<kupchik@hawaii.edu>

Department of Linguistics
University of Hawaii at Manoa

On musical genre: acquisition, dialect, and linguistic parallelism

In this presentation I will explore the parallels between musical genre and language. More specifically, I will talk about the idea of "acquiring" a musical genre (or form), in comparison to acquiring a human language. While many people have studied the acquisition of music and language by children, as well as L2 language acquisition, studies on the acquisition of specific musical genre have been severely neglected. I will address this oversight by giving examples of my own experience of acquiring a genre of music created by a British composer named Neil Halstead on his 1994 work "Pygmalion". I will play recordings of compositions by Halstead to illustrate the features of his genre, and then I will play some recordings of my own compositions which illustrate my gradual acquisition of Halstead's genre stage-by-stage. Importantly, I will show how similar processes are involved in acquiring musical genre as are in acquiring human language, and raise questions about the implications of this parallelism.    

It is my hope this presentation will give support to the idea that learning more about musical syntax, acquisition, genre, and cognition has the potential to broaden our understanding of aspects of linguistics such as language acquisition, syntactic processing, and cognition.