Musical Languages

An associate professor of music at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., and author of Sound Judgment: Basic Ideas about Music, Swain attempts to ask what music has in common with language. Touching on musical metaphor, musical semantics, syntax, artificial (computer) languages and more, Swain's survey of previous analyses and arguments is sometimes useful but, as is perhaps inevitable in a short (though expensive) book on this complicated subject, sometimes overly generalized or insufficiently explained for any but the specialist. Swain's style is also rather airless (""There is no context-free formula for friction. This is to say nothing of multivariable, chaotic systems when even the classical formulas cannot predict the emergent properties that arise out of weather patterns and such."") and he has an annoying tic of asking a run of several questions in breathless fashion, some of them rhetorical. Some definitions are odd: the translator and critic Eric Bentley is called a ""drama theorist"" while Verdi is praised for ""songs that suited both Cafe and La Scala."" Swain's viewpoint is sometimes very odd: he finds the writings of the eccentric French Boulez-worshipper Jean-Jacques Nattiez proof that the subject of music and language is very timely today, whereas it probably saw its day as a fashionable debate issue decades ago, when the ever-trendy Leonard Bernstein picked it up for the Norton lectures and the resulting book The Unanswered Question. (July)