The Grammar of Music

Music is a language. It communicates what words cannot. Call it the language of imagination and emotion, but it is even more; it connects us to realms we can hardly conceive of or explain. The gravity that music has over life is perhaps why musicians and magicians are so often portrayed as one. 

I am fascinated by the language of music because I find that it offers insight into what Paulo Coelho calls in The Alchemist, “The Language of The World”.

The Language of the World is –according to Coelho– what the true alchemists have mastered. They become fluent in a silent tongue that speaks to the innermost essences of all life: man, animal, and plant. Furthermore the Language of the World also speaks to each element, all landscapes, and even celestial bodies. This mystical language is what allows an alchemist to do things like change another person’s thought, heal an ailment, transform into the wind, become immortal, and of course, turn lead into gold. 

So I believe it is music –coded into all of life as heartbeat, vibration, cycle, syncopation, ritual, and eventually song– that is the doorway, maybe a dialect, to this mysterious Language of the World. 

Coelho cleverly accounts in The Alchemist that in order to understand the Language of the World, one must listen to their own heart.

Is it not the heartbeat that is our first conscious exposure to rhythm and life simultaneously? Our heartbeat gently initiates us into bodily sense, and perhaps it may be the connection between realms as we gradually travel from aether into physical being.

All this is to say that the extent to which music communicates information may not be comprehended, but the fact that it communicates is undoubtably felt. 

In this exploration, we will be seeing music as language; just as one learns to become fluent in any spoken language, we will breakdown the way music functions to eventually understand and express what words cannot. Perhaps we may even glean information from the Language of the World as we learn to see through a musical lens. 

Written by Ila Cantor