Is music a language or does music “speak a language”? Musical languages in historical perspective: a draft preface

The phrase “musical language” is synchronically/diachronically widespread and universally applied to music, and the issue embedded in it is a typically cultural-musical issue that belongs - by definition and par excellence - to the “broad field of cultural musicology” . Its definition as cultural-musical presupposes that such an issue is musical insofar as it is cultural and viceversa not only because it “is never a question of music alone” (as if “music alone” existed and might be represented in mere technical and specialized terms).