think of a way horizontal activity could represent the "verbs" of music except for perhaps voice leading where in major the P4 wants to go to the M3 etc...