''The Language of Music'' is a 1959 book about

music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

by the critic and musician

Deryck Cooke Deryck Cooke (14 September 1919 – 26 October 1976) was a British musician, musicologist, broadcaster and Gustav Mahler expert. Life Cooke was born in Leicester to a poor, working-class family; his father died when he was a child, but his mother ...

Reception

Robert M. Wallace reviewed ''The Language of Music'' in ''

The Nation ''The Nation'' is a progressive American monthly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's '' The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper ...

''. ''The Language of Music'' is an often cited representative of the expressionist theory of art. No systematic experimental study of Cooke's theory has emerged relating it to musical education, but one pilot study showed that for 22 non-musician students, his characterizations of musical phrases were not experienced. The philosopher

Douglas Hofstadter Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born 15 February 1945) is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, Strange loop, strange ...

writes that ''The Language of Music'' is, "A valuable start down what is sure to be a long hard road to understanding music and the human mind."

References

Bibliography

;Books * * * ;Journals * {{DEFAULTSORT:Language of Music 1959 non-fiction books Books by Deryck Cooke English-language non-fiction books Music books