Music as Language
Music is powerful to us humans. We consume – no, devour – music for everything. We play it for celebrations, we use it for sorrow, we use it to vent, we play it to romance.
Music at its core is a language.
Compare it to a spoken/written language. Music has letters (notes), words (musical phrases), sentences (verses), and together they make stories (songs). A song tells you something. That something is its meaning.
Vehicles of Meaning
I read the phrase “language is a vehicle of meaning” and I immediately thought of music. Music does the same.
For example, if I write a bouncy, light, skippy tune, you might think of something happy. If I write, a dark, somber, plodding tune, you may feel something sad. This effect is extremely powerful! I can make you feel something with just timed sound.
However, I think there are some limits. I can’t really make you think something specific, like say the day Dad took you to the ball game, or the feeling you felt when your best friend moved.
Music superimposes itself on us. It uses our past. If some soul had never, ever heard any music, they probably could guess the bouncy tune was happy, but they would not know that it was written to resemble the way a family dog bounced on everything.
This idea is important though. There are certain emotions you can convey well, such as happiness, sorrow, longing, anger, or reverence. Outside of these emotions, you would need some other experience or opinion. If you heard a certain tune every time your parents were angry, then you would associate that tune with those events, even if the song does not deal with that.
Always search for the purpose of a song. Especially the intent of the writer and performer. The whole meaning of a song includes the human intent and the human interpretation.
