I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream

God bless Harlan Ellison.
I tried to explain the history of music in these terms: Bach wrote words, Mozart wrote sentences, Beethoven created poems, Mahler etc. wrote novels. This is wrong and unfair if only because Mozart wrote at the very least poems and Beethoven was more the Wordsworth of his time musically.
I tried then to explain language in terms of cloud and rain; we have our concepts - clouds - and these are condensed into words which we can use in short hand terms. This applies as much to music as to language in the verbal sense. I was in the company of musicians who knew little musical theory. You need to understand what has gone before - in abstract terms - in order to use it properly. I also tried to explain the band-audience dynamic, but again I spoke unintelligibly. I have no mouth, but I must scream.