For a while, I couldn’t decide if I believed music was a language. I realized I would first need to find my own definition of language. That being said, I think of language as a means of being able to communicate anything going on in the outside world to another person. This can range from how you are feeling to what you ate for dinner last night. Following this criteria, I do not see music as a language. It is obvious that facts like the dinner example cannot be transmitted through music. However, many people would argue that music is a language because it can convey certain feelings and emotions. That may be true, but those emotions will vary with each performance- depending on how the artist performs it and how the audience absorbs it. Therefore, a piece of music will not necessarily provide its listeners with the feeling the composer or performer tried to convey. This is a major glitch in the communication, something that would not happen in a real language in which we have words to convey exactly what we want to.
As for who is truly the artist, I agree with pretty much everyone else. The performer is the artist as well as the composer, writer, choreographer, etc. A piece of art cannot exist without one or the other and both people will add their own interpretation or feeling into whatever is being created. I know we mentioned jazz in class, (a style of music that could be said to have no composer.) However, I believe the person playing the instrument is simply taking on both duties. Through improvisation, he or she is still composing. There are two stages to art- having an idea and then executing it. These processes may happen at the same moment and with only one person, but they are still needed to create art.
Well written post. Your clarity of thinking helps the reader in understanding the issues at hand. What art is able to convey to the audience is a sense of connection surpassing words, more mysterious, more primeval, using the senses with little interpretation.