Concrete images and abstract metaphorical extensions in the encounter between language and music: Hsu Chih-Mo's poem “Serendipity”

Abstract

Although previous studies on metaphor and music have yielded fruitful results in the past decades, none of them have investigated the complex “one-to-many” relationships between metaphor and music in compositions based on the same lyrics in examining how verbal metaphors are mapped on, transformed into, and combined with the musical/aural mode of the compositions. To bridge this gap, this study provides a detailed metaphor-based and musical analyses to examine the transformation of verbal metaphors in the classic Mandarin Chinese poem “Serendipity,” written by the famous poet Hsu Chih-Mo (徐志摩), into multimodal metaphors in four musical versions.Our findings show that the lyrics of the poem have been transformed into the musical mode both visually and aurally through the highlighting of the “concrete images” and “abstract metaphorical extension” of metaphors, providing a method for categorization of the concrete-abstract continuum of compositional patterns and musical techniques. Furthermore, we demonstrate the following findings that have not been addressed in previous studies on metaphor and music, especially within a multimodal context:(1) The “chain of metaphors,” the interactively echoing relationship between metaphors resulting in the coherent and holistic multimodal representation, may be a significant feature distinguishing the differences between metaphors in multimodal and monomodal modes; (2) both the concrete relationships of space and the abstract attributes of emotion can be mapped onto various representations of prominent musical features like increasing/decreasing dynamics, high/low keys, increasing/decreasing figures, dark/bright timbres, and wide or narrow tonal range; (3) the pictorial effect shown in the score and prominent musical features, deemed to be visual and aural cues, function to construct the scenario of the metaphor and to activate imagination, interpretation, and the multimodal esthetic appreciation. In summary, this study heralds a new way of thinking about multimodal metaphor, which could shed light on interdisciplinary studies of the interface between pragmatic multimodal use of language and music and the esthetic experience of art appreciation.