Analysis
During the course of this project I have had to re-integrate myself within the music discourse community. It has been about six years since I was an integral person within the community. I was being apprenticed in by my piano teacher; I met other fellow students who were learning as I was. We were being apprenticed into the music community, primarily the piano community. But because music is so vast there is overlapping within the community. My focus was on the composition of music and how composing music makes its own language. Even though I was apprenticed primarily into the piano community I was still able to discuss music with others that were apprenticed into a different community I.e. the flute community. Through the use of music terminology and the knowledge and ability of composing a song I could connect and re-integrate myself within the music community.
In Chapter 2 of Beyond Grammar it states “given are linguistic competence, we can even make sense out of nonsense” (13). A piece of composition from an outsider would not understand; however, someone who is within any part of the music community would understand; even though, they were primarily apprenticed into the trumpet community. Also within the music community people have the ability to learn a multitude of instruments, but one thing I did find during my data gathering was that people who played woodwind instruments had a hard time playing string instruments and vice a versa. It was not because of the composition or terminology of music it was the different type of foundation on what they had to use. Take for instance; a generality states that the piano is the easiest string instrument to learn. So if the piano is the base foundation and other sting instruments were bricks then a person could continue to build upward; however, if a person decided to learn the flute they have the basic ability to the learn the flute i.e. the terminology and understanding of composition, but the person doesn’t have a base foundation of playing a woodwind instrument. They would have to start a new foundation on which to build. A person couldn’t build a brick house with wood if they wanted a brick house.
When reading or speaking a person has a general understanding of how words flow together and what they mean. When playing a piece of music it is this same general rule that they understand how the notes on the staff flow together. In Beyond Grammar it states, “The genetic imprinting of language allows the learner to form a series of hypotheses about language structures that could never be learned from merely imitating or mimicking words or sentences,” (23). This hypothesis argues that a person doesn’t learn from mimicking words or sentences, but I do not believe this statement. This statement made me realize the old rule “the more you practice, the better at something you will get.” In language when a person practices saying a word they become better at saying that word. Take for example, myself. I would pronounce wolf, woof or criminal, crinmal. After practicing the word over and over again I became better at not mispronouncing. It is like this in music when a person mimics a serious of keys to learn how the notes fall on the staff or practicing a song over and over again that they being to memorize the song. When a person memorizes the song it frees them from the burden of reading the piece of music just as a person who has mimicked a word over and over again. It has freed them from their own burden of not being able to say a simple word correctly.
After analyzing my collected data, I have determined that music is its own language on the base foundation of the composition of music. Even though people are apprenticed within a primary community i.e. the piano community they have the ability to talk outside of this primary discourse community with others in a secondary community because of the basic understanding of language between them. It is the ability to understand music terminology, play an instrument, and create or compose a piece of work.
