From: George States [gstates@yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2002 11:01 AM
To: ben@washedashore.com

Subject: DESH

In 1959, a British musicologist - Deryck Cooke - published a book on his studies and theories about patterns in music and how they trigger and effect human emotions.

The book's title is "The Language of Music". I studied it in 1967 for a research paper, and he does have a whole section/chapter on DESH (even though he doesn't call it this!). Deryck Cooke maintains that music is a language for expressing emotional states, and that furthermore it is (at least in the case of tonal music) a strictly codified language in which each scale degree signifies a certain emotion and permits only a single specific reading. Cooke's argument on behalf of his theory in "The Language of Music" cites a great many supporting examples.

George - Vancouver, BC, Canada.