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Language's Influence on Music

Last Updated (Wednesday, 14 May 2008 08:24)
Written by Roger Bobo
Saturday, 26 January 2008 12:11

Articles - Personal Essays

The more I travel and the more I become familiar with the various languages of the venues where I’ve resided, the more sure I become that our mother tongues have a huge influence on the way we perceive the performance of music. Tempo, articulation and note length all are frequently affected by one’s native language.  

Many years ago, during my first residence in Europe while playing with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, I was fascinated with what was my first encounter with a language other than English. Inspired to study the idiosyncrasies of Italian, French, Japanese, German and English I learned two things: 1) Different languages move at different speeds; and 2) something of which many of us were probably already aware; women talk faster than men! In English, for example, women speak approximately 175 words a minute while men speak only 150. Further research on that fact would certainly be interesting but in the meantime we can find amusement asking why.

More important is the speed of our mother tongue and the influence it has on our performance of music. The French language, on average, moves at about 350 syllables per minute, Japanese about 310, German 250 and English is 220. I don’t have researched numbers for Italian but I’m sure it’s considerably faster than French. An educated guess would be 380 (especially for Italian women). These language velocities greatly influence the way we hear and perceive sound in both speaking and performing.

Consonants also differ greatly between languages and the consonants of our mother tongues also have an enormous influence on the way we approach articulation, which is really the consonance of the musical language. In the verbal languages of the world, linguists can’t agree on the number of consonants because they don’t know where to draw the line of distinction. The consonant “T”, for example, differs greatly from one language to the other. An Italian “T” is made with the tongue very forward just at the top of the upper teeth, while in Chinese the tongue is very high at the roof of the mouth. Those tongue placements result in quite different sounds for the same “T”.

But the newest and most fascinating aspect of the influence of language on music performance has come to my attention just recently while working with Japanese brass players. There is a prevailing tendency for Japanese brass and wind players to play all tongued notes short. Whether it's a half note or a sixteenth note, it’s frequently played at a shorter length than the printed music indicates. Last week while giving a lesson, I asked several times for the quarter notes in a passage to be tenuto and that there be no silence between the notes, but the silence between the notes remained. Finally, I used my name as an example.

The student said the syllables after me...

Even verbally the silence remained.


“Please try it again, my name is Bo ͡ bo ͡ ”. The student responded...

It started to get better... said the student.

Finally, the problem was understood and resolved!

Suddenly, it became very clear, Japanese is the most staccato language I’ve encountered and much of it is spoken with silence between the syllables, especially if the syllable begins with a consonant. That is one of the reasons why some Japanese brass players occasionally play western music with that “foreign accent” I’ve spoken about in other articles. This is not a serious problem and when it’s pointed out and understood it’s very easily corrected.

Sometimes a foreign accent is charming, but sometimes it distorts the meaning; it’s up to the speaker or the player to decide which will better benefit the result.

Tokyo