Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking 025302160X, 9780253021601

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Music and Embodied Cognition

Music and Embodied Cognition Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking A R N I E C OX

I N DI A NA U N I V ER SIT Y PR E SS Bloomington & Indianapolis

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2016 by Arnie Cox All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cox, Arnie, 1963- author. Title: Music and embodied cognition : listening, moving, feeling, and thinking / Arnie Cox. Other titles: Musical meaning and interpretation. Description: Bloomington ; Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 2016. | 2016 | Series: Musical meaning and interpretation | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016004456 | ISBN 9780253021601 (cloth : alkaline paper) Subjects: LCSH: Music—Psychological aspects. | Emotions and cognition. | Emotions in music. | Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. Classification: LCC ML3830 .C69 2016 | DDC 781.1/1—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016004456 1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16

Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part 1: Theoretical Background 1. Mimetic Comprehension  11 2. Mimetic Comprehension of Music  36 3. Metaphor and Related Means of Reasoning  58 Part 2: Spatial Conceptions 4. Pitch Height  85 5. Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  109 6. Perspectives on Musical Motion  134 Part 3: Beyond Musical Space 7. Music and the External Senses  163 8. Musical Affect  176 9. Applications  200 10. Review and Implications  221 Appendix I. Mimetic Subvocalization and Absolute Pitch 231 Appendix II. Levels of Abstraction among Metaphors 233 Notes 237 Bibliography 257 Index 273

Acknowledgments My music studies began in the public schools under Vernon Ludwig and Jim Reyn­­ olds; my professional life as a music teacher and scholar has been possible only because of the existence of such programs and the efforts of these educators. In my undergraduate studies at Humboldt State University I was fortunate to learn from Frank Marks, Charles Moon, Hubert Kennemer, and our instrument technician and mentor-in-residence Dan Gurnée, each of whose encouragement and lessons have contributed to the ideas in this book. I encountered two scholars during my graduate studies at the University of Oregon whose influence provided the most direct and substantive foundation for this book. Nadine Hubbs was a visiting member of the music theory faculty at the time, and while introducing me to the breadth of alternatives and complements to structural music analysis she directed me to the work of Mark Johnson, who, as it happened, had recently accepted a position as chair of the philosophy department across campus. Mark’s interest in the bases of musical meaning led to a very beneficial collaboration, and I’m grateful for his guidance and encouragement, from my coursework and dissertation to the eventual book. I would also like to acknowledge the help and educational benefits of studying with my other teachers at the University of Oregon: Peter Bergquist, Jack Boss, Robert Hurwitz, Dean Kramer, Steve Larson, Harold Owen, and Marian Smith. Since arriving at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music my ideas have been shaped through conversations with many current and former colleagues, in particular Tim Best, Rebecca Leydon, Charity Lofthouse, Joe Lubben, and Diane Urista. Colleagues at other institutions who have been especially helpful include Candace Brower, Murray Dineen, Marion Guck, Eric McKee, Janna Saslaw, Mari Takada, and Larry Zbikowski. I have refined most of the ideas in this book in the context of my teaching, and the feedback from my students is reflected throughout the following chapters. First among these is Kendra Juul, whose analysis of Björk’s “Enjoy” confirmed early on my belief in the value and practicality of the kind of holistic analytical approach that eventually became what is outlined here in chapters 8 and 9. There are too many others to acknowledge, but among those who pointed to difficulties and lacunas, helped in addressing both, and/or otherwise particularly encouraged the endeavor are (in approximate chronological order): Ellen (Stewart) Baker, James Garlick, Aaron Helgeson, Joe Kimmel, Mary Larew, Erin Grady Milne, Teddy Rankin-Parker, Matt Chamberlain, Marek Poliks, Jessie Downs, Doug Farrand, Josh Rosner, and Elizabeth Castro Abrams. At the very

start of my time at Oberlin, Lucy (Davis) Vander Kamp’s ideas and encouragement were especially helpful. I am grateful that Indiana University Press and the Music and Meaning Series under Robert Hatten took an interest in this project. I want to thank Robert for his comments, questions, and suggestions with regard to the manuscript, along with Elizabeth Margulis for her comments and suggestions on behalf of Indiana University Press. I would also like to thank Raina Polivka and Janice Frisch at Indiana University Press for their encouragement and help in the process, and Candace McNulty for insightful questions and comments along with the copyediting. Finally, I would like to thank two longtime friends, Dave Pinyerd and Adrienne Valencia, for listening, offering feedback, and otherwise supporting me as I tried out various ideas over the last two decades. And my parents: Sylvia (Lavell) Cox, who most often went by “Toby” and who had the most beautiful soprano voice one could wish to hear, and Rod Cox, who can’t carry a tune in a bucket, as he would say, and yet loves to sing. They encouraged my music studies from the first lessons through graduate studies and beyond, and they fostered in me a perspective that is woven into the fabric of the following pages.

Music and Embodied Cognition

Introduction I do not know how the sentence “I have a body” is to be used. Ludwig Wittgenstein

Like many music students, I spent a good deal of my undergraduate and graduate coursework in music theory focusing on musical structure and making more or less factual observations about how the various elements of music fit together in particular works and styles. Since I enjoyed this kind of study, for my doctoral thesis I planned to take the same approach in analyzing the music of Debussy. But then one day the stove in my apartment stopped working, the repairman came over, and we started chatting. He asked if I was a student up at the college, and I said yes, and that I was studying music theory. He replied, with unexpected enthusiasm and seriousness, “Music theory—so you must study how music makes us feel things.” With some embarrassment I explained that I was actually studying hierarchical relations among musical tones, at which point our conversation quickly died a quiet little death. His assumption, however, that a music theorist naturally would study musical affect led me to reflect on my scholarly priorities. One result of this reflection was my attention to the fact that, although my analysis revealed relevant and interesting details about the music, it seemed to miss something important about how the music “works” and about why I was drawn to this music in the first place. From this reflection emerged a desire for a more holistic approach. My search for a more holistic, interpretive approach led me to Debussy’s letters and critical writings, where I intended to learn what I could about how he understood his own music and the music of others. Since these writings proved to be filled with metaphors, both conventional and idiosyncratic, I then needed a way of understanding more explicitly the relationship between his words and the music to which they referred. I eventually settled on conceptual metaphor theory, and the book you are reading is a result of my study of the relationship between musical experience and conceptualization—or, how music makes us feel and think whatever it is that it makes us feel and think. This exploration has led me beyond the music of Debussy to a number of principles that apply to music

generally, some of which are directly in line with the repairman’s assumption, and some of which lead to still more questions.

Experience and Meaning This book concerns the question of how we make meaning from musical experience. “We” are Homo sapiens, members of particular cultures, and individual persons, and the starting point in this exploration is the premise that musical meaning emerges via a combination of feeling and thinking in response to musical actions and sounds. Accordingly, I will be describing what I take to be some of the processes whereby music gets inside of us and makes us feel whatever it is that it makes us feel, and how this feeling then shapes conceptualizations of musical experience. While conceptualizations in turn shape what one feels, the main focus here will be on the bottom-up portion: from feeling to thinking. The perspective will be primarily that of listeners, but I will also give consideration to the crucial roles of performers and composers. Strictly speaking, the notion of embodied cognition in the title of this book ought to be redundant, on the premise that there is no disembodied cognition. But this term is meant to highlight the connections between the flesh of experience and conceptualizations of this experience. The chapters in this book are an attempt to specify some of the relevant processes and variables.

The Plan The emergence of musical meaning includes conceptualization of musical experience, and one of the premises here is that musical concepts are conceptualizations not only of what we hear but also of what we feel. Accordingly, the words we use to describe music never refer simply to sounds but also to what those sounds make us feel. To see how this might be, we will have to do a bit of cognitive archeology and dig beneath some common assumptions. One tactic in such an exploration would be to analyze, or deconstruct, our spatial conceptions of music—the overlapping concepts of pitch height, musical motion, and musical space. I do this in the middle of the book, in part 2 (chaps. 4–6), where I offer an account of how pitch height (high and low notes) and musical motion are mostly imaginary and are motivated by and grounded in an affective response to music. To make this case, I apply the conceptual metaphor theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980, 1999) and extend the earlier applications offered by other music theorists. Because this theory challenges common fundamental assumptions about how meaning is constructed, we will need some background, and this is the purpose of part 1 (chaps. 1–3). Chapter 3 is a primer on metaphor and related cognitive processes and is meant to help keep us from talking past one another. Since conceptual metaphor theory depends on there being an embodied experience to be conceptualized, we will also need a theory of how music gets into the flesh in the first place. This is the purpose of chapters 1 and 2, 2  Music and Embodied Cognition

on the role of physical imitation in everyday cognition, and on the various forms of physical imitation in music cognition. The ideas in chapter 2, in the form of the mimetic hypothesis, are at the core of the arguments for most of the book. Part 3 (chaps. 7–10) then takes us beyond musical motion and space to an exploration of the processes involved in our more plainly affective responses to music. Chapter 7 compares hearing to the other external senses, but its most important point concerns the relationship between the eye, the hand, and the ear in connection with the foundations of our general epistemology, or our general system of understanding and knowing. As we will see, this epistemology is biased in favor of the eye (vision) and the hand (grasping), which creates a problem for musical understanding and knowledge given the many invisible and intangible components of music. This “problem,” however, turns out to be a potent source of musical affect, as I explain in chapter 8, where I map out the basics of an eightpart framework for understanding musical affect. I apply the principles of chapter 8 in three demonstrations in chapter 9, and in chapter 10 I describe some of the implications and additional applications of the ideas in this book.

On the Evolution and Development of Brains and Embodied Minds The value of the notion of “embodied cognition” depends on one’s understanding of the relationship between the brain, the rest of the body, and mental activity. Since this relationship is a product of both evolution and individual human development, acknowledging some basics of these processes can help ground the arguments. The pertinent idea explored in the chapters to follow is that musical experience involves an adaptation, or aestheticization, of ancient and practical perceptual-affective-cognitive processes. One of the implications of evolutionary theory is that the human brain and the capacity for conceptualization has evolved—not only from earlier primates, or from even earlier tetrapods, but from animals that had no brain and no central nervous system at all. If this billion-year perspective seems too remote to be relevant to music conceptualization, one can focus on the much briefer and equally significant development of individual humans, in which single-cell bodies start out with no brain and yet gradually develop the capacity for various kinds of thinking. Since life on Earth evolved for millions of years without brains or nervous systems, we should ask what changed. One answer is that, as body sizes increased from single-cell organisms to massively multicellular organisms (human bodies being roughly a million times larger than bacterial bodies), there was a corresponding need to coordinate increasingly disparate parts and evolving systems, including limbs, internal organs, respiration, and blood circulation. A central nervous system performs this coordinating function, which is to say that it evolved as a way of taking care of the organism as a whole. The result, one could say, is an “embrained body.” In Antonio Damasio’s terms (Damasio 1994), the Introduction  3

brain evolved as a way of maintaining homeostasis, or the overall good functioning of the organism. Maintenance of homeostasis necessarily involves some kind of action by the organism, and the motivation for particular actions is affect: feelings of hunger, fear, fatigue, and so forth. For example, a drop in blood sugar initiates a negative affective state, mild or severe, and a desire for food, which in turn motivates searching (or crying) for food and its acquisition and ingestion. This in turn changes blood chemistry, temporarily reestablishes homeostasis, and results in the agreeable affective state of satisfaction. For humans and some other animals, such actions involve a measure of memory, planning, and monitoring, even in the deceptively simple process of reaching for an apple and eating it. At the level of consciousness, the intricate and complex cognitive processes involved in such a “simple” series of actions require very little conscious thought, and the embodied cognition involved might seem to be a species of thinking that differs from reflective thinking. But at its core, this series of actions is only a simpler version of going to the market to buy apples, or of going to college to get a degree in order to get a job to earn money to purchase apples and other items required to maintain homeostasis. While a college degree may be about more than ensuring access to food, the point here is that reflection and planning evolved in connection with affect and action in the service of maintaining homeostasis. From such ancient practical processes emerge consciousness and the possibility of self-identity, as well as a conceptualization of one’s self as transcending the bodily processes from which it emerges. This self is largely unaware of basic bodily processes that give rise to it—which is functionally beneficial in that it allows one to attend to recalled, planned, and otherwise imagined events and scenarios. But one common result is the notion that I have a body, which can then become an implicit part of the foundation for understanding musical experience: I am distinct from my bodily processing of musical sounds. The following chapters offer a different perspective.

