Yes. Music in no way makes any kind of statement. It exists entirely in a vacuum. Without context and entirely devoid of anything to say because it doesn’t use words. It is nothing but pitch and duration. Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is therefore saying the exact same thing as Heavy Action by Johnny Pearson.
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That was kind of my point there. We’re dealing with modern conceptions of what art can include, within the framework of modern games and game design. I’ll assume no one else was jumping in here to discuss chess and go.
Only if by “saying the exact same thing” you mean that neither of them is saying anything. The null set is the null set.
Good to know that the entire history of music theory and analysis is meaningless.
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Only if you assume that “does not assert propositions” is equivalent to “is meaningless.” Not being a Cartesian, I don’t believe that to be so.
Really, I don’t understand why you think it’s problematic to say that the Fifth Brandenburg (for example) is not made up of words but of musical notes; or that it does not assert propositions (which are statements made up of words, spoken or signed); or that its theme cannot be expressed as a concept (that is, cannot be stated in words)—I suppose in principle you might describe that exact sequence of notes verbally, “quarter note B flat in the second octave above middle C” and so on, but it would be impossibly cumbrous and even a musicologist probably wouldn’t get anything out of it until they put it into musical notation. All of these seem to be obvious truths about music and don’t seem to denigrate it in any way. And I picked the Fifth Brandenburg because it’s one of my favorite musical works and means a lot to me—but not a meaning that can be stated in words.
“Different in kind” does not mean “inferior in quality.”
I think that wordless sounds often make propositional statements, as they are often substitutes for words. Like how ‘AAAAH’ can mean a whole pile of things - like ‘I’m very scared right now’. Also, just because you cannot explain what something is propositioning (perhaps because it is something extremely vague like the Fifth Brandenburg), doesn’t mean that it isn’t propositioning something.
Words themselves are just lines on a page or vibrations in the air - we impose value on them in order to communicate. Just because music is (usually) a much more complex sound than the sound of a person speaking, or that people may interpret the sound in different ways, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t communicate a statement.
An example that comes to mind is the New World Symphony. It makes this proposition through the sound it makes: ‘This is what the new world is like’, and a whole pile of smaller statements in each movement.
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Well now @Sagantine has gone and said most of what I was going to say 
.
While music, not having words, does not convey a written statement, and would not be considered “logic” per se, it does convey information, and hence meaning. Music is unique in that the statement it conveys is pure emotion, however, this does not devalue its ability to use a logical progression of sorts; for instance, if one progresses from “conflict” to “determination” to “happiness”, then one is making a very different statement than if it went “conflict” to “determination” to “destruction”. Of course, this kind of emotional logic is unique to music.
Every art form works differently; just because games do not function the same as paintings does not mean they are not both art.
Writing, obviously, makes the most directly intellectual statement, because it is exclusively words. Music makes an emotional statement. Painting makes an initial statement, which because it generally lacks progression, can be taken different ways, to different conclusions. And games themselves, (separated from the works of painting, writing, sculpting and crafting which generally accompany them) still make statements in their own way.
For instance, Chess propounds the value of conflict and victory. Pandemic propounds the value of working together to get things good enough, but not perfect. Contrast this with Sudoku, where the expectation is perfection, and you can see they make very different statements about reality even by their very mechanics.
And while most modern games tend to not be “contemplated” in the same high-brow sort of way which paintings are generally regarded, they fit more into pop art, where the statements they make tend to be common and readily acceptable. Most people don’t really “contemplate” the works of Justin Beiber, or Aerosmith, but they are still artists, as are game designers; some, like Reiner Knizia, do expect their works to be contemplated, but because the statements are less readily acceptable, we generally just say “their games are mostly bad” and move on, in the similar way a pop-music fan would say that most classical music is “bad”.
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The symphony does not make that statement. If you just heard the symphony, without knowing the title, there is no way you would figure out that it referred to the New World in any way. And I think I would also say that it doesn’t even say the “is like,” because I think that if you had fifty naive people listen to it, they would say that it made them think of a lot of different things. Maybe not fifty, but there’s no way they were converge on one or two predicates.
