Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

Metaphor and Musical Thought.

Article Excerpt
Metaphor and Musical Thought. By Michael Spitzer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. [x, 380 p. ISBN 0-226-769720. $60.00.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

At various times music has been called "the universal language," or "the most expressive of the arts," and, as such, it is difficult to translate into any other medium. We therefore speak of music in terms of metaphor, mapping the abstract onto the concrete, conveying musical experience by way of analogy with other forms and feelings. Michael Spitzer's Metaphor and Musical Thought provides an impressive and thorough analysis of this process and synthesis of a wide range of fields: music history and theory, philosophy, aesthetics, semiotics, hermeneutics, art history, linguistics, literature, science, and theology. His critique of the literature of metaphor is comprehensive and his theory compelling and unique. With the increasing interest in more abstract ways of thinking about music, his work should appeal to music historians and theorists, and students of philosophy and aesthetics. His book fills a major gap in interdisciplinary studies.

Spitzer defines metaphor as "the relationship between the physical, proximate, and familiar, and the abstract, distal, and unfamiliar" (p. 4). This relationship is bidirectional within music reception and production: "With reception, theorists and listeners conceptualize musical structure by metaphorically mapping from physical bodily experience. With production, the illusion of a musical body emerges through compositional poetics--the rhetorical manipulation of grammatical norms" (p. 4). In other words, music structures thought and thought structures...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!