Making Sense of Music: Categorization and Metaphor According to the view of ancient cognition under consideration, the human capacity for explicit memory, planning, and reasoning evolved for the species, and develop in individual minds, in connection with affect and action: despite being distinguishable processes, the experiences of feeling, doing, and thinking are each, to a great extent, inextricable from their combined function. One of the most significant ways in which this plays out is in categorization, which we can think of as a way of answering the implicit question “What is that?” Every verb and every noun refers to a category, and in many cases a single word refers to both actions and objects, as in the musical cases of leap, phrase, and cadence. Because actions normally have an affective component, in what it feels like to perform a particular action, such musical categories thus blend together sound, action, and affect. The case of leap, for example, blends the sound of a leap, the 4  Music and Embodied Cognition

action of leaping, and the feeling of leaping. Accordingly, the concept of leap is a category whose members share something of this three-part phenomenology. When we use metaphor, we conceptualize something from one category in terms of a different category. In Indo-European languages such as English, the more ancient categories generally concern physical actions and objects, and these commonly become the basis for conceptualizing evolutionarily more recent abstract experience, such as those involving time, quantities, and music. For example, physical leaping and the concept of leap predates the metaphoric concepts of a leap in logic, a leap of faith, perceptual salience (from Latin salire, to leap), and musical leaps. The logic of the general metaphoric extension of terms like leap is of interest in its own right, but for music the implications are particularly notable. We experience something that can be very definite in terms of sound and action, but that is otherwise abstract in the sense that it involves largely invisible, intangible, and ephemeral events and relations, and when we try to make sense of it we look for a way to categorize it. From the perspective that I will describe, the basis for musical categorization, in this and many other instances, is not simply what we hear or see but also what we feel: a musical leap somehow feels something like an actual leap. How this might be so, and how such a term can apply to sounds, are two of the questions that we will explore.

Limitations To tell this story I have drawn upon ideas from a number of different fields, and consequently none of these fields is adequately represented on its own terms. This is not a book on the psychology of music, or the neuroscience of music, or the philosophy of music, although each of these disciplines plays a key role. Likewise, this is not a book on metaphor or on musical affect, and scholars in these areas will note the many relevant studies, approaches, and details that are omitted or given scant attention. Instead, this book specifies some of the details of how music gets into the flesh and how we make sense of this experience, and it does so in a way that can be achieved only by an interdisciplinary and synoptic approach, with all of the advantages and disadvantages that come with that. In connection with the synoptic nature of this book, I seldom stop to apply the ideas to particular musical examples before chapter 9. Instead, I leave it to readers to stop and consider the relevance of the ideas, whether in connection with particular examples mentioned or otherwise. Most of the musical examples and references are from Western classical music, but I hope that the references to other kinds of music will give some indication of the broader potential application of these ideas.

Related Readings Judging by the various conversations I have had, a good portion of the ideas in this book come from a perspective that is unfamiliar to many music scholars and Introduction  5

other music lovers. Although my claims and suggestions stand or fall on their own, familiarity with the following books can add dimensions of understanding. David Huron’s Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (2006) is important for understanding the pervasiveness of anticipation, in daily life and in music, and especially for understanding that some cognitive processes do most of their work without our awareness. For example, statements of explicit anticipation, such as “I can’t wait for vacation,” constitute only a small portion of the embodied mind’s anticipatory processes. Lower-level anticipation, involving matters such as individual steps while walking or individual notes in a musical passage, is far more pervasive than explicit anticipation. Most of the musical processes that I will be describing likewise operate for the most part implicitly. Lawrence Zbikowski’s Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (2002) helped to establish, in the field of music scholarship, the relevance of conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory in the construction of musical meaning, and part of what I offer here pursues this relevance in a related vein. Beyond music, Antonio Damasio’s books, Descartes’s Error (1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (1999), have fundamentally influenced my view of the relation between action, affect, and reasoning. In large part, the present book is an application and extension of ideas presented in Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) and Philosophy in the Flesh (1999). For those unfamiliar with this approach to conceptual metaphor theory, two books by Zoltán Kövecses present Lakoff and Johnson’s ideas with a more pedagogical orientation and with more extensive consideration of metaphor in the languages of the world: Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (2002) and Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (2005). Apart from the specific application to music, the present book gives somewhat greater attention to the phenomenology of experience that motivates and grounds metaphoric reasoning. Two other books introduced me to value of the larger context of evolution for understanding how musical meaning emerges: The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (1991), and Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, by Ellen Dissanayake (1992). While I do not engage with these books directly, the present book can be understood as sharing a similar view.1

Pathways through This Book For the most part the later chapters depend on the earlier chapters, but here are some suggestions for selective reading. Chapters 1 and 2 can be read as a pair and applied to contexts other than those in the subsequent chapters. The value of chapter 3 depends largely if not entirely on its role as a preparation for subsequent chapters. The chapters on musical motion and space (chaps. 4–6) might be read individually or as a group, but their fuller value depends on the connections to chapters 2 and 3, and then to the other chapters as well. Readers interested pri6  Music and Embodied Cognition

marily in affect (chaps. 8–9) might pass over chapters 3–6 without too much loss, although one of the main points of this book is to show something of the relationship between affect and conceptualization, including in particular the role of affect in our conceptualizations of music in terms of motion and space.

Concluding Remarks In sharing these ideas over the past two decades I have found that what seems obvious to one person is not obvious, or is obviously wrong, to another. Happily, some who have initially found the ideas in this book to be counterintuitive have later come to find at least some of them to be not only plausible but intuitively right and, in the end, even obvious. While my interest began with the question of how music works, it gradually and necessarily transformed into the question of how we work under the influence of music. Ultimately, however, both of these questions prove to be misleading until one specifies just what is meant by music and the music. The following chapters explain what I mean.

Introduction  7

Part One Theoretical Background

1 Mimetic Comprehension Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery— it’s the sincerest form of learning. George Bernard Shaw When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. Eric Hoffer

If music cognition is embodied in a musically meaningful way, in the flesh of experience, then we ought to be able to specify just how this occurs. One way begins in imitation of musical sounds and of the physical exertions that produce them. This bodily comprehension of sounds and of sound-producing actions is one of the bases of embodied cognition of music, and it is the central basis that we will be exploring in the following chapters. The issue of musical embodiment may be relatively straightforward in the case of performers, in the sense that performing, planning, and otherwise thinking about musical performance are tied to the bodily actions of performance. But the situation is less straightforward in the case of listeners: How and why would listening to or thinking about music, apart from planning or recalling one’s own performance, have anything to do with embodiment beyond the operations of the auditory system? The answer offered here is that listening to, recalling, or otherwise thinking about music involves one or more kinds of vicarious performance, or imitation (or simulation), and that the role of this imitation in music is a special case of its general role in human perception. The gist of this idea is not new, but the details of how it actually plays out in music comprehension will take some time to describe. By imitation I mean not only the overt behavior of “monkey see, monkey do” but also covert imitation that occurs only in imagination. These forms of imitation occur whenever we attend to the behavior of others, whether in the performing arts or athletics, or in learning a particular skill from someone else’s demonstration, or in merely taking an interest in what others are doing. When we imitate overtly or covertly, in effect we are responding to two implicit questions:

What’s it like to do that? and its twin question, What’s it like to be that? We answer these questions in part by overtly and covertly imitating the behavior of others. Overt imitation is plainly evident in children but it is also evident later in life. Music lessons and foreign language classes, for example, involve a measure of deliberate overt imitation. But imitation also regularly occurs covertly, involuntarily, and without our awareness, and I will try to clarify the importance of this. Because the term “imitation” bears unhelpful connotations, such as a lack of originality and/or lack of sophistication, I will in most cases describe imitative behavior as mimetic.1 By behavior I mean not only overt actions, as in singing along with music, but also the behavior of muscle-related portions of the brain. Since overt mimetic behavior is plainly evident, it will not require much investigation in this context. The covert processes, however, some of which are conscious and some of which are not, will require more attention. I will refer to overt mimetic behavior as mimetic motor action (MMA), and for the relevant muscle-related brain processes that do not manifest in overt actions I will use the term mimetic motor imagery (MMI): mimetic for imitative, motor for muscle related, and imagery for “thought,” “imagination,” or “mental representation.” I intend imagery to include not only voluntary and conscious forms, but especially those forms that occur automatically and with or without our awareness. The involuntary and nonconscious forms of MMI are in some respects the most significant in the construction of musical meaning.2 It is important to distinguish imagination, as the term is commonly used, from imagery. When I imagine playing the cello, for example, this is normally a conscious and deliberate enactment of motor imagery, and when I imagine playing the cello like Jacqueline du Pré, this is conscious and deliberate MMI and is thus a special case of MMI generally. MMI is grounded in motor-related brain processes that occasionally become conscious and occasionally are initiated deliberately. As a whole, the various forms of mimetic behavior (MMA and MMI) constitute the core of the mimetic hypothesis (Cox 2001, 2011), whose initial principles are the following: • Part of how we comprehend the behavior of others is by imitating, covertly (MMI) or overtly (MMA), the observed actions of others. • Part of how we comprehend music is by imitating, covertly or overtly, the observed sound-producing actions of performers. Both of these propositions lead immediately to many questions. In the case of mu­sic these include the questions of how this might apply to, say, electronic music, in which the sounds are not produced directly by human exertions, or to ensemble music, where the various performers may be doing quite different things—for example, do listeners somehow imitate the percussion, the winds, and the strings of an orchestra all at once? They also raise the question of how differences in performing experience shape the different experiences of individual listeners. For example, listening to violin or fiddle music will offer a different mi12  Theoretical Background

metic experience for string players than it will for other listeners, and the same applies to every performance medium. A theory of embodied music cognition must accommodate such variables, and I address these and other questions in the next chapter, where I describe twenty principles of the mimetic hypothesis. The value of the hypothesis and its implications, however, depends on the evidence for the hypothesis in the broader context of general mimetic behavior, and that is the purpose of the present chapter. Because it will be a few pages before I get to the details of the hypothesis, I offer a preview of its principles here. The first nine apply to mimetic comprehension generally, while the others are more germane to music, and for the most part all are listed in order from more general to more specific. While each principle is integral to the hypothesis, principles 6–7, 9–13, and 16–20 are among the most significant for the approach to musical experience and embodied cognition described in subsequent chapters. 1. Sounds are produced by physical events; sounds indicate (signify) the physicality of their source 2. Many or most musical sounds are evidence of the human motor actions that produce them 3. Humans understand other entities (animate or not, human or not) and events in their environment in part via mimetic behavior (MMI and MMA) 4. MMA and MMI are bodily representations of observed actions 5. Mimetic comprehension is based on visual, auditory, and/or tactile information: • The observed behavior can be seen but not heard (the sight of action) • The observed behavior can be heard but not seen (the sound of action) • The observed behavior need not be seen or heard (the feel of action) 6. Musical imagery is partly motor imagery 7. Mimetic behavior (MMI and MMA) involves the variables of volition, consciousness, and overtness: • Mimetic behavior can be voluntary, but often it is involuntary • It can be conscious, but often it is nonconscious (beyond awareness) • It can be overt, but often it is covert (occurring only in imagery) 8. MMI and MMA are more strongly activated in observation of goaldirected actions 9. MMI and MMA occur in real time, recall, and planning 10. MMI and MMA take three forms: • Intramodal, or direct-matching (e.g., finger imitation of finger movements) • Intermodal, or cross-modal (e.g., subvocal imitation of musical sounds generally) • Amodal (abdominal exertions that underlie limb movements and vocalizations) Mimetic Comprehension  13

