Metaphor and Musical Thought

Michael Spitzer

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226279435
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

"The scholarship of Michael Spitzer's new book is impressive and thorough. The writing is impeccable and the coverage extensive. The book treats the history of the use of metaphor in the field of classical music. It also covers a substantial part of the philosophical literature. The book treats the topic of metaphor in a new and extremely convincing manner."-Lydia Goehr, Columbia UniversityThe experience of music is an abstract and elusive one, enough so that we're often forced to describe it using analogies to other forms and sensations: we say that music moves or rises like a physical form; that it contains the imagery of paintings or the grammar of language. In these and countless other ways, our discussions of music take the form of metaphor, attempting to describe music's abstractions by referencing more concrete and familiar experiences.Michael Spitzer's Metaphor and Musical Thought uses this process to create a unique and insightful history of our relationship with music—the first ever book-length study of musical metaphor in any language. Treating issues of language, aesthetics, semiotics, and cognition, Spitzer offers an evaluation, a comprehensive history, and an original theory of the ways our cultural values have informed the metaphors we use to address music. And as he brings these discussions to bear on specific works of music and follows them through current debates on how music's meaning might be considered, what emerges is a clear and engaging guide to both the philosophy of musical thought and the history of musical analysis, from the seventeenth century to the present day. Spitzer writes engagingly for students of philosophy and aesthetics, as well as for music theorists and historians.

Part I

The Metaphorical Present

The Aristotelian Telescope

To think, talk, or write about music is to engage with it in terms of something else, metaphorically. Music “moves,” “speaks,” paints an “image,” or fights a “battle.” It may have a beginning, middle and end, like a story, or have line and color, like a picture. Music can even be a “language,” with a lexicon and syntax. Are these metaphors mere figments of our imagination, or do they really bring us closer to music in itself?

The seventeenth-century literary theorist Emanuele Tesauro likened metaphor to a telescope, in particular an Aristotelian telescope, after the philosopher who coined the most influential definition of the term.¹ The frontispiece of Il cannocchiale aristotelico (see facing page) shows a telescope pointed at the sun. Tesauro’s engraving is somewhat surprising, since he would surely have known that we cannot stare at the sun, on pain of blindness. Yet the figure peering through the telescope steadied for her by Aristotle is not a real person but an allegorical image of Poesis, or metaphor. As stated in the Latin tag at the bottom, she is examining the spots on the sun: “she reproves the blemishes on a perfect body.” Since we cannot look at the sun for ourselves, Poesis looks for us. Piling layer upon layer, Tesauro’s picture is a metaphor for the epistemological workings of metaphor. His conceit assumes frankness about the mediated character of all representation; the metaphor is basically a model or a picture of something to which we can never have direct access. The metaphorical telescope seems to me a rather good analogy for the uses of music theory.

Calling discourse about music “metaphorical” inevitably suggests that there is a more literal mode of engagement, one generally associated with technical music theory. And yet an argument that music theory brings us closer to music would cut little ice with the overwhelming majority of listeners, who actually find arcane categories such as “tonics” and “dominants,” “voice leading,” “retransition,” “hemiola,” and so on, rather alienating, and for whom such metalanguage interferes with the cherished immediacy of the musical experience. Disbelief, already suspended, is stretched to incredulity when we climb from the foothills of basic terminology to the mountain peaks of analytical systems such as Schenkerian analysis, the most important music-theoretical approach of the twentieth century. Heinrich Schenker is to modern musical thought roughly what Noam Chomsky is to linguistics and Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean Piaget were to structuralism. Schenkerian reduction is essentially a transformational theory of musical structure worked out in terms of contrapuntal level. While most people have no problem with the idea of generative models in social science, they may find their application to aesthetics, especially to an art form that elicits such a high degree of personal emotional investment as music does, rather offensive. Yet music theory only makes it worse when it claims for itself the status of a science, for how then can it justify its interest in history? Work on historical theorists such as Zarlino, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Heinrich Koch, and Hugo Riemann is currently resurgent, in the teeth of the established view, based on the work of Karl Popper, of scientific progress, where models continuously supersede one another. Why resort to Galileo’s instrument when we have the Hubble telescope?

