Dissertation - World Federation of Music Therapy

3.6.2 Music as metaphor in musicology
This section is a brief examination of how musicology has related to the idea of music
as metaphor, and especially how the cognitive theory of metaphor by Lakoff and
Johnson has been applied to music theory and analysis. In a historical perspective one
might say that metaphor is now being reintroduced in music theory after more than a
century of negligence or rejection. The raise of modern positivist musicology was also
a farewell to the ideas of music imitating human emotions, dominating the baroque
period, and the ideas of music as emotional projection or non-verbal narratives,
dominating the romantic period. The early experimental music psychologists
reintroduced the study of music and emotion, and a few philosophers with an interest
in music aesthetics and music experience continued the discussion of the relationship
between music and emotion, including the ever controversial question if and how
music may ‘express emotion’. 28 The first book in modern time addressing the
relationship of music and metaphor was Ferguson’s Music and Metaphor (1960). The
book investigated how music can be considered an expression, and how music may
express emotion and meaning. Ferguson understands music as a means of
communication. “It is the perception of a full reality of experience – an awareness in
which our every faculty of sensuous, intellectual, and emotional perception is indeed
focused to a point.” (p. 16) Ferguson also investigated music as embodied emotions
and the elements of expression in music. He identified two embodied elements of
music: tension and motion. “Our hypothesis… may be summarized as follows: There
are two fundamental elements of musical expression – tone stress and ideal motion.
These elements may serve to portray, respectively, two of three elemental factors of
emotional experience – nervous tension and motor impulse.” (p. 87) Secondary
factors enhancing the vividness of the elemental suggestions made by tension and
motion are: timbre, register, dynamic or rhythmic inflection. The Epilogue uses the
concepts of metaphor and analogy to show how
“Tension and motion... are characteristic of human as well as of musical
bodies. In the musical body they function for structure. In the human body the
28 The study of ’Music and Emotion’ throughout the 20th Century is summarized and discussed in the
comprehensive textbook with the same title, editied by Juslin and Sloboda (2001). This volume
includes perspectives from philosophy, musicology, cognitive psychology and music therapy (Bunt and
Pavlicevic). From a music therapy perspective Pavlicevic (1997) presented an overview of the music
and meaning debate, including the presentation of her own concept of ’Dynamic form’.
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