11. Any and all acoustic features can or will be mimetically represented: pitch, duration, timbre, strength (acoustic intensity, or “volume”), and location 12. Different kinds of music “invite” (motivate) different kinds of mimetic engagement, and this contributes to the different feel (quale) of different kinds of music 13. Music is sometimes found to “resist” mimetic participation 14. Ensemble music offers simultaneous multiple “invitations” 15. MMI and MMA can be stronger in live performance than in recorded performance 16. MMI and MMA vary in strength and accuracy among different people 17. Mimetic participation results in a sense of belonging and shared achievement 18. Mimetic participation is a central source of musical affect 19. MMI and MMA motivate and constrain conceptualization (metaphoric and otherwise) 20. Mimetic comprehension is part of human cognition generally I am referring to this as a hypothesis because most of the principles are empirically testable but for the most part have yet to be tested directly in musical contexts. Nevertheless, the evidence presented below leaves little question that music is comprehended mimetically, and instead it leaves only the more specific questions of (1) the extent to which this is so, (2) the manner in which it plays out in different contexts, and (3) its implications for musical meaning. Readers who happen to be familiar with theories of entrainment and/or simulation (e.g., Barsalou 1999 and 2009; Jeannerod 2001) will find overlap with the mimetic hypothesis. The much discussed “mirror neurons” (e.g., Iacoboni 2008) are also relevant, although we will consider some of the complexities that arise in trying to specify their likely role. Within music scholarship, the mimetic hypothesis is similar to ideas in Lidov (1987), Todd (1995), Cumming (1997 and 2000), Mead (1999), Leman (2008), and numerous others.3 Of particular note are two ideas in Cusick (2006). The first is her description of a listener’s desire to be the music, which is also one of the implications of the hypothesis and one that will force us eventually to define the music in light of mimetic engagement. The other is the notion of responding to an invitation to participate, which for all intents and purposes is identical to principle 12.4 What distinguishes the mimetic hypothesis from related writings is the more comprehensive view of imitation in music perception and of its role in our affectivecognitive responses to music. I begin by considering some of the evidence for the hypothesis.

Evidence for the Mimetic Hypothesis The majority of the evidence comes from areas outside of music, in the form of psychological studies of overt mimetic behavior (MMA, mimetic motor action) 14  Theoretical Background

and neurological studies of covert mimetic behavior (MMI, mimetic motor imagery). In order to keep the focus on music, I have selected studies that are most closely related to music comprehension. I have grouped the evidence into the following overlapping categories:    1. Psychological Studies of Imitation 1.1. Child-Caregiver Interactions 1.2. Social Interactions in Adulthood   2. Neurological Studies of MMI and MMA in General   3. MMI and Auditory Perception: Neurological and Psychological Studies 3.1. Speech 3.2. Vocal and Instrumental Music Discussion of the hypothesis requires a couple of novel terms. Mimetic comprehension refers to the portion of music comprehension that involves MMA and MMI. Mimetic participation emphasizes the joining-in and taking-part that result from MMI and MMA. Mimetic engagement refers to the more general aspect of merely being engaged with the music as a listener, and one of the claims to be explored is that whenever we are engaged in listening, normally we are mimetically engaged whether we are aware of it or not. Although mimetic perception might be an apt term, I will speak most often of mimetic comprehension because the familiar use of “perception” is largely if not entirely nonmimetic (that is, not involving the mimetic processes that I am describing here). Once the arguments of the following chapters have been made, mimetic perception can then be understood as a form of perception that is complementary to our more traditional understanding of music perception. Along these lines, I am taking cognition to be the sum of the processes of coming-toknow and coming-to-understand and to thus subsume all forms of perception, comprehension, and conceptualization. Finally, it will be helpful on occasion to use the term mimetic representation. This is defined in the discussion of principle 4 in the next chapter, but for now we can think of mimetic representations as activity in the muscles (MMA) and/ or the motor-related portions of the brain (MMI) that involve imitation as a direct response to music—for example, singing along with a melody or dancing to a song are two kinds of mimetic representations of music. A mimetic representation is thus a kind of copy that we make, or that we embody, as part of how we perceive and comprehend something exterior to us. 1.1. Psychological Studies of Imitation: Children and Caregivers Human development is saturated with overt imitation, where “monkey see mon­ key do” describes a significant portion of our social lives as children. I want to suggest, in a manner similar to Walton’s discussion of the practice of makebelieve (Walton 1990), that the overt imitation we practice as children (MMA) Mimetic Comprehension  15

remains a part of how we participate with and understand others in the world, and that rather than outgrowing imitation as adults, a greater proportion of imitation gradually takes the form of MMI. The development of mimetic motor imagery occurs in tandem with the development of nonmimetic motor imagery (imagined actions that are not directly imitative of an observed action), and together the two constitute the more general category of motor imagery: imagination of one’s own actions, including planned, recalled, and otherwise imagined singing and playing instruments. With this in mind, let us examine the nature and breadth of imitation in our early lives, first in general and then in musical contexts. General Imitative Behavior Infant studies confirm what might seem rather unremarkable: as infants, we imitate the vocalizations, facial expressions, and gestures of others around us.5 These studies make plain the pervasive and fundamental role of imitation in how we learn to take part in and make sense of the world from the very start.6 There is one significant feature of infant-caregiver interactions, however, that may not be obvious at first, and it is the mutuality of imitation in these situations: not only do infants imitate parents and other caregivers, but parents and other caregivers likewise imitate infants (Malloch 1999–2000). As Ulric Neisser puts it, “What is perceived is not merely the other’s behavior, but its reciprocity with one’s own. Both participants are engaged in a mutual enterprise, and they are aware of that mutuality” (Neisser 1976, 10). While it might not be surprising that we should imitate others as part of the process of learning to be fully human, we should ask why adult caregivers would imitate an infant. One answer is that, for infants, a caregiver’s imitative behavior demonstrates at least two things: that as infants we are capable of generating a like response in others, and, since a like response demonstrates a basic level of understanding, in observing such a response we implicitly learn that we are capable of being understood. If it is a basic human desire to understand and to be understood, then mutual imitation helps satisfy this desire for both parties. In imitating an infant, a caregiver feels something of what it is like to behave in the particular ways of the infant. In thus answering the implicit question of what it’s like to do and be what this other little person-in-development is doing and being, adults enact mimetic exertions that produce mutual facial expressions, vocalizations, and other movements. These exertions have an affective dimension, in the feeling of what it is like to move in a certain way, and because such feelings normally correlate with emotional and mental states, it contributes to adult inferences as to the emotional and mental states of infants. One especially significant state is that of desire, as indicated by the actions of looking and reaching, and on the basis of which adults infer intentionality on the part of infants (Stern 1985). Mimetic comprehension of the actions of others contributes to such inferences in adult-adult interactions as well.7 For example, I can believe that you understand me when you demonstrate that you share my state—when 16  Theoretical Background

you show that you “feel” me by physically mimicking my facial expression, posture, gestures, and vocalizations (more on this below). In adult interactions with children and with other adults, mutual mimetic comprehension contributes to the affective reward that comes with mutual understanding. Vocal-Musical Mimetic Behavior The special case of imitating the music-making actions others begins in infantcaregiver vocalizations. Parents spontaneously model vocalizations that are especially for infants, with features that include the exaggerated melodic modulations of infant-directed speech (“motherese”), and they actively encourage and reward imitation (Papoušek and Papoušek 1982; H. Papoušek 1996; M. Papoušek 1996). As noted above, parents also imitate the infant’s vocalizations, which not only demonstrates understanding but also models mimetic participation: “Do what I’m doing, which is imitating my interlocutor.” In other words it is not simply that the impulse to imitate is innate, but that we learn that mimetic interactions with others is normal and emotionally rewarding behavior. As infants we begin mimetic and nonmimetic cooing around eight weeks (Meltzoff and Moore 1994), on our way to the more complex and continuous vocalizations of speech and song.8 “Infants usually stimulate an affectionate adult, male or female, to extended poetic or musical speech, which often moves into wordless song, or imitative, rhythmic and repetitive nonsense sounds. This distinctive style of adult speech is . . . attended to and responded to with much pleasure by infants. It varies with the age and stage, and motives and emotions of the infant partner” (Malloch 1999–2000, 30). Malloch goes on to describe how infants and parents attune their mutual vocalizations in timing, contour (between low and high pitch), and timbre, and that these combine with nonvocal bodily movements in creating a shared narrative. This behavior is both educational and aesthetic, and as much as one’s abilities may change from infancy to adulthood, it is difficult to miss the physical and emotional similarities with adult-adult mimetic participation in sing-alongs and other performance situations where we take part via some form of shared embodiment. Dissanayake (2000) makes similar observations in presenting a case for mother-infant interactions as the origin of the temporal arts. Cross-Modal and Amodal Mimetic Behavior One principle of the mimetic hypothesis is that imitation also occurs cross-modally, as demonstrated in numerous videos on YouTube that feature infants and toddlers spontaneously dancing to music: the singing is in one physical modality, the playing is in another, and the dancing is in yet another, and yet somehow they all fit together. One could say that all of them match “the beat,” but it will be helpful to be more specific. In such cross-modal imitation there is a pattern of exertions (rhythm), with a particular intensity (strength), that recurs at some rate (tempo). This composite can be manifest in the specific forms of singing, playing, and/or dancing, and at the core of such cross-modal mimetic participation Mimetic Comprehension  17

is a theoretical exertion schema: a shared pattern that can be manifest in various muscle groups.9 Although culture shapes our responses to music, this is a shaping of what appears to be a spontaneous, innate response. The next example supports this conjecture more directly. Many or most children who move to music have previously observed, or are concurrently observing, others moving to music, and so their dancing could be partly or largely intramodal imitation of dancing. But consider the example shared by Trevarthen (1999–2000) of a video of a mother cradling and singing to her blind infant. The infant is moving her right arm in time with the song in a manner that loosely resembles conducting or simply beating time. At one point the song is interrupted when someone enters the room to speak with the mother, and the infant’s arm movements, too, are likewise interrupted. The infant makes a couple of isolated conducting movements, as if wanting to resume the pattern, and when the mother eventually resumes her song, the infant resumes the matching pattern of arm movements.10 In this example the mother and child are using different muscle groups—those of the voice and those of the arm—but they are sharing the same temporal pattern, rate of recurrence, and intensity: the gentle exertions of the singing and the gentle exertions of the arm movements. In the cross-modal imitation just described, notice that there is an additional form of mimetic exertion shared by both participants: the abdominal exertions that anchor both vocalizations and arm movements, which I will be referring to as an amodal form of mimetic behavior. In one sense abdominal exertions are of course modally specific, in that they involve the specific muscle group of the core, but I am referring to them as amodal because they are activated in most if not all of the limb movements and vocalizations, including those involved in musical performance.11 Abdominal exertions often are not as salient as the limb and vocal exertions that they anchor, and their relevance is thus easily overlooked, but trauma to the abdomen, via injury and/or surgery, will give salience to this crucial muscle group. One can also increase awareness through ad hoc experiments, such as lifting something moderately heavy while either seated or standing, or by trying to raise one’s arms while a friend offers resistance via pushing down on one’s hands. Any lifting of the arms in musical performance, and all singing, involves activation of the abdominal muscles.12 Mimetic comprehension of musical performance thus always involves abdominal exertions to some extent or another, and this contributes to musical experience by way of the correlations between abdominal exertions (tightness and relaxation) and emotional states. Imitation and Music Perception Our ability as infants to detect (perceive) differences in timbre, pitch, contour, and rhythm likely has an innate foundation (Trehub 2003). Although perception of such features involves nonmimetic processes, infants also imitate tim­ bre, contour, and rhythm as early as six weeks of age (Malloch 1999–2000), and 18  Theoretical Background

