ABSTRACT
Linguistic orientations to the study of music as human communication have been of considerable interest to ethnomusicology as well as other music disciplines. The close relationship between music and language has long been recognized. George Herzog’s (1934, 1945) early investigation of drum language in Liberia on the west coast of Africa and his own training in linguistics, as well as musicology and anthropology, set up a model of interdisciplinary study and investigation that others in the field followed. Béla Bartók and Albert Lord’s study (1951) of SerboCroatian folk song also devoted considerable attention to the linguistic elements.
