Language Script

 There is a language with no word for music. A language where, for those who feel the world in that tongue only, music simply does not exist. For those amongst you for whom music is a constant, a fundamental, or even a defining feature of your life, such a world seems nigh impossible to conceive of. But even so, there is a language with no word for music. Earlier this year, I was reading this book, An African In Greenland, by Tété-Michel Kpomassie, a memoir of how a young man from Togo made his way to live with Inuits, and I was thinking about what Inuit music was like, wondering what a man from Togo would think of this music. So, I did what any self-respecting half-asleep aspiring music YouTuber would do, and looked it up on Wikipedia, where I was struck by this sentence:

“Traditionally Inuit languages did not have a word for what a European-influenced listener or ethnomusicologist's understanding of music, ‘and ethnographic investigation seems to suggest that the concept of music as such is also absent from their culture.’”

So the Wikipedia page I’m on is, seemingly paradoxically, claiming that the very thing it sets out to describe does not exist. But, of course, it does. Well, kind of. To us, and by us I refer primarily to the core Anglosphere, there is something present in Inuit culture that we, in English, would call music. But, to a monolingual Inuit speaker, there traditionally existed no  word that equates to the word music. What the Inuit do have is the word nipi, a word that encompasses a number of sonic experiences, including speech, wind, animals, and - yes - music. Inuit music includes dance songs, accompanied by drums, and also the katajjaq, the ‘throat game’. Conceptualised in Western terms, it’s certainly ‘music’, but the primary function within Inuit society is as a game, and musical semiologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez argues it is more helpful to view it in this framework than in a musical one.
And the Inuits are by no means exceptional in their lack of a concept of ‘music’, in fact this is a feature of many non-Western languages. The Tiv people also have no word for music, the Hausa people of Nigeria possess a rich musical vocabulary, but don’t actually have a complete word for ‘music’, with the closest being “rok’o”. Indian music has its own elaborate theory and concepts. Perhaps the closest word is “sangita”, but even that can contain other forms of art such as dance. But, in the strictly Western sense, as far as we know, there has never been a society or culture that did not in some way feature what we would call ‘music’. With this in mind, I want to pose three very broad questions in this video: Can we talk about the music of non-Western cultures if the concept of music doesn’t exist in their language? If we can do this, should we? And more broadly, how does our language limit our understanding of pieces of music themselves when talking about any music written by those who don’t speak it?
Before we even begin to look at how the music of other cultures is impacted by our use of language, it’s worth examining how the word ‘music’ can limit our own understanding, even with regards to English-language music. The English word ‘music’ is derived from French ‘musique’, in turn from Latin ‘musica’, and finally from Ancient Greek ‘mousiké’. Languages as varied as Norwegian and Arabic have words for music that derive from this same route. Some languages, like Czech hudba, have got their own unique words, and some, like Indonesian ‘musik’, have adopted the word recently. Defining music is extremely difficult, and I can’t exactly answer one of the fundamental questions of musical philosophy in a YouTube video, but I can talk about some of the problems that arise when attempting to define music, and the implications these have for our understanding of it as a concept.
Nicolas Ruwet argued that the current age is one in which “it has become possible (without undue risk) for anyone to baptise anything as ‘music’, ‘poetry’, or ‘painting’”, raising the question of how far we can actually stretch the definition of music. Would you call a Bach fugue music? Nobody would seriously argue otherwise, beyond being deliberately obtuse. Is one of Charlie Parker’s wild saxophone solos music? Now, nobody would argue otherwise, but, for example, broadcasting pioneer and inaugural BBC Director-General Lord Reith called it “damnable noise” and a “filthy product of modernity”, admiring Hitler’s ban of the genre. Are some of the less melodic rappers music? Few young, or musically literate people would argue otherwise, but many, especially older people, cite the ‘lack of melody’ of rap as ‘evidence’. Is Krzysztof Penderecki’s highly experimental Polymorphia music? Yes, say enthusiasts, academics, and musicians, but no, say my friends who aren’t really into music. Is the 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence in John Cage’s 4’33 music? That’s the cutoff point for a lot of people, but it’s not universal.
One example I find particularly interesting is that of the punk poet John Cooper Clarke. He released much of his poetry with musical backing from the Invisible Girls. One of his most famous poems, Evidently Chickentown, was released on his 1980 album Snap, Crackle & Bop with this kind of musical backing. In any meaningful way, this is a ‘song’. There’s a beat, there’s instruments, lyrics. There’s even a little melody at the start. But when Dr Clarke performs it live, it’s just him standing onstage, alone, reciting the words to the poem. Is this then not ‘music’, but rather poetry? And if that is the case, where, between the two versions of the same piece, does the line of music lie?
Many of the writers I’ve delved into in my research for this video view the matter of defining music with little direct concern. Highly influential ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl argues that a specific definition doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s agreed that music involves sounds and the combination thereof, and that there is an aspect both artistic and scientific, creative and practical. Other writers, like Jean Molino, highlight how fraught with problems the road to definition is, since one can consider music in so very many ways: creatively, sonically, physically (as in pertaining to physics), or by its production. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, for example, defines music as

“An art form that reflects reality and affects man through sensible and specially organised sound sequences consisting chiefly of tones (sounds of definite pitch). Music is a specific variant of the sound made by people.”