one of the principles of the mimetic hypothesis is that imitation enhances perception. This proposition is supported by the findings of Phillips-Silver and Trainor (2005, involving children) and Phillips-Silver and Trainor (2007, involving adults), in which comprehension of heard rhythms was enhanced through rhythmic movement training. In plain terms, participants were better at comprehending heard actions (the sound of musical performance) that shared an exertion schema with actions that they had performed previously. These findings are also consistent with the proposition that rhythm perception involves realtime MMI, or mimetic enactment of the rhythms heard, based on previous overt imitation (MMA). There is one notable perceptual ability, however, that must be reconciled with the role of mimetic comprehension: absolute pitch (AP). Its most distinctive features are the abilities to recognize the specific pitch of a note by ear and/or to sing a specific pitch without the aid of an instrument. Traditionally this is implicitly understood to involve nonmimetic processes, but if AP truly is nonmimetic, then this has implications for the overall relevance of the mimetic hypothesis, particularly since many music academics possess this ability. I explore this matter in appendix I. 1.2. Psychological Studies of Imitation: Social Interactions in Adulthood Social interaction among humans and among other animals involves individuals comprehending and responding to the gestures of others. These include limb movements, gaits, postures, facial expressions, and nonlinguistic vocalizations, all of which contribute to “body language” or nonverbal communication. Among humans and some other species, comprehension of these gestures involves both mimetic and nonmimetic processes. In this section I describe how mimetic comprehension plays out in both functional and aesthetic human experiences, including comprehension of musical gestures.13 Because gestures signify something of the state and/or intention of the gesturer, let us refer to them as gestural signs. While comprehension of a gestural sign is sometimes conscious, more often it is either nonconscious or only marginally conscious. For example, the subtle gestural signs, or microexpressions (Ekman 2001), that signify attempted deceit may register explicitly in consciousness and provoke a corresponding response (such as a belief that the speaker is lying), or they may register only implicitly (nonconsciously) and provoke a subtler response (such as a feeling of doubt), or they may not be recognized at all and thus provoke no response (the deceit goes undetected). The issue here concerns the role of MMI in comprehending these and other gestural signs. We can begin by acknowledging that imitation is not directly relevant in comprehending all gestures. For example, imitation is not needed for the comprehension of, and appropriate response to, aggressive gestures that threaten immediate bodily harm, as in the cross-species case of walking past a parked car and being surprised by a dog suddenly barking at me: my startled response is, I want to say, Mimetic Comprehension  19

entirely nonmimetic. Despite the significance of such cases, however, they are exceptional. The majority of gestural cues that we read in other people and animals are more subtle and nonthreatening, and comprehension of these cues regularly involves imitation. Chartrand and Bargh (1999) review the history of studies of social imitation and remind us of how easily, for example, one picks up a regional accent upon moving to a new state or country. In unintentionally adopting an accent, one adopts a way of behaving, via speech gestures, that results in becoming like the other members of the community. This extends even to apparently superfluous gestures in one-on-one interactions, as in the following example. Chartrand and Bargh conducted an experiment in which participants were paired first with one confederate and then another, in a task that involved taking turns describing photographs. (“Confederates” are part of the team of experimenters and pose as participants.) One of the confederates actively performed gestures that were superfluous to the task of describing the photos (including smiling, face rubbing, and foot-shaking), while the other was more neutral, and the experimenters found that participants tended to imitate the superfluous gestures. Although irrelevant to the task, such imitation is not irrelevant to the larger social value of enacting mutuality while participating with others. “Air Guitar” and Other Air Instruments Overt mimetic musical behavior, such as singing along and/or playing along with recordings, is plainly evident in various contexts and for the present purpose does not require the support of clinical evidence. Instead, let us simply consider how it relates to the mimetic hypothesis. Intentional (deliberate), overt imitation is common among musicians, whether in copying a teacher’s demonstration, learning a song by ear, or transcribing a solo. Among nonmusicians, air guitar is a common form of recreational mimetic behavior: pretending to hold and play a guitar in imitation of a performer, whether in real time or recall. As Godøy, Haga, and Jensenius (2006) note, air guitar requires no expertise in actual guitar playing: the imitation does not need to be exact in every detail in order for someone to enjoy the reward of mimetic participation. Air guitar has a counterpart in the video games Rock Band and Guitar Hero. The imitation in these games originally involved button pushing, which facilitated participation by nonguitarists, but Rock Band subsequently developed a real guitar as a controller. One notable feature is that air guitarists tend to vocally imitate the guitar sounds, thereby adding cross-modal imitation to flesh out the experience. In the case of the video games, however, the gamers are not required to make any mimetic sounds since the sounds are produced by the game, and yet commonly they do sing along. This mimetic singing is superfluous as far as the game is concerned, but we can understand it as satisfying the urge to sing along and to thereby more fully participate in the music-making experience. Guitar Hero also has a vocal version in which the player must match the singing in the recording. The aesthetic-competitive rewards of successful imitation are similar but occur within the more straightforward context of intramodal vo20  Theoretical Background

cal imitation. The genre of karaoke is akin to video games but without the pointoriented scoring, and its wide appeal can be understood similarly in connection with the reward of successful mimetic participation in the performance of favorite songs. (Both activities involve a combination of intramodal imitation of recalled singing and real-time cross-modal mimetic participation with the accompaniment.) At another level, according to the hypothesis, audience members in turn mimetically comprehend the amateur performer’s singing and gain a reward that varies according to the quality of the performance and the expectations—for example, an out-of-tune performance can be found to be dreadful or delightful. A related form of mimetic participation is the practice among preteens and teens of mimicking popular singers, including not only the singing but also the gestures, postures, and poses. Soon after YouTube was launched, people took the opportunity to share audiovisual recordings of their lip-synching mimes, sometimes with wildly popular results. Two examples on YouTube are a 2005 video by the “Chinese Backstreet Boys,” Wei Wei and Huang Yixin, based on the song “I Want It That Way,” and Gary Brolsma’s 2006 “Numa Numa” video.14 In a broad sense of the term, these are “covers” of the original songs, but we should ask why anyone would want to watch a lip-synched version of the original recording. One answer is that some viewers might find them humorous (more on this below), but in fact some viewers find the mimes’ version more compelling, in a nonironic way, than the originals. One plausible reason for this is that the mimes are enacting what some people either enjoy enacting themselves (mimicking professionals) or might like to enact but do not feel comfortable doing themselves. In this situation we have first-order overt imitation (MMA) enacted by the mimes, and second-order covert imitation (MMI) enacted by viewers of the mimes’ videos. In some cases, the second-order imitation enacted by viewers transforms into overt and deliberate imitation in the form of tribute videos, created by fans of the mime’s videos and uploaded to YouTube. At the same time, some other viewers derive pleasure in laughing at the lipsynching performers. Although this might seem to be a nonmimetic response, more likely it involves a combination of mimetic participation and aesthetic distance. If I give my attention to a music video, my comprehension will involve MMI, as part of my implicitly asking what it would be like to do what the performers are doing. At another level, I evaluate the embodied experience of what it would be like, which then results in either derision or admiration or indifference. Accordingly, the evaluation is based not merely on what I have seen and heard but on what I have imagined doing. In the concluding chapter I suggest that aesthetic evaluation of music in general is based in part on mimetic parti­cipation. Old Man River and the Mimetic Imperative More private forms of mimetic singing, whether covert (subvocalizing) or overt (singing aloud), also offer rewards of self-expression and mimetic participation, and the urge to overtly join in with a live public performance can sometimes Mimetic Comprehension  21

overpower normal social constraints. I was once at a recital by the bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, who sang “Old Man River” as one of his encores. As he was singing I thought I heard a kind of echo, and then I realized that an elderly gentleman two rows in front of me was singing along. His wife shushed him, but after a few bars he joined in again. It may be that this was one of his favorite tunes, and/or he may have taken the popular nature of the song as granting some license to join in, but it seems clear to me now that he was forced to choose between two incompatible social behaviors: to sit quietly like everyone else, or to give in to the mimetic urge. In this case the mimetic urge became for him an imperative. In my own experience at concerts and recitals, classical and otherwise, I regularly find myself singing along in my head and wanting to move with the music in some way or another, as I imagine many other listeners do. In subsequent chapters I describe how such mimetic engagement contributes not only to the immediate experience but also to our conceptualizations of musical experience generally. Sentics: The Work of Manfred Clynes Manfred Clynes (1977) measured overt physiological features of emotional states in connection with his theory of sentics. In a number of experiments, participants were asked to express one of several emotions (anger, joy, and so forth) while the middle finger of their dominant hand was attached to a device that measures changes in finger pressure. Changes in breathing and heart rate were also measured, as was direction of the finger pressing either away from or toward the body. One of these experiments concerned responses to music, in which participants were asked to recall one of various classical musical works. Clynes compares the finger movements to conducting, and he describes the pattern of movement as an expression of the music’s “inner pulse.” From the perspective of the mimetic hypothesis these are overt, deliberate mimetic responses that are congruent not only with the rate of exertions in the imagined performance (the finger, arm, and torso movements that would produce the imagined sounds), but also with other features of movement that are commonly indicated in performance instructions for this music: strength of effort (piano versus forte), speed and strength of onset (legato versus marcato), and pattern of exertion (crescendo versus diminuendo, sostenuto versus staccato, etc.). Given the classical repertoire, for some participants these finger movements may well have been influenced by images of conductors. However, conductors’ exertions are nevertheless congruent with the sound-producing exertions of the performers and vice versa, so that imitation of them can be understood as indirect imitation of the performers. In effect the conductor says not only “Play at this tempo,” but also “Play in a way that matches the manner of my exertions.” A conductor’s movements are an invitation to the audience (welcome or not) to feel the music in the way that the conductor is demonstrating.15 As with other cross-modal mimetic responses, most of the finger movements measured by Clynes are not direct imitations of the particular exertions of the performers, but instead are cross-modal imitations of the pattern, rate, and intensity of the exertions.16 22  Theoretical Background

