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Language, Music and the Rhetoric Discourse

It is commonly known that music is a natural language that has its own syntax and discourse structure. Music serves different purposes than texts, but there are many parallelisms which can be drawn between these two major communication means. Rhetoric developed in language and philosophy has been adapted to the musical discourse with its own features.

This chapter discusses the differences and the common elements that text and music have from the viewpoint of their use and efficiency in rhetoric. This chapter still has an introductory character. First, the differences in terms of structures and functions between language and music are explored. This is an important topic in itself with important consequences for contemporary music where boundaries between communication channels are not as strict and as clear as they were in previous centuries. Then, a number of music parameters that play an important role in rhetoric are explored, including figures of sound. Finally, a few historical milestones are given from the Middle Ages up to the Romantic period, which show how rhetoric emerged in music and how it developed. This chapter gives a general overview of rhetoric in music. The chapters that follow concentrate on more precise facets of rhetoric, illustrated by relevant works, styles, forms and composers.

2.1. Music and language

The cognitive similarities and dissimilarities between language and music have stimulated a number of debates in linguistics, music, psychology and philosophy. Some of the main positions are briefly presented in this section. It is clear that when considering high level and very abstract capacities of the human brain, similarities may be striking. This is the case for many aspects concerning the structures, functions and affects conveyed by both language and music, and probably also by the other forms of art. However, these abstract capacities remain to be identified and their functions still need to be characterized from a scientific point of view. Cognitive psychology, where abstract human capabilities are investigated, and psychoacoustics at the sound level, may be of a certain help to identify the parallelisms between language and music.

2.1.1. On the relations between language and music

Language is primarily designed to convey meaning. Meaning may then provoke affects. Music does not convey meaning in the same sense as language. Music is basically designed to convey affects, but these affects are not just psychological; they can have a certain form of underlying “meaning”. Language utterances convey information, beliefs or jokes, suggest actions, teach, give orders, ask questions, remind listeners about their obligations, etc. There are many languages around the world. Music does not convey such types of information. Music is also more universal and even if there are different traditions, it does not need any translation to be “understood”; it just probably needs some familiarity with a given style to be appreciated. Let us consider and develop in this section a few aspects of language and music of interest to rhetoric and discuss a few main issues such as innateness of construction principles. More technical aspects contrasting language and music are discussed in the next section.

Let us first consider prosody and sound. From the viewpoint of rhetoric, the differences between language and music are not so clear-cut. Music stimulates affect, has a major impact on the listener and has a major social role in events such as dances, shows and films. Meter and rhythm in the style and delivery steps of a discourse share a lot of similarities with these parameters in music. For example, Gregorian song is defined as perfect sound with a unified view of body movements, pitch, metrics and text (jubilus). However, it is clear that spoken language is different from music. The phonological structure of language, the pronunciation of the vowels and the consonants, the structure of prosody and intonation have little in common with the characteristics of melodies in music, although some metaphors can be made and, in fact, do exist. For example, questions in music may resemble the intonation profile of questions in language (see Chapter 5).

If we now consider syntax and structure, language utterances (in dialogues, texts, messages, notices, etc.) must follow well-formedness principles: words are assembled by means of grammatical principles. Words, as well as syntactic constructions, but to a lesser extent, convey meaning. According to the principle of compositionality, the meaning of an utterance is a certain function of the meaning of its components. At the text level, inflected words are the minimal units which are considered by the grammar. Grammatical principles manage sentence construction whereas discourse construction principles account for the structure of paragraphs and texts or dialogues so that sequences of sentences can be connected by semantic links, such as cause – effect. The context of utterance of a text or of a dialogue determines its interpretation and its impact on readers or listeners. This is the pragmatic dimension of language.

Music also has a syntax and it follows construction principles which are strict, complex and multidimensional. Indeed, while language is rather linear, but with the possibility of dealing with overlapping events, e.g. by means of adequate temporal connectors, and some limited forms of textual polyphony, music often and naturally accommodates several parallel discourses, in particular in polyphony. Language often has prosody, syntax and pragmatics operating in parallel. This is also the case of music, as will be discussed in the next chapters, with a much more complex structure. In general, music is composed of short musical motives (melodic fragments that have a certain coherence and autonomy) which could be viewed as words, although they function very differently. Music construction principles, whatever they are (e.g. serial and Baroque polyphony), govern the organization of those melodic fragments into phrases, themes, variations, etc. The construction of a theme from musical motives follows the principles that have been modeled, e.g., within a generative perspective in [LER 83] or within a functional perspective [STO 00]. The syntax of a theme in music is, however, not as strict as the syntax of a sentence, since there is no need of “understanding” it. It, however, follows the principles of, for example, tension-resolution or tonal and rhythmic stability which cannot be stated in terms similar to grammar principles [ABR 10]. Their genesis is investigated in [LAI 02].

These construction principles also govern more vertical aspects such as polyphony and harmony. This is addressed in more detail in Chapters 3 and 5. Meter and rhythm are proper to melodic fragments; they can be modified by construction principles (e.g. augmentation, reduction, fragmentation and dislocation). At a higher level, music has a discourse structure that accounts for the organization of themes, variations, developments and transitions, just to mention a few important situations. Music obviously has a pragmatic dimension since the affects it stimulates or provokes largely depend on social and personal contexts. When music comes with a text, each paradigm plays its own function, music stimulating the affect aspects of the text.

These differences have been discussed with different views, e.g. in [RAF 93, LER 83] and [PAT 03, PAT 08]. The cognitive dimension of music is elaborated in detail in [TEM 04] where the notion of music cognition is introduced. This view integrates cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics and neurosciences. The generative capacity of the two systems must be underlined: from a limited acquisition of language structures of a given language or from a limited exposure to music and the integration of a few music patterns, humans can potentially “understand” a large number of utterances or feel some affect for a large diversity of music pieces of various styles. This suggests that the cognitive capacities used by humans to understand language and get feelings from music may be based on the same principles.

A major challenge is then to discern how much language as well as music acquisition is innate and universal or, conversely, simply contextual, in relation with the stimuli received by the person considered. So far, there is no sufficient experimental basis to establish and to conclude on such claims in language. Similarly, in music competence acquisition, the balance and the cooperation between learning from audio examples and from social interactions is a topic that still needs a lot of investigations. Finally, how generic are these observations, e.g. with respect to other fine art productions? Can we assume that abstract notions such as meter, rhythm and discourse organization are necessary elements of any form of communication and possibly perception?

Similar to syntax, morphology and semantics in linguistics, musical analysis (e.g. analysis of harmonic processes, musical motive variations, counterpoint structures) pursues the goal of finding the structure of musical works and the motivations for such structures. Music cognition aims to analyze the perceptions and the reactions of listeners. While these goals are distinct, it is clear that music analysis and music cognition have interactions. In their generative theory of tonal music [LER 83], the authors proposed an analysis system based on four types of structure: grouping, meter, time-span reduction and prolongational reduction. For each type, the authors propose preference rules and structural schemata that define the structures that are...