How To Disappear Completely

Music as Sociology...

"In addition, this music [instrumental music of the 18th-century] appears to be nonrepresentational, at least as representation is usually construed. Unlike literature or the visual arts or even texted music, instrumental music seems to be generated from its own self-contained, abstract pricinples. Clearly, it is much easier to demonstrate the content (both liberal and ideological) of stories, pictures, and libretti than of patterns of tones, for which most people have no verbal vocabulary. Since most listeners do not know how intellectually to account for their response to music, they tend to understand it as communicating in an entirely unmediated fashion. Many guard jealously that mystified notion of music, precisely because it permits that experiencing of what is taken to be a higher order of being than the corrupt socio/political world in which they live. To drag music back inside that world, then, is to destroy that last illusion of metaphysical certainty."

--Susan McClary, "A Musical Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Mozart's Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453, Movement 2," Cultural Critique 4 (Fall, 1986), pg. 163.

Also:
"While most music of the twentieth-century avant-garde has departed deliberately from the constraints of tonality, this same harmonic language [tonality] continues to underlie our popular musics and the music of movies and advertisement. Thus, even those members of Western societies who do not think they know what tonality is understand intuitively (like the Bourgeois Gentleman who had been speaking prose unknowingly all his life) how it operates, how to follow its logic, how to perceive deviations from its norms."

--Ibid., pg. 134.

Thus, it seems that music, like language, is a learned form of communication. But, like one's first language, it is usually not learned formally. Rather, through constant exposure, one absorbs the rules of one's own code of communication.