2. Neurological Studies of MMI and MMA in General Evidence in this section comes primarily from measurements of the motor-related brain activity that occurs when participants observe the actions of others. Motor-related portions of the brain are those portions related to muscle action and movement (the musculoskeletal system). Activation of these portions of the brain while observing the actions of others suggests that part of how we comprehend observed actions is by imagining performing those actions. This imagining need not be deliberate or conscious. It is imagery, more specifically motor imagery, and because it underlies potential actions that would mimic the observed actions, it is mimetic motor imagery (MMI). The techniques for measuring brain activity in the studies cited here include fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and PET (positron emission tomography). Mirror Neurons Since overt mimetic behavior is a normal part of human behavior, there must be corresponding processes in the brain. The subsystem in which MMI occurs is sometimes referred to as the mirror system, since it involves mirroring observed behavior. MMI is also closely related to various versions of simulation theory (for example, Gallese and Goldman 1998, Gallese 2005; see Decety and Grèzes 2006 for a review), the most relevant feature of which is the relation between perception and action, with the principle that perception of the behavior of others activates simulation of the observed behavior in one’s own motor imagery. Among the relevant findings are those involving mirror neurons. As is now widely understood, these are neurons that fire both when an action is observed and when the same or closely analogous action is executed. The behavior of this category of neurons is more complex than is often acknowledged outside of neuroscience, including the classification of different types of mirror neurons according to function.17 When it comes to understanding their role in specific musical contexts the complexities only multiply, and here I would like to identify what I believe are some of the challenges. Consider the case of listening to, for example, a flute performance. We should ask whether the mirroring neurons are devoted to the fingers, the arms, the embouchure, the tongue, and/or the abdomen; or whether there are generic mirror neurons that are activated by any exertion regardless of the specific physical modality; or whether there might be groups, such as those involving the fingers and arms, or the lips and the tongue. We would also want to account for the significant variation in both the physical modality and the strength of mimetic responses among different listeners—for example, among flute players, among all other musicians, and among music lovers who do not perform on a regular basis. We should also investigate possible cross-modal mirroring, such as mimetic representations of instrumental music in voice-related areas of the brain. And we should distinguish between representations of pitch and representations of rhythm, timbre, and attack (tone onset) and intensity (strength). I believe that such specifications may be possible, but as yet these details remain unexplored. Mimetic Comprehension  23

MMI and Visual Perception The majority of studies on the relation between perception and action focus on visual perception and not auditory perception. However, because much or most music is performed by the visible or visualizable exertions of human performers, these sources are relevant to the mimetic hypothesis. In a paper focusing on involuntary simulation, Decety and Grèzes (2006) cite one study (Calvo-Merino et al. 2005) in which fMRI scans of expert dancers showed stronger activation of premotor cortex (a part of the brain involved in action planning) when watching other dancers, than in the brains of novices watching the same dancers.18 One way to understand this is that this activation was stronger in expert dancers because of the greater congruency between the observed actions and their own experience. This process of understanding via simulation should apply beyond dance to expertise in other artistic, athletic, and everyday actions. For example, imagery activated in a two-year-old in watching someone tie a shoe or stir a cup of cocoa should be weaker, due to the lack of congruent experience, compared to that of a five-year-old or a twenty-five-yearold. In support of this conjecture, see Iacoboni et al. (2005) for evidence of MMI in adults when observing another person grasping a mug. With music, the same should apply with regard to differences of expertise in playing various instruments and in singing (principle 16). Goal-Oriented Imitation of Actions and Sounds Grèzes, Costes, and Decety (1998) had participants observe two kinds of handarm actions under two conditions. The kinds of actions were defined as meaningful (goal-directed actions upon objects, such as opening a bottle or sewing a button) and meaningless (similar gestures without objects), and the conditions were (1) simple observation and (2) observation with the goal of subsequently imitating the observed actions. Notably, the experimenters found activation of motor-related brain areas under the first condition, when the participants were simply observing both kinds of actions.19 Such activation is a representation of the observed action in motor imagery and is, therefore, a form of MMI. The pertinent implication is that simply attending to goal-directed actions can activate MMI. Perhaps not surprisingly, the same experimenters also found activation in motor-related brain areas under the second condition; this would reflect motor planning in connection with the goal of subsequently imitating what was observed, analogous to a music student observing a teacher’s demonstration. In such a context there are then two kinds of goals: the goal-directed actions of the performer, and the observer’s goal of creating a motor representation of the observed action and subsequently imitating it. Along these lines, Wohlschläger, Gattis, and Bekkering (2003) describe a fundamental feature of imitation, which is that we tend to focus more on the goal of the action (in music, the sounds produced) than on the specific movements in24  Theoretical Background

volved (principle 8). They also describe a hierarchy of goal movements, or a nesting of concatenated actions, which in music would correspond to the production of individual pitches and rhythms combining to make a phrase, and the combinations of phrases that make larger structures. In listening to music one can focus on the sounds produced and/or on the actions that produce them, but in the aesthetic context of attending a concert or watching an audio-visual recording, part of the pleasure is in observing the combination of, or the relationship between, artistic actions and artistic sounds. Broadly speaking, greater attention to the specific actions fosters intra-modal MMI, and greater attention to the sounds produced—the pitches, rhythms, timbres and so forth—fosters cross-modal MMI. Layered on top of the goal-oriented actions of performers is the sense of motion toward “musical goals,” such as the cadences and climaxes of tonal music. In such moments we can expect to find that mimetic engagement is particularly strong. 3.1. MMI and Auditory Perception: Speech In this section I begin with perception of nonvocal sounds, and then consider speech perception on the premise that speaking and singing share fundamental processes with respect to production and perception, so that studies of speech perception should have some relevance for song perception. Since human speech and song are the sounds and sights of humans performing very specific motor actions, this physicality is perceived along with the auditory and visual information. Speech perception involves both nonmimetic and mimetic processes, but I will focus primarily on the mimetic. The evidence in each case comes from both psychological and neurological studies.20 MMI in Auditory Imagery for Nonvocal Sounds Underlying all mimetic comprehension is the correlation between sounds and the actions or events that produce them. When we hear incidental human-made sounds, such as door-closing or footsteps, we infer the corresponding actions without needing to see them performed. Although MMI is likely minimal in such cases, consider the findings of Gazzola, Aziz-Zadeh, and Keysers (2006), who report fMRI experiments showing activation of motor areas in human brains both when performing hand actions and when only hearing such actions.21 The actions in question involved reaching for and grasping a peanut or a piece of paper, breaking or ripping the object, and replacing the object. The activation of these populations of neurons represents an equivalence between goal-oriented heard and performed hand actions. This implies that my comprehension of such sounds involves simulation of the actions (in MMI) that I infer are likely to have created the sound. In musical contexts this would include the goal-oriented (soundproducing) hand actions of musical performers: the sound of the piano, for example, is the sound of actions performed on a piano, the sound of hand drums Mimetic Comprehension  25

is the sound of drumming actions, and so forth. One of the implications, then, is that whenever we give our attention to such musical sounds, normally we do not simply hear the sounds, but we also feel something of what it would be like to perform the sound-producing actions. (That is, we mimetically represent the soundproducing hand actions, to some degree of fidelity, and such representations have an affective dimension, in what it feels like to perform such actions.) MMI and Speech Perception The central proposition here is that part of how we comprehend heard speech is by covertly and nonconsciously imitating the speaker. With this in mind, the first and most relevant thing to note about speech is that it is the sound of very specific muscle movements. As Ulrich Neisser describes it, to speak is to make finely controlled movements in certain parts of your body, with the result that information about these movements is broadcast to the environment. For this reason the movements of speech are sometimes called articulatory gestures. A person who perceives speech, then, is picking up information about a certain class of real, physical, tangible . . . events (1976, 156).22

The pertinent question then is how these events are perceived and comprehended, and I am suggesting that the process involves MMI. To help see how this might be, try to imagine how one learns to speak one’s first language (or languages). Whatever else may be involved, normally this includes learning to imitate the vocal sounds of those around us. This imitation is simultaneously of the sounds and of the muscle movements that produce the sounds. For the visible portion of the relevant muscle movements the imitation is by eye, and for the invisible portion (the sounds) the imitation is by ear. With practice each of us eventually acquires our own repertoire of words and phrases, and imitation in the comprehension of heard speech seems gradually to disappear, much as it does in learning a new language as an adult: at first one feels the effort of trying to mimetically represent and reproduce the sounds heard, and this effort and attention gradually fade as one acquires fluency. The pertinent result is that the sense that one is imitating gradually disappears as one acquires fluency in a language. However, the studies of speech perception discussed below indicate that speech-related imitation only seems to disappear, and we can identify two reasons for why it fades from awareness. One reason involves the acquisition of fluency, as just discussed. Another rea­ son is that normally one’s focus is on the words spoken and the things to which they refer—the goals of the speech actions. Poetry can bring this physicality closer to the surface, and Vladimir Nabokov draws explicit attention to this physicality in his alliterative description of the name of one of his title characters: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.23

26  Theoretical Background

The available meaning of “Lolita” here is not confined to its reference to the character Lolita but also includes the feeling of speaking this name. To put it another way, although it may be possible to read this paragraph while paying little attention to the sensuality that Nabokov highlights, such a reading would be impoverished relative to a reading that included the salient feeling of making these tongue articulations. Nabokov explicitly invites us to understand the narrator’s (Humbert’s) predatory obsession via mimetic comprehension of Humbert’s demonstration of this lingual sensuality. Among the clinical evidence is a study by Wilson et al. (2004) who found that speech perception involves activation of motor areas that serve speech production. Fadiga et al. (2002) found that listening to both spoken words and spoken nonwords produced excitation of tongue muscles, with the actual words (the more linguistically meaningful sounds) producing the strongest response. They note that participants were not given the explicit goal of imitating the words and nonwords afterward, which means that this mimetic motor response was automatic. Nishitani and Hari (2002) found activation in motor areas not only when observing lip movements but even in observing still photos of lips. In a similar study, Watkins, Strafella, and Paus (2003) tested for lip-muscle activation under four conditions: (1) speech only (listening to continuous spoken prose while viewing visual noise); (2) nonverbal sounds only (listening to nonverbal sounds, such as glass breaking, bells ringing, and gunfire while viewing visual noise); (3) vision only: lips (viewing speech-related lip movements while listening to white noise); and (4) vision only: eyes (viewing eye and brow movements while listening to white noise). As predicted, conditions 1 and 3 (listening to speech, and viewing lips) produced the strongest responses.24 Condition 4 (viewing eyes) produced no significant response, but condition 2 (listening to nonverbal sounds) produced an unexpectedly significant effect, for which the authors offer a possible explanation in terms of the imitability of these sounds. Most pertinent here, however, is the activation of lip muscles in listening to speech without seeing the speaker (condition 1) and the significance of goal-oriented actions. Watkins et al. note that the finding of lip muscle activation is not consistent with that of Sundara, Namasivayam, and Chen (2001), who used a similar measuring technique; however, Fadiga, Craighero, and Oliver (2005) note that Sundara et al. measured activation of facial muscles that are not directly involved in speech production. If participants were particularly interested in such actions, which are superfluous to speech comprehension, we might find activation of mimetic responses in the corresponding muscles of the participant-observers; but in listening to speech, one’s attention is on the sounds and one’s nonconscious attention is on the relevant actions, including those of the lips, in which Watkins et al. in fact found mimetic activity. Watkins et al. also point out that Sundara et al. used isolated syllables (such as “ba” and “ta”) as their stimuli as opposed to continuous spoken prose. With this in mind, we should consider further the significance of goal-oriented actions as methods of testing for mimetic comprehension of speech and music. Mimetic Comprehension  27

