Indeed! You're definitely getting into one aspect of things. The most important thing to know about music is that it is a super-stimulus. Great music activates

Indeed! You're definitely getting into one aspect of things. The most important thing to know about music is that it is a super-stimulus. Great music activates all sorts of otherwise unrelated parts of the brain all at once! So we can spend infinite amount of time on any one of the cultural references, the language-like aspects, the rhythmic structures, the play with prediction and surprise, the psychoacoustic properties, etc. And on top of all that, lots of music happens in live performance with visual and social elements. Regarding the language relationship, many people have discussed the ways that music, especially harmonized singing, is like a super-voice, it's triggers our emotional reactions to expressive language but at a higher order of magnitude. The real interest comes when we realize that all the valid elements of the notation-jargon-style theory actually can be themselves described psychologically. So, the books I've mentioned, don't deny the classical ideas of tonality and chords and voice-leading and all. They just explain these phenomena in ways that are actually more meaningful and more universally applicable than just recognizing the notation patterns.