I find this particular definition so fascinating because it contains a distinctly human aspect, and, artificial intelligence notwithstanding, excludes anything nonhuman like birdsong from music. Can this definition be so if, as Francois-Bernard Mache points out, birds sing with a repetition-transformation principle, pitch, and rhythm?   saw rain as just as musical as anything else. Nattiez, in his writing, addresses the problem by simply saying that “music is whatever people choose to recognise as such”, recognising music as an amorphous thing. But in his attempt to solve the problem, Nattiez displays it more eloquently than I ever could. Since every individual’s conception of music and the baggage that the word carries is unique, the word music itself can be incredibly limiting in our conception of music that sits on the fringes of the definition. Think back to the katajjaq, the Inuit throat game I mentioned earlier. The katajjaq is sung, nearly always between two women, as a kind of contest, a game, lasting a couple of minutes until one player can’t go anymore, and the other one wins. In the same way the Inuit have no word for music, we have no word to describe this kind of performance adequately in English, and the word music itself can be more limiting than enlightening in understanding this kind of performance.
This is also demonstrative of the fact that understanding the purpose behind any music is incredibly helpful in understanding it in its entirety. We have a lot of “art for art’s sake” stuff in the West right now, and that’s fine, but it’s by no means the only approach to art. Plenty of people, and plenty of cultures, view aesthetics as inherently shallow, and European aesthetics only ascended to their current dominance in the 18th century. To have a look at purpose, let’s stick with the Inuit, for example, whose traditional songs are inherently intertwined with their traditional rituals. Or in Africa, where the conception of a musical piece is tied to its associations with dance. Kwabena Nketia wrote how, in much African music, “sounds, however beautiful, are meaningless if they do not offer [motor responses] or contribute to the expressive quality of a performance”. Think about the melody of the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, it’s certainly melodic, but the context in which it is proclaimed means that, to most, it’s not really ‘music’. But this video is about language, and this is straying into talking about the purpose of art more generally.
In much the same way that concepts that exist in English that don’t exist in other languages can colour our view of foreign language music, concepts in other languages that don’t have equivalents in English can do very much the same thing. Let’s, for example, talk about the Japanese concept of ‘ma’, a kind of ‘negative space’, but really, it is much more complex than this. Yukiko Kisaski describes it as the “pure, and indeed essential, void between all things”, and specifically in a musical context, that ma is “the silence between the notes which make the music”. This concept is fairly pervasive in Japanese art, and its lack of equivalent in English can limit our understanding of Japanese art unless we take some time to get our heads round the concept. On Jeremy James’ blog, he points out a discussion of ma between the conductor Seiji Ozawa and author Haruki Murakami in this book, which luckily, I have. The conversation goes like this:

Ozawa - In Japan we talk about ‘ma’ in Asian music – the importance of those pauses or empty spaces – but it’s there in Western music, too. You get a musician like Glenn Gould, and he’s doing exactly the same thing. Not everybody can do it – certainly no ordinary musician. But somebody like him does it all the time.

Murakami - Ordinary musicians don’t do it?

Ozawa - No, never. And if they do, the spaces don’t fit in as naturally as this. It doesn’t grab you - you don’t get drawn in as you do here. That’s what putting in these empty spaces, or ma, is all about, isn’t it? You grab your audience and pull them in. East or West, it’s all the same when a virtuoso does it.

