Music as Language (2)

Clearly music is only a language by analogy, because it doesn't mean anything the way words in a language mean things. There is no way music could convey the meaning of the following sentence: When I was a child I took piano lessons from my aunt Ethel.
Whereas people do convey specific messages by beating drums and whistling, those drumbeats and whistles are no longer music, just as spoken sentences have pitch, tempo, and rhythm - but they are not music either.
In any event, "music" is a huge category, like "language," and within the field of music there are innumerable musical idioms, some related to each other and others extremely distant.
Recently I began to work on Bach's E Minor sonata for flute and continuo, as I would rather improve my playing by struggling with Bach's sixteenth note runs than work on exercises.The phrases that Bach wrote are more interesting than the patterns written by the authors of flute methods. They are also challenging, because the sequences of notes were composed by a musical genius. As I slowly played the first movement, I encountered sequences of notes that did not fall into place naturally as phrases - at least for me. Figuring out how to phrase a piece while you play it, which notes should be emphasized, when the piece should get louder or softer, and so on, are aspects of understanding music. Sometimes this understanding is intuitive, but often it is conscious and planned. The musician studies the score and marks it so she will remember how to play it with understanding.
To understand Bach in that way requires familiarity with many works of his, with the music of his age, with the rules of harmony and counterpoint that he obeyed, and so on. The same applies to playing any kind of music. That's what I mean by a using musical language.
Not everyone uses a musical language in the same way: composers, conductors, performers, and listeners all respond to different demands and have different abilities within the use of musical languages. In my estimation, composers, arrangers, conductors, and performers who memorize long and complex pieces are masters of musical language, as are jazz improvisers. By those high standards, I merely stammer in music, though I'm a decent amateur musician.
I play baritone saxophone in a community orchestra, whose repertoire ranges from arrangements of classical music through jazz and Latin pieces. This requires us, without thinking about it very much, to shift abruptly from one musical idiom to another, and it also requires the audience to listen to, say, the soundtrack of Star Wars, followed by an arrangement of the 1812 Overture.
Years ago I took musicology courses at the Hebrew University. The third year of the cycle of courses in harmony was a form of analysis developed by the nineteenth century musicologist, Heinrich Schenker, which I found stiff, reductive, and uncongenial - though it also provides deep insights into the classical pieces are constructed. As presented in that class, the laws that Schenker discovered are meant to be universally applicable, based on the acoustic properties of notes. But I kept thinking that those laws were only a kind of grammar of classical music, not universal at all.
Is there a Chomsky in musicology who has worked out a universal generative grammar of music?

Music as a Language (1)

Years ago I attended a concert in a small auditorium at which the works of ten contemporary composers were performed. I must have enjoyed it and found it interesting, because I stayed to the end, though the music made no concessions either to the listeners or to the performers. I came away with the feeling that each composer was writing in a musical language of his or her own, a language that the composer invented along with the piece that was played. I didn't feel that the works were in conversation with one another, which is not the case when a program contains works from the standard Western classical repertoire.
Classical composers like Haydn and Mozart built on and rebelled against the baroque composers who preceded them. Beethoven and Schubert looked back at their classical predecessors and opened new possibilities for the romantic composers who followed them - and so on. These composers didn't try to invent a new musical language. They were writing in idioms shared by their contemporaries. True, their compositions stretched the conventions of the norms they inherited, but by and large they remained within them.
I'm tempted to say that using an existing musical language made it easier for them to compose, but obviously it isn't easy to compose like any of these great composers. We all speak a language, but not everything we write in it is immortal poetry.
On my only trip to Japan  (so far, one can always hope) my wife and I went to one act of a kabuki performance. The music and chanting sounded entirely random to me, interesting, not exactly pleasant, but full of energy and surprises. I couldn't understand it any more than I can understand the Japanese language when I hear it spoken. Other non-Western music, such as classical Indian music, is far less off-putting, and I can listen to it with enjoyment, if not real understanding.
So what do I mean by understanding music?
To be continued.