Isolated syllables are not a statistically common part of everyday experience, where syllables normally occur within whole words in more or less continuous prose. Although isolated syllables are of course imitable, without context there is little or no communicative goal and correspondingly little motivation to mimetically represent the sounds. (If in doubting this claim one were to respond with “Bah,” this vocal reaction would be in a communicative context, as a dismissive response to a proposed idea, and would be performed with a prosody that is not commonly found in the uninflected stimuli used in speech perception studies). The situation with musical studies should be similar: we can expect to find MMI activated only minimally in response to isolated abstract sounds, such as a single interval presented with no musical context, whether in a laboratory or a classroom. The farther a stimulus is removed from normal contexts, the weaker the mimetic response is likely to be, whether in speech, music, or otherwise. 3.2. MMI and Auditory Perception: Vocal and Instrumental Music Only a relatively small proportion of the many brain imaging studies involving music focuses on matters related to mimetic motor imagery.25 Leman (2008) has applied some of the same evidence under consideration here in making related arguments from similar premises, particularly in his fourth and fifth chapters. Godøy’s 2003 essay, “Motor-Mimetic Music Cognition,” takes a closely related approach, and Molnar-Szakacs and Overy (2006) offer a sketch of how a mirror system might play a role in creating emotional responses to music. More broadly, Zatorre, Chen, and Penhune (2007) summarize findings related to auditory-motor interactions in music perception and production, including some consideration of apparently mimetic processes. Imagery for Speech and Song: Mimetic Subvocalization The auditory system proper and its corresponding portions of the brain are anatomically distinct from the musculoskeletal system, its corresponding portions of the brain, and mimetic processes. However, since auditory imagery includes representations of sounds that we have performed or might perform, it is related to motor imagery. A subset of such imagery includes planned, recalled, or otherwise imagined speech actions, or subvocalization, which is covert vocalization that includes the sound and feel of covert speech (as in silently practicing what one might say aloud), and the sound and feel of one’s covert voice when reading. Subvocalization thus integrates auditory imagery and motor imagery, or imagined voice-related sounds and actions. A special form of subvocalization is mimetic subvocalization, which includes covert imitation of someone else’s spoken words and/or singing. Mimetic subvocalization is thus also a form of MMI, and the mimetic hypothesis holds that it extends from imitation of vocal sounds to imitation of musical sounds in general. The importance of music-related subvocalization has been discussed philosophically by, among others, Spencer (1951 [1857]), Barthes (1977), Lidov (1987), 28  Theoretical Background

and Cumming (1997, 2000), and yet it remains largely peripheral to our general understanding of how music works. The significance of mimetic subvocalization derives from the significance of overt and covert vocalization, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. For most of us the voice is our first and daily means of communication via sound; it is normally integral to how we express ourselves and how we comprehend the vocal expressions of others. Unlike manufactured musical instruments, the voice is completely embodied within the flesh; we do not need to pick it up or move to its location before we can use it to make sounds. The voice is also capable of mimetically representing most if not all sounds to a greater degree of fidelity than most instruments, and it does not require special training; it gives us a way of mimetically comprehending music without having any direct experience playing the various musical instruments or singing like Maria Callas. In some contexts subvocalization is taken to include low-level activation of the voice-related muscles (in the abdomen, throat, and/or mouth), and such activation would constitute a liminal form between MMI and MMA. Mimetic Subvocalization subsumes all forms of covert, liminal, and overt mimetic representations. Evidence of Voice-Related Mimetic Subvocalization Zattore et al. (1996) investigated auditory imagery for song, using “Jingle Bells,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “Joy to the World” as stimuli, and they found, perhaps not surprisingly, that perceiving a melody and imagining a melody involve overlapping neural systems. More notably, they also found activation of the supplementary motor area (SMA) in both tasks. Since the perceptual task and the imagery task both involved comparing the relative pitch height of two words in the lyrics, the authors note the implication that the participants were likely subvocalizing the composite of melody+lyrics. In the perceiving task this would be mimetic subvocalization in real time. In the imagining task this would involve recall and/or possibly planning (which is not necessarily mimetic). In a theory of melodic recall that focused solely on hearing, activation of the SMA would be superfluous. By contrast, it would be consistent with a theory that understood recall as a combination of rehearing and reenacting—in this case, resinging (and/or possibly replaying). Such reenactment would be mimetic, insofar as songs such as “Jingle Bells” are normally learned via imitation, so that such reenactment involves reenacting the original stage of learning via mimetic participation. I return to this issue in the discussion of principle 9 in the next chapter.26 Consistent with the study above, Hickok et al. (2003) had participants listen to nonsense speech and music, followed by voluntary covert rehearsal, and found activation of shared auditory and motor brain areas in both perception and rehearsal.27 In a related fMRI study with similar procedures (passive perception of lyrics spoken and sung, and voluntary covert rehearsal of both while visually presented), Callan et al. (2006) found activation in the same and additional areas, and they interpret their data as being consistent with that of Hickok et al.28 Mimetic Comprehension  29

Callan et al. focused specifically on the shared and unshared features of speech and music, as represented in the same lyrics being spoken and sung, and they describe their results as pointing toward a motor theory of music perception. In particular, they note that perception and imagery for spoken and sung lyrics involved activation of a brain area known to represent the lips and tongue, and which has been shown to correlate with improved pitch memory (Gaab et al. 2003).29 In order to exclude the potential influence of specifically linguistic processes, Halpern and Zatorre (1999) studied auditory imagery for familiar melodies without lyrics. The examples included two six-second portions of classical music (Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony) and themes from film, TV, and elsewhere; familiarity with the music was confirmed by a pilot study. There were three conditions involving intentional imagery for three kinds of stimuli: (1) listening to the beginning of a familiar melody and then imagining the continuation, (2) a control task of listening to a novel and unfamiliar melody, and (3) listening to and then reimagining the novel melody. For the familiar melodies, one might expect that imagery for the continuations should have been a matter of nonmotor retrieval; however, PET scans indicated activation of SMA in imagery for the continuation of familiar melodies as well as in reimagining novel melodies. They note that SMA activation likely reflects motor planning associated with subvocal singing or humming, and they conclude by speculating that “the SMA is specifically involved in a motor process relevant for auditory image generation, irrespective of the familiarity of the imagined stimulus” (704). For some, evidence such as the foregoing only specifies some of the details of what is already plainly evident: perception and recall involve mimetic subvocalization. For others, this kind of evidence points to the often hidden nature of the performative component of perception and recall. This hidden nature can foster a belief that music perception and recall do not involve mimetic motor processes, but clinical studies suggest otherwise. Mimetic Subvocalization and Instrumental Timbres Mimetic subvocalization for song is a relatively straightforward case of intramodal MMI, but the next issue is whether subvocalization occurs cross-modally, in imagery for instrumental music. If it does, then to the extent that it does it makes vocal experience relevant to our comprehension of music generally. The significance of such relevance will become clearer in subsequent chapters. For now, let me first theorize and then consider some evidence. Recall Brahms’s First Symphony and the Beethovenian first theme of the finale; or recall some other folk-like instrumental melody such as the Largo of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. While recalling the Brahms, some string players understandably report MMI related to string playing, while other string players also report a measure of subvocalization, in line with reports of most nonstring players. (These reports are in nonclinical surveys.) If some form of 30  Theoretical Background

subvocalization in recalling such instrumental music is common, we should ask why this would be: Why would recall of an instrumental melody not simply involve rehearing that melody as played by violins or the English horn? The evidence in the previous section might seem to offer an answer, but remember that those studies involved songs and, thus, intramodal mimetic subvocalization. In considering that some people’s recall of the Brahms involves cross-modal subvocalization, some might object that the Brahms example is biased in that it involves a particularly singable melody. This is true; this and similar melodies afford easy vocal and subvocal imitation, and so we should ask whether and to what extent subvocalization is activated in hearing and recalling less easily singable instrumental music, including music that some might not think of as being singable at all. Recall that learning to speak involves two layers of imitation: (1) imitation of the sounds produced (product, or end), and (2) imitation of the relevant muscle movements (process, or means). In speech and song these remain coupled, but with instrumental music these become uncoupled, in that we can recreate the same pitches and rhythms in the voice without needing to imitate the muscle movements of particular instrumental performance. This leads to the question of whether and to what extent we can represent instrumental timbres without MMI: Is it possible to hear or imagine the sound of, say, a bassoon without subvocally imitating the timbre of that sound? Some authors (e.g., Crowder 1989) have proposed that nonmotor representations are not only possible but are the norm, but let us consider some of the complications to this view.30 Every sound with a unique name has a unique timbre; the bassoon, oboe, piccolo, piano, and so forth are all distinguishable by their particular timbres. In testing for representations of timbre in imagery one immediately encounters the challenge that most musical instruments, in the way they are most often played, do not produce a timbre without simultaneously producing a more or less definite pitch, and this makes it difficult to separate timbre imagery from pitch imagery. One study that confronts this is Halpern et al. (2004), who used fMRI to test for timbre imagery. Participants made similarity judgments involving various common musical instruments (flute, trumpet, etc.) in a perceptual task (hearing) and in an imagery task (imagining). In the perceptual task, participants heard a single note played by one instrument for 1.5 seconds, followed by 2 seconds of silence, and then 1.5 seconds of a different instrument. They then judged the similarity of the timbres on a scale of one to five. The imagery task followed the same pattern, except that participants were only shown the names of the instruments, without hearing them, and were asked to imagine the sounds of the instruments. One premise of the study was that timbre imagery likely does not involve subvocalization (based in part on Crowder 1989), and since the task was a matter of comparing the timbre of heard and imagined sounds, the authors predicted no activation of SMA, since this would seem to indicate subvocalization (or perhaps some other form of motor imagery). They found, however, that SMA was in fact activated, and they offer two possible explanations. One is that, “although subvoMimetic Comprehension  31

calizing the timbre of an instrument is difficult, the timbre was accompanied by pitch, which itself is easily vocalizable” (1291), implying that the intentional comparison of timbres was accompanied by unintentional subvocalization of each note’s pitch. The other possible explanation that they offer is that SMA activation might involve some other nonsubvocal motor-related activity. Although they do not offer additional thoughts on this, it is plausible that this nonvocal motor imagery would be related to the mechanics of playing these instruments. As it happens, in following a model from an earlier study, seven of the eight examples used were wind instruments and the one exception was violin. Since preparation for the test ensured familiarity with the correlations of timbre, instrument name, and, likely, the appearance of the instruments themselves and human performance upon them (participants had at least five years of formal musical training, and the instruments were common orchestral instruments), each example also included implicit information about the finger, arm, and torso exertions as well as the lip, tongue, and chest exertions. Both of the suggested explanations here imply MMI: in the first, mimetic subvocalization of pitch; in the second, mimetic representation of the other relevant exertions. I suspect that both forms of MMI occurred, but I also suspect that the subvocalization was not only for pitch but also for timbre. I base this conjecture on the observation that, despite the limitations of the human voice, we do intentionally and overtly imitate timbres, to some degree of fidelity, as children and as adults. The fact that the fidelity of our imitations is in most cases rough or very rough— I cannot really make the sound of a bassoon or an electric guitar with my voice— is, in an important sense, irrelevant. What matters is the attempt to emulate the sounds, to feel something of what it would be like to make such sounds, and to thereby feel something of what it would be like to be an entity capable of making such sounds. When air guitarists sing, they recreate not simply the pitches but also something of the timbre, and when conductors demonstrate by singing, they commonly model the timbre that they are asking for. The continuum of vocal imitability, from vocal music to instrumental music, electronic music, and environmental sounds then becomes one of the factors that shapes the experience of different kinds of music. Instrument-Specific MMI Let us now focus on the more straightforward matter of intramodal (nonsub­vocal) imitation of the bowings, blowings, fingerings, and beatings specific to individual instruments and instrument families; I consider electronic sounds in chapters 2, 8, 9, and 10. According to Haueisen and Knösche (2001), pianists reported involuntary finger movements when listening to well-performed piano music, which is conscious, unintentional, and intramodal MMA. We should not expect that the same would necessarily hold for nonpianists because of the difference in expertise (as in the dance study by Calvo-Merino et al. 2005), and this difference was borne out in the study. Haueisen and Knösche also studied neural activity in pianists and nonpianists while listening to piano music, and indeed 32  Theoretical Background

