Art and language: is music a simple metaphor or an alternative way of speaking?

Music, along with painting, literature and architecture, is considered one of the “fine arts”, which means that it is to be appreciated primarily or even solely by means of their imaginative, aesthetic or intellectual content. Mainly in Western Music, we can see an ensemble of musicians in an orchestra performing an artistic miracle of playing together the same piece, each one with their respective instruments, with almost no flaws whatsoever. However, we might ask ourselves: are they really flawless as we say about a correct result of a mathematical equation? and/or are they really following a strictly precise rule that allow them to “prove” all the steps to a same exact “true” performance? And, about its expressive capacities, can music convey actual fixed concepts as do words, paragraphs or entire books? On this paper, we are going to analyze how far Music Theory is able to determine accurateness in a musical score, regarding reading for a performance and the aesthetic effects in a hearer, highlighting the conceptual problems behind numbers and linguistic reference and how music is actually much more similar to the cognitive socio-linguistic phenomenon of the pragmatics of language than to an exact science.