	I think this is particularly fascinating because, to Ozawa, ma is present in both Western and Eastern music, at least in the instincts of the performer, but it’s his familiarity and understanding of the uniquely Japanese concept of ma that allows him to really appreciate the negative spaces, the ‘music between the notes’ in all music, no matter its origin. Toru Takemitsu is a good composer to look at to explore this concept further, firstly because I know enough about him already to make comment, and secondly because, owing to his wartime experience, he consciously tried to distance himself from traditional Japanese music, therefore his music can viewed from a Western lens far more easily than many other Japanese musicians. Let’s have a look at two of his pieces, Rain Tree Sketch and Garden Rain, to see how ma manifests itself in Takemitsu’s music.
Rain Tree Sketch, for solo piano, generally speaking maintains a fairly quiet dynamic and high register, and features a lot of constant semiquaver movement, like little drops of rain. But these little cascades of music are frequently interrupted with full bars of silence. It’s been compared to disturbing the branches of a tree and seeing the raindrops fall out, before stillness and quiet returns for an equally brief moment. To me, it sounds like raindrops falling on a still lake, rippling out elegantly, but nonetheless disturbing the picturesque serenity of the water’s surface. But this only dawned on me once I started considering the piece in terms of its silence, which, I confess, until reading about ma for this video, I had hardly even noticed. I’d listened to the piece a lot, but always fairly passively, never playing or analysing it, but once I started considering it in terms of its silence, I was shocked by how deafening the silence really was. Now it is those very moments of silence I ignored that I find to be the most shimmering, crystalline moments of the whole piece.
Garden Rain wasn’t a piece of Takemitsu’s I was familiar with before this video, and so I don’t have the same frame of reference that I do with Rain Tree Sketch, but the contrast between silence and sound seems even more stark here. Garden Rain’s abrasive harmony and sharp, direct brass instrumentation leaves very little room for the listener to breathe, instead it is the silences that release the tension, providing the listener a chance to recuperate. Takemitsu does this consciously with his understanding of ma, saying: “What I want to do is not to put sounds in motion towards a goal by controlling them. Rather, I would prefer to let them free, if possible, without controlling them.” Look, in contrast, at perhaps the most famous piece of Western classical music inspired by the rain, Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28, No. 15 in D♭Major, or, as it is more commonly known, the Raindrop Prelude. The ‘raindrops’ here are the constant quavers, and that makes sense, rain is often thought of as a cascade of many tiny individual pieces of water, but look the scores of Rain Tree Sketch and Garden Rain, the importance of the empty space is right there on the page in the bars of rests. I’m not suggesting that we all need to be native or fluent Japanese speakers to understand that silence matters in music, or even that the silence speaks for itself in these two Takemitsu pieces. Rather, I’m suggesting that even a small look into concepts and ideas that don’t have an equivalent in the English language can radically transform the way you listen to the music of a certain culture. I know it changed the way I thought about Takemitsu’s music.
	On a micro-level, the language that we speak has an impact on the music we compose. The obvious starting point is to think about the difference between tonal and non-tonal languages. For those unaware, tonal languages are those in which the pitch and pitch contour of a word can impact its meaning. Pitch does alter meaning in non-tonal languages like English, think about the difference between ‘Really?’ and ‘Really.’, with the pitch rising at the end indicating a question, but the word still means the same thing, unlike in tonal languages, where the meaning of the word itself can completely change. The various means of ‘ma’ in Mandarin is the classic example of this. The jury is still out as to whether or not speaking a tonal language is musically beneficial. Some studies have argued that those who speak tonal languages have better absolute pitch, and better abilities at discerning melodic patterns, whilst others have argued that it can muddy the waters of musical understanding rather than provide assistance.
	Aside from impeding or helping musical ability, how do people even sing in tonal languages, considering the contour of the pitch can impact the meaning? The simple answer is that it depends on which tonal language that you’re talking about, since tonal languages crop up all over the world. In Mandarin, for example, the tones are usually ignored in favour of just writing a melody, meaning that it can often be difficult to understand the lyrics of a song unless they are seen written down. In Twi, the language of the West African Akan, the contour of a melody reflects the contour of the tones in speech. The exact intervals and exact pitches don’t matter, but whether the melody is rising or falling does. If the melody is moving in the opposite direction to the tone, auxiliary notes can be added to keep the words intelligible, language contorting a melody.
So that’s one way in which melody can be impacted by language, but how can the rhythm of language impact the rhythm of the music we write? Obviously, language and music are related in the sense that they both have the same two axes of time and sound and are complex processes, probably why we hear the ‘music is a language’ metaphor so very commonly. There’s been a few studies to suggest that the native tongue of a composer will impact the rhythms that they choose in their music. A study by Patel and Daniele measures this closely, with fascinating results. Firstly, a bit of linguistics. Stress timed languages, like English, have the rhythm between stressed syllables more equal, whilst otherwise the rhythm of the language is a little more uneven, with unstressed syllables being spoken a little faster. On the other hand, syllable-timed languages, such as French, are more even across all syllables. Patel and Daniele, therefore, chose to compare English and French music and see how this linguistic difference impacted the music.