If music is analogous to any linguistic entity, it’s analogous to interjections, the part of speech that cannot be either a subject or a predicate and that does not fit into the syntax of propositions, but is purely an expression of feeling, like “Oh!” or “Aaaah” or “Bugger!” But that’s analogizing the great complexity of music to the minimal simplicity of a cry of feeling, which does not do justice to music.
I really don’t understand this urge to treat music as if it were a form of language, instead of treating it as a distinct thing with its own properties and capabilities. Music does what it does extremely well, better than language could do it (there aren’t many linguistic structures of which you could say, “It’s got a good beat, you can dance to it”); but what it does is not to assert propositions and form them into arguments, which is one of the things that language is good at.
Oh, and I don’t think the Fifth Brandenburg is “vague” in any way. There are ways to be precise that don’t involve verbal concepts or propositions.
Yeah, things don’t have to have a universal contextless meaning in order to make a discreet statement. I don’t speak mandarin, and hearing it without translation/context is gibberish to me and millions of others. Give us a sentence of mandarin, and we’ll come up with countless possible meanings. The fact that it means something to someone (who isn’t me) and carries a message that can be understood in the right context means that speaking mandarin is communication, and it is capable of making statements.
I don’t think anyone is saying that music has to be bound to the rules of language, i.e. that it should be strictly classified as a language, only that it does share some characteristics with language. For example, that there is a communication of ideas, including specific statements such as the New World Symphony’s ‘the new world is wild, full of adventure and beauty’. Considering how deep the actual experience of listening to the symphony is, typing ‘the new world (that Dvorak imagined) is wild etc. etc.’ as the symphony’s statement certainly doesn’t do justice to the sweeping power and subtlety of it. But the experience is an unfolding of Dvorak’s desire to express that idea in a sonic format, and a listener will recognize that in the music if they understand the context (which the title supplies, but an understanding of the background behind the composition is better).
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I don’t think that’s a valid comparison. If you wrote the sentence in Mandarin that is the best possible translation of “The New World is wild, full of adventure and beauty,” pretty much anyone who could read Mandarin would understand that that was what you were asserting, even if they had no context. (The problem that prevents me from understanding sentences in Mandarin isn’t “lack of context”; it’s that I don’t know the language.) But if you played the New World symphony to someone who didn’t have the title to go by, and didn’t recognize it from having heard it before, there is no way they would extract that statement from it. That’s not a matter of not knowing the “language,” as it would be with the Mandarin statement; it’s a matter of music not being able to provide proper nouns, or indeed much in the way of nouns of any kind.
And I’m not convinced that music does communicate ideas. I’m not familiar with the New World Symphony, but I know the Fifth Brandenburg, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, or the Helios Overture. I find them powerfully expressive in different ways, but I don’t think what they express can be stated in words—or that a jury of 50 independent naive listeners would converge on a predicate such as “is wild, full of adventure and beauty.”
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I was equating the knowledge of mandarin to the knowledge of the musical context of a piece. Two frameworks of pre-existing knowledge that allow you to interpret and contextualize what is otherwise just vibrations of your ear drum. So, because I know the context of the New World Symphony, I can understand what Dvorak is trying to convey, similar to how a mandarin speaker can understand a mandarin sentence due to their knowledge of the language. Sorry if my writing was unclear!
The New World Symphony isn’t quite in the same genre as the classical music you mentioned. I believe that a good percentage of 50 naive judges would describe some combination of ‘wild, powerful, beautiful, exploration, adventure and probably something about seafaring’ for the last movement, for example. Then when explained to them that ‘this music is about the discovery of a new world’ they would say ‘ah yes that makes sense’.
It’s also been aped by every swashbuckling soundtrack ever, so there’s that too.
This reminds me of some work my wife did as part of her studies of medieval history. If we say “she looked like an English rose” that implies a particular sort of appearance of a person. In the 1300s there were lots of terms like that, all sorts of named plants that had particular associations through the English-literate culture, and if you read something from that period now without having the references you will simply miss a lot of the information that’s being given.
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That doesn’t seem like a very specific meaning. Compare Homer, who says in one sentence
Sing to me, Muse, of the man of many turnings, who strayed very much, after he sacked the holy city of Troy,
Which is not only far quicker, but far more specific.
