Metaphor and Musical Thought (review)

At various times music has been called "the universal language," or "the most expressive of the arts," and, as such, it is difficult to translate into any other medium. We therefore speak of music in terms of metaphor, mapping the abstract onto the concrete, conveying musical experience by way of analogy with other forms and feelings. Michael Spitzer's Metaphor and Musical Thought provides an impressive and thorough analysis of this process and synthesis of a wide range of fields: music history and theory, philosophy, aesthetics, semiotics, hermeneutics, art history, linguistics, literature, science, and theology. His critique of the literature of metaphor is comprehensive and his theory compelling and unique. With the increasing interest in more abstract ways of thinking about music, his work should appeal to music historians and theorists, and students of philosophy and aesthetics. His book fills a major gap in interdisciplinary studies.

Spitzer defines metaphor as "the relationship between the physical, proximate, and familiar, and the abstract, distal, and unfamiliar" (p. 4). This relationship is bi- directional within music reception and production: "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" (p. 4). In other words, music structures thought and thought structures music.

Spitzer's book is well-organized, clear in presentation and prose, with his theory elucidated by diagrams and music examples. His book is divided into two parts, "The Metaphorical Present" and "The Metaphorical Tradition" in accordance with his bi-directional view of metaphor's history, in which modern, cognitive Anglo-American approaches to music influence and are influenced by an older, hermeneutic, European tradition. "The Metaphorical Present" encompasses the work of linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Ronald Langacker, Andrew Ortony, Eve Sweetser, and Paul Ricoeur. "The Metaphorical Tradition" focuses on Austro-Germany, since "it is simply a fact that composers of 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" (p. 5).

Spitzer limits his scope based on technical, not aesthetic, criteria and makes no value judgments. He explores well-known and less-known texts to arrive at a tripartite metaphorical tradition, corresponding to baroque, classical, and romantic styles: harmony and painting, rhythm and language, and melody and life, respectively. Although he makes a convincing case for his theory, based on intellectual tradition, a reader may question whether there is a broader application of it within the music of the time, place, and composers chosen. His music examples are cogent; one might wish only for more of them.

In "The Metaphorical Present," Spitzer reconciles the cognitive and aesthetic sides of metaphor, or the "scientific" and the "artistic" kinds of imagination, through the notion of schema. The schema is the basis for and a hinge between intramusical and cross-domain metaphors, which are further projected onto analytical and cultural metaphors, respectively. In this model, metaphors interpenetrate and permeate each other. Spitzer thus accounts for complexities and avoids the pitfall of oversimplification in "neat" theories. He then proceeds to explain how schemata generate three compositional structures—radial, hierarchical, and processive, which correspond to his three historical pairs of metaphors. He relates basic-level mappings to linguistics, pedagogy, the notion of scientific paradigm, and ultimately, the concept of educational metaphor. Among the many writers he discusses are Immanuel Kant, Lakoff, Johnson, Sweetser, Janna Saslaw, Steve Larson, Candace Brower, and Thomas S. Kuhn. In the chapter "Poetics," Spitzer addresses metaphor as composition, as opposed to metaphor as interpretation. He critiques Ricoeur's theory of metaphor in literary discourse and applies it to music, proposing a general theory of musical discourse and a method of analysis for metaphor in the common-practice period.

The bulk of the book falls into the three chapters that discuss the above-mentioned...