It’s a given (that is, researchers have proven) that music is not a human language, does not have communicative structures in the way that the many thousands of human languages have and have had. Qualitatively, they are not the same, even though they both allow for written forms, and have been standardized while still maintaining an incredible fluidity in expression, permitting innovation and improvisation on the part of any speaker, signer, or musician.
Language exists to make possible conversation — that is, there is always a person conveying a message and a person decoding the message according to some agreed-upon meaning. Music absent of any accompanying words (that is, mutually-intelligible language) does not exist to engender conversation. It doesn’t convey information but rather atmosphere and emotion in all the nuance that standard dictionary definitions and poetry can’t quite manage; as such, it also has less precision and interpretation is far more open-ended.
The open-ended nature of its interpretation of meaning is something that many humans don’t enjoy, preferring music to be accompanied by words in a language they can understand (lyrics) or that music be in the background of a scene of some kind (like in movies, or in a play).
Listening to or feeling music by itself, unaccompanied by precise, mutually-intelligible words or a scene of some kind is an act of deep reflection or a journey into memory. What does the arrangement of sound make you feel? What do you imagine from the music alone? What do you think the composer might have been feeling or imagining as they crafted or improvised the piece? What do you think the musician who played the piece was thinking or imagining as they played it?
These questions are far more readily answered when words or scenes are included; it becomes a conversation, a set of signposts to guide you.
Without these, music is music.
A living memorial to feeling, to atmosphere, to thought, to impression, just as open to individual interpretation and imagination as its structure can be replicated by other skilled musicians. But its structure being replicable does not mean that its originally intended meaning can be fully divined by the one doing the replication (or interpretation).
Furthermore, a great deal of theory and structure underlies the creating (or playing) of music, but listening to it, even reproducing it without any knowledge of this, is possible. Paradoxically.
Like repeating a word or a phrase that you like the sound, the feel of, in a language you have no knowledge of. You repeat the word or the phrase finding it beautiful or meaningful in some way, without knowing its agreed-upon significance to another person or group.
Music by itself is like a perpetually foreign language, an atmosphere, a feel to be enjoyed and appreciated without needing to understand it in a concrete way.
Poetry can offer the same pleasure (or discomfort, depending upon the individual), eschewing sometimes the conventional in order to play with words in an idiosyncratic way, one that might not allow for easy understanding between the poet and the admirer. But that absence of immediate, standardized understanding is what makes it and music an art form. They require time, thought, feeling — and a willingness to engage both in introspection and in extending empathy toward the other party.
Should poetry written in gibberish, then, be considered in the same vein as wordless music?
I woke up before sunrise today, and this (possibly incoherent line of questioning) was what was on my mind.