 The cliché that music is “the language of the emotions” is often considered as a possible starting point for a theory of musical expressiveness. The idea combines the attractive simplicity of conventionality that associationism makes the basis of music’s meaning with the formalist notion that music’s order is to be understood in terms of syntax. (See Lerdahl &amp; Jackendoff 1983 for a theory along the latter lines.) However, although Deryck Cooke (1959) and Leonard Meyer (1956) are often cited as proponents, it is not clear that anyone holds a full-blown version of the theory. The central problem is the great disparities between language and music, in terms of the ways in which each is both syntactic and semantic (Jackendoff 2011). A serious subsidiary problem is that even if music were about the emotions in the way that language can be, that would not account for music’s expressiveness. The sentence “I am sad” is about the emotions, but it is not expressive of sadness in the way a sad face is, though I could use either to express my sadness. Most people agree that music’s relation to emotion is more like that of a sad face than that of a sentence. (This last criticism is also applicable to Susanne Langer’s theory (1953) that music is about the emotions in a symbolic yet non-linguistic way.)