We do not look through the Aristotelian telescope for ourselves; we gaze at an image of Poesis. Music theory is admittedly poor at describing how music is composed or heard, and even more suspect when it attempts to prescribe these practices. But it has a third dimension, in addition to the descriptive and prescriptive: the imaginary. We can look at music theory as a picture of an imaginative act that is, in some ways, just as creative as a work of composition. Theorists build models by drawing on domains of human experience—a knowledge of language and culture, but also the experience of what it is like to have a body that is contained, that can move through a landscape, that can grasp and manipulate objects, and so on. In short, music theory is human, just as to create and receive music is human. Theorists have one advantage over composers and listeners, however: they are in the business of blending tones, concepts, and words, and do so more articulately than most musicians, and more expertly than nearly all philosophers. In this respect, they really do bring us closer to the “meaning” of music.

I call this activity of projecting from the domain of human experience onto the domain of concepts “metaphorical mapping,” after the cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphor dropped out of fashionable literary criticism in the 1970s, at the precise moment when it was discovered by sciences such as cognitive linguistics, developmental psychology, creativity theory, education theory, and ethnology. One could even pinpoint this date to 1979, the year which saw both the epoch-making collection of cognitivist writings edited by Andrew Ortony, and Paul De Man’s Allegories of Reading, a book that tarred metaphor with the brush of romantic ideology. Nevertheless, in the 1980s metaphor was returned to the humanities with interest—with what one might call an enhanced “cognitive capital.” That is, from having been mostly a matter of rhetoric, metaphor became recognized as an agent of thought, of conceptualization. Cognitive theories of metaphor entered musicology about ten years ago and quickly came to be appreciated for their rich interdisciplinary potential. Because metaphorical mapping is common to all walks of life—including composing, listening, and theorizing—it suggests the possibility of building bridges between many critical approaches that have drifted increasingly further apart: between musicology, music theory, and music psychology; between the history of theory and present-day analytical methods; and between hermeneutic and technical engagements with musical structure. My book is written in the spirit of rapprochement and under the umbrella of a particularly broad concept of metaphor. I am aware that in my use of the word “metaphor” I am conflating a range of terms that have traditionally been given individual names: simile, analogy, model, trope, figure, metonym, image, allegory, myth, symbol, schema, and probably many more. Metaphor is actually as difficult to define as imagination, perhaps because it is also an expression of creativity. Before I present the theory and outline of my book, it would be helpful to quickly dispose of metaphor’s traditional definition.

1. WHAT IS METAPHOR?

Metaphor has always been a composite or portmanteau category. Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature, a key text of literary theory in the 1950s, lists four defining features:

The four basic elements in our whole conception of metaphor would appear to be that of analogy; that of double vision; that of sensuous image, revelatory of the imperceptible; that of animistic projection. (1956, 187)

Gerhard Kurz’s Metapher, Allegorie, Symbol (1993) presents an admirably concise survey of the many additional meanings metaphor has accrued since its cognitive turn in the 1970s. At the same time, Kurz’s handbook inadvertently demonstrates the hopelessness of any attempt to demarcate metaphor’s boundaries. After conceding that “one can give no necessary and general rules for the identification of metaphors” (14), Kurz nonetheless seeks to differentiate metaphor from allegory and symbol—the other two “central concepts of literary studies” (5). And yet the definition of metaphor is so all-embracing that there remains little distinctive for allegory and symbol to do. Kurz’s survey begins with theories of metaphorical substitution, by which “the ‘literal’ word is replaced (substituted) by a foreign word” (7). Comparison theories are also types of metaphorical substitution, on the basis of similarity (simile). Kurz moves on to theories of interaction, according to which a word’s metaphorical extension is defined by a systemic context, such as discourse. Interaction theories turn metaphor on its head, so it becomes not the exception but the norm: an expression of language’s inherently creative and imaginative character. From the systemic and the creative, it is a small step to the cognitive. Kurz ends with “metaphoric fields,” as when science weaves together metaphors into conceptual models such as “wave,” “force,” “resistance,” and “current” (21). Metaphor as model catches up with the cognitive projection theory of Lakoff and Johnson.

