Word: bernsteins
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This kind of recklessness with language characterizes the whole series. Bernstein has a curious difficulty in deciding what audience to address. He makes a careful effort to avoid bringing in too much musical esoterica--he occasionally calls time out to explain such things as diminished seventh chords and the harmonic series, and then apologizes, saying "But you knew all that." But when he talks about linguistics the Young People's Concert atmosphere disappears and the jargon rolls in thick enough...
...Often Bernstein seems to be using linguistic terminology simply because he likes the sound of it. The word "syntactical" appears in his discussions of music at apparently arbitrary intervals, and usually seems to mean something like "important." And when the available jargon is not enough, Bernstein makes up his own, including such unlikely hybrids as "morphosemantics." The result is that much of what he says about linguistics is not so much wrong as it is just empty...
ANALOGIES BETWEEN music and language are intriguing, and when they are treated as metaphors they can even be useful. But Bernstein wants to prove a point, and he pushes his analogies too far. He believes that music is a universal language, not because, as third grade teachers explain, tempo markings are in Italian, but because all music shares certain structures in spite of the obvious variety in the music of different cultures...
...quest for universality in music, Bernstein begins with monogenesis, the idea that all language evolved from a common origin. As a metaphor, monogenesis lies behind the Biblical Tower of Babel myth, and as a general principle it lies behind a century of serious philology, but it is not an idea with any scientific foundation--linguists believe the dozen or so major language families to be unrelated. Still, it reminds Bernstein of a discovery he made when he was an undergraduate: the first four notes of Aaron Copland's Piano Variations rearranged and transposed in various ways turn...
...BERNSTEIN CONTINUES his search for universality with a discussion of transformational grammar, a field which has become the dominant area of study of American linguistics in the ten years since it sprang fully-clothed from the brow of Noam Chomsky. Contemporary linguistics, focusing on syntax, aims at uncovering the structures underlying language. And this is the source of the universality that Bernstein finds so attractive--beneath their surface differences, Chomsky believes, languages are organized on a few simple and universal principles...