Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

— Thelonius Monk*

Princeton musicologist Elizabeth Margulis and her colleagues convincingly provide strong and subtle evidence that the claims that music is the universal language remain, at best, significantly overstated, just as much as they were when Mehr et al published their most recent rehearsal in 2019. Musicologists are right to be highly skeptical of these old and somewhat tired claims.

By way of example: English and German doubtless share many linguistic traits, but they are not the same language. They merely share that they are both examples of languages. That they have discernible similarities does not make it possible for a speaker of one or the other language to get very far without some mutual base. From personal experience, if you cannot remember the German word for “bathroom” in a non-touristy part of even cosmopolitan Berlin, you may struggle to meet your immediate needs. Similarities do not equate to sameness.

Further, few would consider claiming that, because English and German share some common phonemes and structures, those sounds constitute a kind of music; and not only that, the two consitute the same kind of music. “Language is the universal music,” sounds absurd. But through sheer repetition, the obverse seems almost to pass for wisdom in our culture, even among some musicians.

As I revisited the claims, and the criticisms made about them, both then and now, it struck me that–minor terminological differences aside–perhaps there is less overall disagreement than is sometimes claimed. (Margulis successfully steers clear of this right/wrong dead end). The reason for the inflated conflict seems to stem from the way in which “universalists” miss something more critical. In fact, it is missed so completely in its popularized and caricatured form that it doesn’t make sense to burn additional fuel to drive down this path. (To their credit, the researchers involved in the 2019 Harvard study recognize a far more open and nuanced space for discussion around these matters than attention-grabbing headlines often seem to suggest. Mehr and his chief collaborators have been open about this. It is the popularized and over-determined version of this view that deserves appropriate scrutiny.)

Instead, there is an alternative and more interesting frame to explore, but which bears heavily on this discussion.

Music is a different way of knowing.**

Music is, at bottom, a different way of knowing. It is a domain of human intellect that cannot be neatly translated, distilled, or transmogrified into some other medium. This is important in many ways. Here are just four:

1. Writing about music can be powerful. But not powerful in the same way that music itself is powerful. Writing about music, is not music.

2. Composing music is not itself music, either. Composing music is… composing. Music, meanwhile, is sounds.

Not all music is composed, and not all compositions are performed. The act of composing is certainly no less significant than the act of performing music, and in many genres and traditions, it is impossible to make music without someone first composing the music.

Many of us devote our lives to attempting to realize the wishes of the composers we meet on the printed page, in fact. Nevertheless, composing music is not identical to making music. Parenting a child is not identical to being a child.

3. Music may have other benefits for young people, say. But if those other benefits dominate the popular imagination, then the people imagining music’s value and importance miss what is important about music in the first place.

Going on a walk, too, might cause me to perform better on a math exam, but you fundamentally misunderstand the value of a walk if improved math skills are the benefit that draws your attention. The same goes for music.

4. Musical intellect operates in the same physical domain as linguistic intellect, in that both require use sounds real or imagined, while operating in two distinct intellectual domains.

I often hear musicians say about one another, and especially of music-adjacent folks (family, fans, board members, etc.), “she gets it.” The “it” there almost always goes unsaid.

I think this is the “it”: music is a fundamentally different way of knowing the world. It’s an important dimension to humanity that is irreducible to any other dimension. Playing a recording, attending a concert, or practicing an instrument are all distinct from the act of writing, reading, or otherwise using words to think about those activities.

Philosopher David Livingstone Smith (no relation) calls it experiential knowledge:

Music gives us knowledge by deepening and expanding our capacity for experience. It somehow opens new channels in our mind, giving us access to features of the world that were previously inaccessible.

We bask in our shared humanity when we make or receive music, and we cut ourselves off from a full life when we try to nest music in a lower or fundamentally orthogonal category, such as by calling it a language. No one has ever called language is the universal music, after all. The reverse formulation is approximately as absurd, poetic as it may have once seemed.

Music is not a hobby or a bolt-on for a rich life; it is a necessity. A life lived without music is like a life without reading or without love: possible but profoundly incomplete. Perhaps it would be fair to say that a life without music is equally as impoverishes as a life without language.

Music is a cognitively unique modality. Music scholars, critics, and essayists have have spent centuries attempting to write intelligibly about a domain that can never be fully intelligible, but through transmission through its medium of origin. The best scholars openly recognize this conundrum in their own writing. Meanwhile, the best musicians know how to draw from good writing those ideas which might stimulate their musical practice, while never losing sight of the uniqueness of that practice.

Music is a different way of knowing.

*The delicious irony of quoting this aphorism in print form, while writing about music, must never be lost.

**The meat of this essay, beginning here, originated last July on Facebook.