The trajectory of Kurz’s survey is thus from the lexical to the conceptual, from the individual word to the systemic field, from the static grammatical rule to the dynamic and imaginative production of meaning—in brief, from the linguistic to the human. All the same, it is not clear how these many attributes of metaphor hang together, or whether a coherent single definition is at all possible. In particular, such a definition would need to coordinate the extreme poles of the series, the aesthetic and the conceptual: metaphor as rhetorical trope, and metaphor as cognitive model. My theory attempts to do exactly that, in the context, moreover, of the additional dimension of applying the theory to music. Applying metaphor theory to music is itself a metaphorical act. Furthermore, a theory of musical metaphor must reckon with the fact that theories of metaphor are historical. Accordingly, my book also takes account of metaphorical thought through the ages.

2. METAPHORICAL THOUGHT

I define musical metaphor as the relationship between the physical, proximate, and familiar, and the abstract, distal, and unfamiliar. This relationship flows in opposite directions within the two realms of musical reception and production, and involves opposite concepts of “the body.” 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. Because musical metaphor flows from both conceptualization and poetics (the rubrics, respectively, of chapters 2 and 3), I call my theory “bidirectional.”

I have structured my book in two parts, titled “The Metaphorical Present” and “The Metaphorical Tradition.” This reflects my bidirectional view of metaphor’s history, in which modern, cognitivist, Anglo-American orientations supervene upon and cross-pollinate an older, hermeneutic, European tradition. (I trope this vegetal imagery rather pointedly in the introduction to part II, “Sunflowers”). Part I comprises a preliminary overview (chapter 1) followed by a conceptual subject (chapter 2) and a poetic countersubject (chapter 3). To avoid overwhelming the reader, I have sought to feed in the theoretical exposition as gently as possible. But you may wish to consult the various diagrams of chapters 2 and 3 as you go along (also the “map” in the “Sunflowers” section). Part II of my book (chapters 4–6) elaborates my model with three historical variations in the baroque, classical, and romantic styles. My historical work draws on primary texts that are often overlooked. All translations from the German and French are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

A few words about the scope of my book. Part I is predominantly Anglo-American (albeit with increasingly French accents). The most interesting recent developments in metaphor theory stem from the work of linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists such as Lakoff, Johnson, Ronald Langacker, Andrew Ortony, and Eve Sweetser. Part II focuses on Austro-Germany. Why? To be perfectly frank, it is simply a fact that composers of the German-speaking lands—Schütz, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Wagner—happen to have been central to the formation of the canon and to our conceptualization of musical thought. I am not interested in arguing for the superiority of one national or historical repertory over another, only in using the fact of canonicity as a methodological control. What I mean by “center” (and, it follows, by “radial structures”) will emerge presently. Enough to say, for now, that it is a technical rather than ideological criterion, and one that makes no judgment whatsoever on the aesthetic worth of a Monteverdi or a Rameau (or, indeed, the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea).

So much for the music. On a theoretical level, my purview is defensible also in that metaphor has particularly deep roots in the German intellectual tradition. The cognitivism of Lakoff and Johnson, as well as the hermeneutic theory of Paul Ricoeur, emerges from the German phenomenological horizon of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Historically, this German heritage is even stronger. Italy and France had no rhetorical school to match seventeenth-century German Figurenlehre. In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, theories of metaphor and symbol became most powerful in German critical thought from Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schelling right through to Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Furthermore, there are good holistic reasons for studying German music in the context of German intellectual history, and vice versa. This integralist approach pays dividends in illuminating problems that are arguably occluded by Italian and French perspectives. For example, the prevailingly French view of the Enl...