They used something called the nPVI, or normalised pairwise variability index, an equation meant to measure the amount of contrast in time between different events in a sequence - basically, how to measure the rhythm of language. Look at the difference between English and French in this value, with the more even rhythm of French scoring lower. In the study, Patel and Daniele chose a list of works from the late 19th to early 20th century and compared them, with the starting note of each piece getting an arbitrary value of 1, and other values being based with relation to that. Looking at the graph, see how the nPVI value of English music and French music lines up fairly similarly with the difference in the nPVI value of the language. Apart from one massive, and interesting, outlier - Vincent D’Indy. However, the researchers explain this by D’Indy’s contempt for his French contemporaries, preferring the “serious and uncompromising principles of German symphony” and the “teutonic Bach-Beethoven-Wagner tradition”, says Fred Goldbeck. The rhythm of the language that we speak, therefore, can influence the rhythms we write in music.
“Any classification is superior to chaos”, said French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and us humans certainly have a penchant for categorisation, with music being no exception. We’ve already talked about the word music itself, but within that, how do different languages categorise aspects of music differently? Let’s look, for example, at Javanese music. Most Javanese music makes use of what we consider percussion instruments, things like the gong, and so the categorisation of percussion instruments in Javanese music differs significantly from that in English. In the West, percussion instruments are categorised in two basic ways: by their usage or by their sound production. Categorising them by sound production, we have pitched and unpitched percussion instruments. Categorising them by usage, we get idiophones (like the cowbell), membranophones (like the snare drum), chordophones (like the piano), and aerophones (like the whistle). Javanese classification on the other hand, is more to do with the physical action of the human playing them. I won’t attempt to pronounce these in Javanese, but they are separated into those beaten with a padded hammer, hard hammer, hand beaten, or shaken, to give just four examples.
But this is just a feature of the language, why does it matter how instruments are categorised to the average listener? Well, instrument categorisation can be helpful in understanding how different instrument families are prioritised in importance in a given music. Percussion instruments, and apologies to anybody who plays them, have generally been considered lesser than those of other families in Western music (excluding the piano, but that’s a different point). Javanese music places the importance of percussion instruments higher, and you can tell this from the greater specificity in the categorisation. Margaret Kartomi puts it this way: you could tell whether a society has had bread or rice as their staple food by looking at their language. In English, England has been a bread-based society for most of its history, and we have separate words for wheat, dough, bread, toast, flour, etc. whereas we have just one catch-all word for rice in all its forms. Contrarily, Javanese has different words for rice depending on things like whether or not it is washed. This is the same with instruments, language can help us understand how important different aspects of music are. Interestingly, the Javanese categorisation has been, until recently, mostly oral. When recent Javanese academics have attempted to put categorisation to paper, instrument categorisation has taken the form of material - bronze instruments, leather instruments, wooden instruments, wire instruments, bamboo instruments. Perhaps not so different to brass instruments, string instruments, and woodwind instruments.
So have I come any closer to answering those three questions that I posed at the beginning of the video? Firstly, can we talk about music in non-Western cultures if the concept of music doesn’t exist in a given culture? Well, when it comes down to it, we sort of have to. If we lived forever and had infinite time for learning, we could take the time to get to grips with the musical conception of any given culture, but we don’t. It’s a compromise to consider Inuit music ‘music’ in the Western sense, as it is for the Tiv, or the Hausa, or any manner of cultural groups around the world. But it’s a much better compromise than not listening to the music at all. The more music we listen to from all corners of the world, the better rounded we are as musicians, listeners, and, well, humans.
My second question regarded if we should talk about ‘music’ in Western terms when talking about non-Western cultures. And again, it’s not ideal, but it’s the best we’ve got. It’s not like the term ‘world music’, which is kind of a tautology. No culture is without music, music is of the world. ‘World music’ is a Eurocentric, if sometimes annoyingly helpful, term that places Western music as ‘special’, and it takes very little effort to just name the culture whose music it is you’re discussing. But when it gets into a deeper understanding of what music means to a culture, it’s just not feasible for the average or casual listener to do. What I would say is that for a more analytical listener, or a musician wanting to broaden their understanding of what music can be, learning about how language shapes our conceptions of music can help us break out of overly fixed mindsets, and open a whole new world of musical understanding. But also, it depends on what you’re doing. If you just want to broaden your range of listening and stick on a playlist of songs from around the world, go for it - you’ll only be better off for it. But if you’re taking any kind of deep dive into the music of a culture, learning a few local   musical terms, getting your head round a few linguistically unique musical concepts, and, well, seeing if there is a word for music at all is an essential, and often overlooked part, of musical understanding.
My third question was about how language impacted the actual music itself, and I’ve hopefully provided some helpful insights as to some ways in which this works, looking at concepts that only exist in other languages, like Japanese ma, how singing works in tonal languages, how musical rhythm is impacted by speech rhythm, and how local instrument classification helps us get a better understanding of how instruments are prioritised. Perhaps next time you listen to a piece of music from Tokyo, or Tehran, or Tijuana, spend a little time familiarising yourself with some important artistic concepts that don’t have an English equivalent. It may give you a whole new outlook on a piece you know and love.