is music a language we can analyse
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Is music a language we can analyse? Discuss with examples.
To discuss music as a language we have to ask what exactly it is that music communicates to us and what do we understand from it? Music is all around us, the average person hears around 3.5 hours of music a day (Tagg 1999). It expresses moods, attitudes and emotions, and these are often identifiable with cultures and/or subcultures. We generally intuitively know what is being expressed because we have come to know the conventions that are constantly referred to. In this essay I will try to understand the relation between the basic components that make up musical constructions and the social and cultural meanings we all draw from these. I will refer to Phillip Tagg's research and to Peircian sign theory and I will describe why I think that this is a very modern area of study and so appropriate to present-day popular music.
Phillip Tagg points to the traditional introspection of music in musicology and the neglect of the cultural value of music, what it means outside of the melody and the harmony and the actual construction of notes and actually to the man on the street, and why it means what it does...