Metaphors for Musical Motion—Beyond Time Is Motion

Abstract

Metaphors pervade musical discourse: Rhythms can be driving, melodies ascend and descend, and harmonies move from tonic to dominant. Conceptual Metaphor Theory offers a framework for the motivation of the rich metaphorisation of musical discourse. Johnson and Larson (Metaphors Musical Motion. Metaphor Symbol 18:63–84, 2003) assume that our understanding of music is largely based on our understanding of time. Thus, as time is conventionally understood in terms of motion, musical progression can be understood in terms of motion as well. The analysis of a corpus of 10,000 words from music criticism reveals that 21% of lexical units within the corpus are used metaphorically, the majority of the vocabulary being drawn from the source domain of motion-in-space. A more specific analysis of these instances suggests that metaphorical musical motion presents a complex set of mappings that reflect three aspects of musical structure: its temporal progression, its melodic progression, and its harmonic progression. While only a subset of these motion metaphors can be explained by time is motion, the findings suggest that they rather rely on a complex concept of time involving several independent mappings as well as the Event Structure Metaphor.