Music and (Linguistic) Meaning

In what sense does music have meaning? In one sense, it uncontroversially does—the sense in which music-making, and listening, are meaningful activities. Only a philistine might deny it. What is controversial is whether music possesses anything analogous to meaning in a narrower sense—linguistic meaning. In what sense is music a language? That is my present topic. The contrast between linguistic and broader senses of meaning has led to much confusion, which it is one of my tasks to untangle. For a Wittgensteinian such as the present writer, not every philosophical proposition—and philosophical debate—is in good order as it stands. That is true of the proposition that “Music is a language,” as well as the debate over music and meaning. The received view, both generally and academically, is that music is a kind of a language, metaphorically if not literally. In this article, I reject the received view, arguing that music has neither a semantics nor a syntax—for a syntax must potentially have a semantics and music cannot. I develop Kathleen Higgins’s persuasive account of the relation between music and language that reverses the received view, holding that we might justly call language a music. The reversal is salutary. My conclusion is that music and language are inter-penetrating phenomena and concepts.