Music has no language?

I did not understand this 'Music has no language' thingy to start with. I mean, music meant essentially film music for me and I could hardly enjoy it unless I could sing along with it. (Bray along? There you go, indulging in ad hominem right away. This voice-shaming should also get people cancelled, I tell you.) And I could hardly sing along in a language that I did not know, especially when others around me could know the language and take exception to the way I was mangling it...and not just verbally.

So, I chugged along, assuming that this 'no language' thing was another of those Zen things that everyone said, or nodded to, wisely with nobody really understanding what it meant...or if it even meant anything. Till, one day, the meaning of it sort of lit up like a lamp above a cartoon character's head. (Apt analogy for the me? Who asked you?)

(Intense music playing)

Those were the All India Radio days, when TV was talked about in the same hushed whispers as Armstrong landing on the moon. And, AIR in its wisdom used to suddenly take to hour long classical music concerts every now and then. The day I caught myself nodding my head and tapping my feet to one such WESTERN Classical symphony, possibly Mozart's 40th or some such, is the day I realized that I could enjoy music without language.

Yet, the same had never applied when I had tried to listen to music in other languages. Perhaps, for me, it was NECESSARY to ensure that there was no language distracting my attention before I could just appreciate the music. Else I seemed to need to appreciate both...or I rejected both.

And, as it happens, I took it as axiomatic that music had no language. That music directly communicated to the emotions without any need to know any language. Till recently, that is, when I suddenly discovered that I was wrong after all...or, to be accurate, right in my original assumption and wrong in changing my mind.

(Suspenseful music playing)

This change in attitude came out of watching movies on OTT. Those subtitles, really, put paid to all my erroneous notions about music being some sort of universal language. I mean, after all, people do not get paid to explain what sort of music is playing at any point in time if music directly communicated to the emotions without having to have a language translation running in the mind. Which meant that music was, probably, something that needed decoding, too. Such as 'eerie music', 'tense music', 'music of pathos', yada yada...without which the listener may break into a jig when funereal music is playing on screen.

Or, perhaps, like a friend of mine says, music probably does communicate directly to the emotions but, in these modern days, people have so lost touch with their emotions that they need someone to tell them the identity of the emotion that they are feeling. Seems quite plausible to me.

(Joyful music playing)