Music and Other Sign Systems

Past scholarship has often investigated what we mean when we say that music is ineffable; it has also explored issues surrounding whether music can—or cannot—be translated. In contrast, this article shifts the focus from music and its meaning to the relationship between music and other sign systems, including verbal language. One of its key hypotheses is that the dictum of music’s ineffability, though apparently describing the ‘nature’ of music, in fact only defines the relationship between music and verbal language. As I will argue, the apparent plausibility of the dictum of music’s ineffability is an effect of our (Western-cultural) habit of attributing primary status to verbal language in comparison with other sign systems. Consequently, in the final section of this article, I will investigate the relationship between music and other sign systems. This latter investigation is founded on the consideration of our world of meaning as an infinite spectrum of diverse sign systems, sign constellations, and sign procedures, each of them valuable in itself.