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[1] Some fifteen years ago there was a flourish of interest among music theorists in the work of Mark Johnson on metaphor and embodied reasoning (Johnson 1987), and applications of this work drew attention to the hidden role of image schemas, such as the path and the container schemas, in structuring musical thinking.(1) According to Johnson, we learn such schemas in basic embodied experience, as in moving along actual paths and interacting with containers (and in being containers ourselves), and we commonly transfer this understanding from concrete, physical domains to more abstract domains such as temporality, giving us metaphoric pathways such as curriculum vitae (the "course" of one's life) and metaphoric containers such as moods, ages, and financial states "in" which one can be (e.g., "in" a good mood, "in" one's twenties, or "in" debt).(2) In the case of music, the initial applications of this approach pointed out the plain and systematic manifestation of the path and the container schemas, among others, in music epistemology, as in melodic "lines" and "contours" and the notion of musical works as "containing" themes, transitions, chords, and, of another sort, meaning.(3) The takeaway from this is that musical meaning becomes embodied as a result of the following process: when we describe music in terms of motion and space, we import our understanding of physically moving through actual space into our understanding and experience of music. This approach is both beneficial and potentially problematic, as I will explain below.[2] Manifestations of the path and the container schemas in musical concepts are part of a more general metaphoric understanding of music in terms of motion, and in Musical Forces Steve Larson explores some of the logical entailments of this more general understanding. As he explains, if we look at how people familiar with Western tonal music talk about, perform, and compose this music, it is as if music involves motion through some kind of space, including negotiation of musical "forces" such as gravity, magnetism, and inertia. These are the three musical forces at issue in this book, and they are presented as logical entailments of our metaphoric understanding of music in terms of motion. They are logical entailments in musical understanding because they are so in our experience of actual motion: we negotiate these forces in everyday motion, and we import this into our understanding of musical motion, with the result that our vocabulary and reasoning are saturated with implicit and explicit evidence of the presence of these forces. In exploring the details of this metaphoric reasoning, Larson describes the systematic structure whereby relations among ephemeral and mass-less sounds come to be understood in terms of "motion [of some entity] within a gravitational field" (84).[3] In the first half of the book, following his exposition of metaphoric musical motion and musical forces, he describes how this applies to melodic expectation, rhythm and meter, and Schenkerian analysis, and in the second half he offers empirical evidence that supports the theory. More specifically, following a wide ranging introductory chapter, in Part 1 we are offered a helpful introduction to metaphoric reasoning (Chapter 2), followed by an account of metaphoric musical motion (Chapter 3), an introduction to the three musical forces (Chapter 4), and then an application of the theory of musical forces to a theory of melodic expectation (Chapter 5), rhythm and meter (Chapter 6), and four sample analyses (Chapter 7). Part 2 offers evidence for the theory via an introductory chapter on converging evidence from different disciplines and sub-disciplines (Chapter 8), followed by considerations of evidence from visual perception theory and from neuroscience (Chapter 9), studies involving compositions and improvisations (Chapter 10), examinations of music-theoretical misunderstandings (Chapter 11), a study of listener judgments (Chapter 12), and comparison of computer models and results from production experiments (Chapter 13). … |
