Moving Beyond Motion: Metaphors for Changing Sound

Author:

Adlington Robert

Abstract

This article argues that music offers experiences of change that are at odds with our common understanding of time. Specifically, I question the widespread belief that onward motion is a condition of musical temporality. I approach this issue through metaphor theory, which tends to argue for the necessity of metaphorical experiences of time and music in terms of motion. I argue that music's changing sound evokes a variety of bodily metaphors; motion is not ever-present, but intermingles with metaphors of heat, light, weight, tension and so on. Works by Ligeti, Carter, Kurtág and Saariaho are discussed as case studies.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

Music

Reference74 articles.

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5. The idea that motion is a literal property of changing existence tends to be reinforced by our vocabulary: our favoured words for identifying different moments in a changing event – music included – are often locational and linear. Thus we talk about one moment ‘following’ another; say that something happened ‘in between’ other things; refer to parts of temporal events as ‘passages’; and so on. Metaphor theorists take such words as indication of our inherently locational and motional experience of change. But, as the present argument is intended to suggest, this descriptive bias reflects a long-lived cultural reluctance to countenance change reflectively in a non-motional way (say, in terms of varying weight or heat, rather than in terms of varying spatial locations) as much as it reflects any actual property of changing experience. (Reasons for the prominence of motional metaphors in descriptions of music, specifically, are offered in the next section.) Non-motional metaphors have to fight for prominence, as it were, alongside the habitual motional ones. It is at this point that I have to depart somewhat from the assumption undergirding metaphor theory, namely that descriptions invariably give a sound indication of modes of experience.

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