found greater neural activity (in contralateral primary motor cortex) in pianists than in nonpianists. In a psychological study, Repp and Knoblich (2009) report related findings. Both sets of findings are consistent with the premise that experience strengthens MMI and MMA according to specific physical modalities. In another study, Repp and Knoblich (2004) tested the more specific case of pianists comparing recordings of their own performances to recordings of the same works performed by other pianists, and found that pianists were better at recognizing their own performances. Based on this, the authors hypothesize that an observer’s motor system is most strongly activated when perceiving one’s own actions. The strength of modally specific MMI for pianists, then, in general should be greatest in listening to their own performances, somewhat lesser in listening to those of other pianists, and then still lesser in listening to performances on other instruments. A similar continuum likely applies to each instrument and vocal type (soprano, alto, etc.), as the next two studies indicate. Drost, Rieger, and Prinz (2007) had pianists and guitarists silently play a series of isolated major or minor chords while they simultaneously heard either a major or a minor chord that was either congruent (minor/minor, major/major) or incongruent with the chord they were about to play.31 The chords that participants heard were presented as recordings in five timbres: piano, organ, guitar, flute, and voice. For pianists, significant interference effects occurred, but only in hearing the piano and organ chords (keyboard instruments) and not the others. Analogously for guitarists, significant interference effects occurred only with the guitar chords. The interference effect in both groups was manifest in the greater time it took to play the indicated chord. While it is likely that a portion of the interference involves nonmotor processes, the authors describe the heard chord’s distracting effect as a “potential action effect,” which can be also explained mimetically: the heard chord “invites” a mimetic performance, and when this conflicts with the chord to be actually played, negotiation of the conflict results in a delay. The fact that significant delays occurred only when the heard chords were in the timbre of the participants’ instrument of expertise suggests, but does not necessarily indicate, that MMI was involved; however, given the other studies cited in this chapter, a mimetic approach offers a relatively straightforward explanation for at least part of the interference effect. In a related fMRI study, involving expert violinists and flutists listening to musical works performed either on their instrument or on a different instrument (J. S. Bach partitas for solo violin and for solo flute), Margulis et al. (2009) found neurological activity consistent with the studies cited above: motor imagery was plainly activated when participants listened to music played on their own instrument, but only minimally activated when listening to the other instrument. We know from Münte, Altenmüller, and Jäncke (2002) that musical training shapes neurophysiology; however, that study compared musicians and nonmusicians. Margulis et al. were interested in whether the same thing might apply to specific kinds of musical training, such as flute playing versus violin playing. As they reason, Mimetic Comprehension  33

If acoustic differences between the two sets of stimuli had been the primary relevant factor, results would have shown selective responses to violin and flute music, regardless of instrument of expertise. Instead, results show selective responses to music played on the instrument of expertise (violin for violinists and flute for flutists). . . . (271)

As they reason further, this selectivity of response (in syntax-related BA44, timbre-related auditory association cortex, motor-related precentral gyrus, and posture-related globus pallidus) indicates that structural and syntactic features alone cannot account for all of the neurological responses. The finding of activity in motor-related areas is particularly notable since the task involved passive listening—passive in that participants were not asked to perform any motor tasks or to generate any motor imagery, but were instead told only that they would be asked questions about the performance afterward. Rhythm and MMI Mimetic rhythmic engagement is perhaps the most obvious form of mimetic behavior, as in the common overt behaviors of toe-tapping, swaying, and dancing to music. A great deal of music—past and present, in the West and globally—invites such mimetic behaviors in offering listeners a regular beat, and these forms of overt mimetic participation hardly require clinical evidence. However, since it is common and perhaps sometimes even preferable to enjoy such music without engaging in overt mimetic behavior, we should ask whether it is possible to listen to such music without activation of MMI (covert mimetic participation). We should also ask a different question that brings us to the same issue: Is it possible to comprehend rhythm and meter in the absence of MMI? If the answer seems obvious, bear in mind that for some scholars the obvious answer is “yes” and for others it is “no.” In the first of two fMRI experiments, Chen, Penhune, and Zatorre (2008) had participants listen to six-second examples played on a woodblock, with the instruction that afterward they would be asked to tap along with the same rhythms. During the initial passive but anticipatory listening phase, motor-related brain areas were activated, which is not surprising: this involves deliberately generating a mimetic motor plan.32 The second experiment, however, is more telling. A separate group of volunteers listened to the same examples but were not told that they would be asked to tap along with a second run of the examples. Nevertheless, the same motor areas were activated in this condition as well (with less robust cerebellar activity corresponding to the different condition of not explicitly planning to imitate). This is MMI because it is a motor representation that mimics the pattern of the stimulus. Still more notably, this response occurred even though the stimuli were only minimally musical in any normative sense: six seconds of irregular (nonrepeating) patterns played without inflection on a wood block. With actual music, and with some kinds of music more so than others, we should expect to find even stronger activation of MMI.

34  Theoretical Background

Concluding Remarks There is a great deal of additional supporting evidence that I have not considered, but I hope that the foregoing survey makes it plain enough that various forms of mimetic motor imagery (MMI) and mimetic motor action (MMA) appear to be integral to music perception, comprehension, and recall. I also hope that it is plain that mimetic comprehension of music appears to be a special case of mimetic comprehension generally; that it would be strange if we generally comprehended the actions of others via imitation and yet did not do so in the case of musical actions. Finally, I hope that the suggestion is clear that much or most of mimetic comprehension occurs without our awareness, some of which is available to awareness but is ignored, and some of which is unavailable to awareness. The next task is to specify more precisely how these mimetic processes actually play out in music.

Mimetic Comprehension  35

2 Mimetic Comprehension of Music For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

The twenty principles of the mimetic hypothesis that I describe in this chapter are meant to specify the nature of mimetic comprehension of music.1 The role of mimetic comprehension in music conceptualization (chaps. 4–6) and in the creation of musical affect (chaps. 8 and 9) reflects the details and variables considered here. Although the extent of variability means that mimetic processes do not provide a uniform basis for conceptualization and affective responses, this variability appears to be integral to the nature of musical experience, conceptualization, and meaning.

Preliminary: Sounds and Their Sources 1. Sounds are produced by physical events; sounds indicate the physicality of their sources. • The physicality of the source is always relevant, but knowledge of this physicality can be specialized or otherwise unavailable Before I can talk about mimetic comprehension of sounds, I must first establish some fundamentals about sounds and our relationship with them. Sounds are disturbances in some medium, such as earth, air, or water, that propagate as pressure waves through the medium. For humans, the majority of musical sound waves are pressure waves that propagate through air. Most of the sources of sounds in a person’s environment eventually become familiar, such as birds singing, car horns honking, and water running. With familiar sounds, we automatically infer the source of the sound, including the

likely actor, action, and context. For example, when I hear a typical door-knock, I automatically know (infer) that there is a person there, knocking on the door in a particular manner—casually, urgently, timidly, or otherwise. I can be wrong in my inference (it might be a raven at the window), but if I am correct often enough, I come to trust my inferences—that is, I might well wonder who is at the door, but I am less likely to ask “What was that?” upon hearing a typical knock at the door. This implicit knowledge applies to all familiar sounds, including knowledge that the sound of a drum, for example, is normally the sound of someone beating on a drum (with hands or sticks). Although my explicit focus might be only on the product—the rhythm of the drumming and/or the timbre of the drum sound—my implicit knowledge of the actions of the drummer (the means) will shape my experience of the sounds both mimetically and nonmimetically. If the sound of the drum has instead been electronically synthesized, then I would be wrong—but I might never know, and my mistaken understanding would nevertheless contribute to my experience and understanding, or misunderstanding, of the music. Inaccuracies in mimetic comprehension can also involve a simple lack of specialized knowledge, as in the fine details of the relevant exertions that distinguish one manner of playing or singing from another. Superficially there is no secret to how the conga drum sound is made, but the subtle details of expert performance can be missed by nonexperts. 2. Many or most musical sounds are evidence of the human motor actions that produce them. This is a more specific version of principle 1. Many or most musical sounds are produced either directly by human actions or indirectly via some form of mediation such as the violin bow, the mechanics of the organ, or the electromechanics of various electronic instruments. We can think of this correlation along a continuum, beginning with (1) the human voice, hand drums, and guitar, where the hand and mouth actions are most immediately responsible for the sound production, followed by: (2) stick drums (timpani, steel drums), string instruments (mediated by the bow), winds (mediated by keys), and piano (mediated by the action of hammers); (3) electronic sounds created in real time via hand controllers, in which the performer’s choreography is similar to that of acoustic instruments; (4) electronic and electronically manipulated sounds created in real time via an interface in a fixed location (operating dials, sliders, and/or QWERTY keys); (5) playback of recorded electronic music (musique concrète, elektronische Musik, and computer music); and, if we will extend the definition this far, (6) musical sounds comprised of incidental human sounds (e.g., John Cage’s “4'33''”) and (7) music not made by humans at all (e.g., birdsong or factory sounds heard as music). The boundaries between the categories in this continuum are not as important as the principle that human exertions are sometimes more and sometimes less immediately responsible for producing musical sounds. This continuum is one of several that shape the imitability of sounds for mimetically engaged listeners. Mimetic Comprehension of Music  37

The special case of musical silences could be taken to signify an absence of sound-producing actions, but near the least mediated end of the continuum they often signify an act of “creating” a silence by holding a pose and interrupting or concluding an established flow of sound-producing actions. Silences, too, can thus be evidence of the human actions that produce them.

Mimetic Behavior in General 3. Humans understand other entities (animate or not, human or not) and events in their environment in part via mimetic behavior (MMA and MMI). Mimetic motor action (MMA) includes any action performed in imitation of another person, animal, or inanimate entity or event (as in the imitation of thunder in the lattermost case). These actions include limb movements, vocalizations, facial expressions, and poses. Mimetic motor imagery (MMI) includes brain activity related to such imitative actions, whether or not the actions are actually performed. In effect, MMA corresponds to “monkey see, monkey do,” while MMI corresponds to “monkey see, monkey imagine-do.” Practical and Aesthetic Interests When we take an interest in the behavior of some other entity, it is as if we ask ourselves, implicitly or explicitly, “What’s it like to do/be that?”2 MMI and MMA are central to how we answer this question. Our interest can be practical, as when we explicitly want to learn how to perform some action, and it can be aesthetic, as when we watch animals play, attend sporting events, or attend concerts. When musicians attend a concert, the line between practical and aesthetic interest can be blurred by a mild or strong interest in how one might emulate, or not, the observed performer(s) in order to improve or otherwise modify one’s own performance skills. Activation of MMI and/or MMA depends on interest in an observed behavior, whether practical or aesthetic. If I am not particularly interested in a performance, or if I am interested but then my interest wanes or I am distracted, my mimetic engagement will be correspondingly weak, weakened, or interrupted. The Extent of Mimetic Engagement The nature of mimetic engagement involves a second continuum, which is the range of imitable actions according to the “species” of the entity whose actions are being observed. At one end of this continuum are human actions, followed by the actions of other animals (mammals, avians, amphibians, and so forth), the actions of inanimate entities (the swaying of trees or the sound of thunder), and the “inaction” of inanimate objects such as sculptures and buildings.The human end of the spectrum is the most straightforward and is most directly supported by the evidence in chapter 1, but let us consider some examples from the far end of the continuum where mimetic engagement might seem unlikely. 38  Theoretical Background

