ABSTRACT
Communication takes place through action; thus, the overall stance of this Companion—that music is best understood as varieties of human action. This chapter considers many topics covered in Companion from the standpoint of communication, limiting ourselves largely to Western tonal music for tractability's sake. With human communication thus framed as the promotion of cooperation and coordination between people in interaction, both language and music fall neatly into place as potentially communicative. Music may lack precise meaning and determinate syntax, but like language it allows people to find and make use of common ground. Western music's structure makes use of both general principles and style-specific materials and processes, both of which contribute to a listener's ability to understand the music. Musical structure is more complicated than note-to-note melodic successions. One immediately apparent difference between speech and music lies in their typical density or texture—to use musical terms, speech is monophonic and music is polyphonic.