Along similar lines, Planet Narnia discusses the vast number of associations for the seven classical planets (the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) and the way in which those specific association turn up in the seven Narnian novels.
Edit: I think we should probably agree to disagree, hopefully amicably! I keep on getting distracted from important stuff I need to work on to see what you’re writing!
Well, I’m glad to have been a source of distraction, but I’m willing to let the exchange of views lapse.
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This is something I can come to quite easily here.
“They are not primarily meant to be contemplated.”
That’s a very odd statement. Depression Quest is meant to be contemplated. Celeste is meant to be contemplated. I sadly don’t have enough board game examples, but if stories are art, then every game of Netrunner I’ve ever played is art.
EDIT: There seem to have been a lot of replies since this, so maybe never mind. 
Well, I’m not well informed about present-day games, as I’ve said. My reference space for “games” includes checkers, chess, go, bridge, poker, blackjack, Klondike, Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and Diplomacy, as more as more recent inventions such as Settlers of Catan and Race for the Galaxy.
It seems to me that the statement “games as such are not primarily meant to be contemplated” cannot be falsified by presenting specific example of games that are so meant; it has to be falsified by saying that all games are primarily meant to be contemplated, that being contemplated is inherent in being a game. I mean, there are some human beings who have no arms or legs, but “human beings are limbless” requires showing that no human beings have arms or legs.
So here for example is chess. Certainly games of chess can be contemplated; people go to chess tournaments to watch games of chess and appreciate the play. But they don’t just read the rules of chess and think about how elegant they are! For chess to be contemplated, someone has to actually play the game! And while some chess players may be thinking about the elegance of the rules, or the symbolic significance of the game’s pieces, you don’t have to think about any of that to play it; what you have to think about is tactical sequences and combinations of moves within the space of the game board, and a really good player may be thinking very hard about that and not have brain space to spare for aesthetic sensibilities.
And the rules of chess, which are the primary thing that defines the game, weren’t written primarily to enable contemplation of chess games; they were written primarily to enable players to play, and to make playing it interesting and challenging. If a rule made it easier to think about the symbolic significance of chess pieces, or of moves like castling, but made it less playable as a game—it would make it a worse game and would be a bad rule.
There is certainly some overlap between “games” and “art.” On one hand, there are artistic genres that have a gamelike aspect, such as the classic murder mystery where the reader is challenged to outhink the fictional detective (or classic physics-based science fiction where the outthinking focuses on things like tidal effects in the neighborhood of a neutron star)—or the premodern Japanese custom of two people exchanging verses. On the other hand, there are games that do have an artistic aspect; for example, I’ve run and played in roleplaying games where people enjoy the actions and dialogue of other people’s characters, and people try to come up with actions and dialogue that will be entertaining and will inspire other people to be similarly entertaining, and that’s a kind of improvised fiction or drama. But the fact that two circles in a Venn diagram overlap doesn’t make them the same circle, or mean that one circle is wholly contained within the other.
(And even in RPGs, for example, there are also classic dungeon crawls where the focus is on killing and looting and levelling up, not on producing memorable narrative.)
Parallel: Weapons as such are not a form of art and are not primarily meant to be contemplated. Now, a well designed weapon, whether a katana or an automatic rifle, can be appreciated aesthetically for how well its structure serves its purpose; and there are also weapons that are made with decorative aspects—the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has some really elegant ancient Egyptian weapons and horse tack. But the primary function of the weapon is not to be contemplated, but to injure or incapacitate, and good design—design, in fact, that deserves aesthetic appreciation as design—is design that makes it effective in doing so.
So if every single example of a thing isn’t meant to convey meaning or provoke thought or emotion, then it isn’t art? Does that make photography or paintings ‘not art’?
“Games are art” means “Games can be art”, in the same way that paintings can be art, but not all are.
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I take a slightly different approach. There is not objective art. All art is subjective.
A person (subject) can encounter an artifact (object). The person exists in a place at a time; this same person has existed in many places through time; they have a personal history.
The object also has a history. The present state and history of both the subject and the object form contexts.
The collision of a subject’s and object’s contexts answers more of “what is art?” than the object or the subject individually.
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