The first example comes from my personal life. One day my brothers and I were splitting oak rounds for firewood using a forty-three-ton wood splitter (a machine that exerts forty-three tons of hydraulic pressure). Throughout the process, my brother Dan continued to marvel: “Feel the power!” It was clear that he was “empathizing” with this machine’s capacity to do work that we could never do as efficiently with hand tools. My experience was very much the same, but empathy cannot be the right word since the machine does not feel anything with which to empathize. In fact, I cannot think of an appropriate word; we were feeling something as a result of imagining what it would be like to do what the machine was doing, and to thereby be an entity with such power. Our practical task also became an aesthetic experience via MMI, and while such a mimetic-aesthetic response is of course not guaranteed, I believe that mimetic comprehension is the norm whenever one takes an aesthetic interest in the operation of machines. Mimetic comprehension of the actions of cyborgs and Transformers in films would be a case that is halfway between mimetic comprehension of the actions of humans and those of machines. A more general example of the farthest reach of mimetic engagement involves printing fonts. Although their effects might become salient only occasionally, WE CERTAINLY HAVE AFFECTIVE RESPONSES TO FONTS, whether bold face, italics, sans serif, or .3 Such responses may be primarily nonmimetic, but according to the mimetic hypothesis an affective response can also involve feeling (1) what it would be like to generate these fonts by hand, (2) what it would be like to be an entity of such a shape, and (3) what it would be like to vocalize (verbalize) the written words in a manner congruent with a given font. It can help to think of the first claim as an extension of our comprehension of handwriting, where handwriting is the residue of the human exertions that produce it. The second claim refers to the far end of the spectrum away from mimetic comprehension of observed human bodies. The third claim is a complement to the nonmimetic sense of being spoken to in a manner congruent with a given font, as in the use of all caps to represent SHOUTING. To the extent that comprehension of written language involves covert speech, the font shapes the nature of this speech-related motor imagery. Accordingly, all-caps text is experienced nonmimetically as being shouted at, and mimetically as shouting. This imitation is across visual and sonic modalities, and so it is less direct than mimetic comprehension of most music, but in principle it plays out with every font. In particular, this includes the experience of ordinary fonts, where the ordinariness involves both nonmimetic and mimetic comprehension.4 The somewhat analogous musical situation of reading staff notation is discussed below under principle 6. The exact point at which mimetic processes become negligible varies from person to person, but identifying such a point is less important than the notion of a continuum of imitability. This continuum is contingent on both the nature of the stimulus and the abilities and proclivities of a given observer, the latter of which I consider below.

other kinds of fonts

Mimetic Comprehension of Music  39

4. MMA and MMI are bodily representations of observed actions. Bodily representation refers to the bodily states and changes of state that occur in response to an external stimulus. These representations involve both nonmimetic and mimetic processes. Via MMI and MMA we represent an observed action in the musculoskeletal system and correlated portions of the brain, as well as in systems that control respiration, heart rate, and blood chemistry. To understand the role of MMI and MMA, we have to relate these representations to established meanings of five terms: perception, comprehension, conceptualization, recognition, and inhibition. Perceptions of external stimuli are nonmimetic representations, including the auditory perception of musical sounds. However, when we give our attention to musical sounds, they are also represented in the form of MMI and often in the form of MMA. These mimetic representations of musical sounds occur within a time frame that is effectively simultaneous with perception, but MMI and MMA are not perceptions in a strict sense. They are motor-related representations, which I have been referring to in terms of mimetic comprehension. Conceptualizations can be understood in part as enduring representations based on ephemeral mimetic and nonmimetic representations. For example, the musical concept of a step is grounded in nonmimetic perceptions of sounds and mimetic representations of sounds as imitable actions. As we will consider in later chapters, the mimetic portion is arguably the central basis for metaphoric conceptualizations such as step, but for now the proposition is that most music conceptualizations are products of both nonmimetic and mimetic processes. Recognition of external stimuli is based in part on information gained via the external senses—the appearance, sound, feel (texture, temperature, weight, etc.), smell, and/or taste of external stimuli. But recognition is also based on other responses and representations in the perceiver, including mimetic representations. Accordingly, I recognize a melody not only because it is acoustically the same as what I have heard before, but also because my mimetic representation of it is the same as before—it is something I have vicariously sung and/or played before, whether overtly or only covertly. In music, recognition is normally both nonmimetic and mimetic. Inhibition in the present context refers to neurological inhibition of action. Mo­tor imagery in general includes the ability to imagine performing an action without having to execute the action, and mimetic motor imagery (MMI) is a special case of this ability. The human capacity to inhibit execution of imagined actions allows for mental representations of our own actions and of the observed actions of others. It is a fundamental way whereby bodies get into minds. MMI, as imagined imitative action, would thus be inhibited MMA. In the case of deliberate imitative imagery the matter of inhibited action may be relatively straightforward, but principle 7 (below) proposes that imitative imagery (MMI) also occurs automatically and without awareness. If this is accurate, then damage to brain areas responsible for inhibiting execution should result in involuntary MMA. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia (2008) discuss this very point in relation to the ex40  Theoretical Background

ecutive portion of the brain (the frontal lobe): “Patients with extensive lesions to the frontal lobe are known to have difficulty in stopping themselves from repeating actions they see performed by others, particularly the doctors treating them” (151). The authors go on to describe how more extensive damage can result in the extreme case of echopraxia, in which patients have a tendency to mimic observed actions compulsively, no matter how unusual the actions may be. The common occurrence of involuntary overt imitation of music (humming, toe-tapping, and so forth) thus suggests two things. One is that, even in the absence of brain damage, the inclination to overtly mimetically participate can be strong enough to override normal inhibition. The other suggestion is that it is a disinhibited manifestation of the MMI that normally occurs when we give our attention to the actions of others. 5. Mimetic comprehension is based on visual, auditory, and/or tactile information: • The observed behavior can be heard but not seen (the sound of action) • The observed behavior can be seen but not heard (the sight of action) • The observed behavior need not be seen or heard (the feel of action) The first point is straightforward: MMI can be activated by sound alone; it does not require that one see the performance. The second point is also straightforward, if relatively less common: MMI can be activated by sight alone; it does not require that one hear the music. This applies to watching sports, dance, and musical performance without sound, whether the sound is turned off or the observer happens to be deaf. The third point applies to both the hearing and the deaf, even if it may be proportionally more significant among the deaf, and deserves some discussion. Percussionist Evelyn Glennie describes hearing as a special form of touch (Glennie 2003), in that in many cases one can feel the acoustic vibrations in body parts other than the ear, and this is somewhat like being touched. Glennie is profoundly deaf—a clinical term meaning, in her case, that with no other sounds interfering she can hear speech but cannot understand it without also lip-reading. In terms of mimetic comprehension, she has full access to visual information, but her access to acoustic information is primarily in terms of its acoustic impact upon various body parts. In performance, these vibrations are a means of coordinating her actions with those of other performers. Such vibrations are available to persons with normal hearing and they help shape one’s mimetic participation, particularly in the case of amplified music and music with regularly recurring patterns (i.e., dance music).5 6. Musical imagery is partly motor imagery (nonmimetic and mimetic). Musical imagery is imagined music, including sounds (auditory imagery), sound-producing actions (motor imagery and visual imagery), and visual representations of sounds (visual imagery related to music notation, and other visual Mimetic Comprehension of Music  41

representations).6 In listening to music all three forms are available, with motor imagery taking the form of mimetic motor imagery (MMI). Although these are distinct processes at some level, the question here is whether and to what extent they actually occur independently—more specifically, whether it is possible to imagine musical sounds without activation of motor imagery, mimetic or otherwise. For example, recall the prelude of Bach’s G-major Cello Suite (or some other work for a string instrument that features arpeggiated chords). If you are a cellist you will likely feel something of what it would be like, or is like, to play those arpeggiations, and this motor imagery would be integrated along with the recalled sounds and, likely, something of the notation. By contrast, as a noncellist I have only a very poor idea of what it would be like to play those arpeggiations, and yet I cannot recall or imagine this music without feeling something of what it would be like to make those sounds. This mimetic inclination takes the form of subvocalization combined with an impulse to move my head and torso in concert. Because MMI is commonly nonconscious, it is easy to imagine that recall involves only nonmimetic auditory imagery, perhaps combined with visual imagery. The specific form of MMI for a given listener and context is determined by the variables discussed above and below. We should also ask to what extent motor imagery (not necessarily mimetic motor imagery) might be activated in reading music notation. Since staff notation is in effect instructions for producing musical sounds, it might seem obvious that comprehension of notation involves imagined performance in one modality or another (i.e., playing and/or singing the indicated sounds). Nevertheless, it might seem that one could simply hear the indicated sounds and bypass motor imagery. Evidence from Brodsky et al. (2003, 2008), however, suggests that activation of motor imagery while reading is the norm among expert musicians. As with MMI, lack of awareness of motor imagery in comprehending staff notation would also be normal (as in principle 7), if more common for some readers and in some contexts than others. 7. Mimetic behavior (MMA and MMI) involves the variables of volition, consciousness, and overtness: • Mimetic behavior can be voluntary, but often it is involuntary • It can be conscious, but often it is nonconscious • It can be overt, but often it is covert (occurring only in imagery) The common understanding of imitation as voluntary and overt, as in deliberate imitation of a teacher’s demonstration, is one of several combinations of these three variables. However, all nonparadoxical combinations are possible.7 Particular combinations are contingent upon the individual listener and the context in which the experience occurs—for example, an indoor symphony concert versus a rock concert versus a folk concert, where overt mimetic participation is either discouraged, welcome, or overtly encouraged. Bases of individual differences are considered in the other principles. The combination that is of most 42  Theoretical Background

interest in this book is involuntary, nonconscious, and covert, in which MMI shapes music conceptualization without our awareness. 8. MMA and MMI are more strongly activated in observation of goal-directed actions. The more goal-directed the observed action, the stronger the mimetic engagement (see the discussion of Grèzes et al. 1998 and Wohlschläger et al. 2003 in chap. 1). Goal-directed here refers to deliberate actions, as opposed to, say, scratching an itch, which is goal-directed but normally does not involve deliberation. Music involves a continuum between both kinds of actions. Music also involves two kinds of goals: the physical and mental goals of performers, and the “musical goals” of “teleological” music (as in the cadences and climaxes of tonal music). These physical and musical goals often coincide in a straightforward way, as in the high B at the climactic cadence of Puccini’s “Nessun dorma.” For aesthetically engaged listeners, we can expect particularly strong mimetic engagement in this moment, along with a corresponding vicarious sense of achievement. But to understand more subtle contexts we have to identify some additional factors. First is the fact that many if not most musical sounds produced directly by human exertions are goal-directed, with at least the straightforward goal of making a particular sound, and the continuum of deliberateness is helpful here. Next is the distinction between two kinds of effort, one of which involves the relatively unconstrained use of muscle energy, as in the Puccini, while the other involves a more finessed use of muscle energy in restraint, as in the final cadence of the Adagio of Mozart’s Oboe Quartet, where the oboist must play a high D quietly. The effort involved in cases like the Mozart can be lost on some listeners (principle 16), with the result that mimetic engagement theoretically is not enhanced in the achievement of this tonal goal. By contrast, listeners who are aware of the effort involved here are likely to have a stronger mimetic response. Low-level examples include each downbeat in music with a regular meter. In contexts where the downbeat is understood as a strong beat, we can expect to find stronger mimetic engagement with the downbeats. Since downbeats are commonly understood as strong beats even when the downbeat is no stronger (no louder) than any other beat (as in the first movement of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” first and second themes), a mimetic perspective helps explain the logic of “strong” and “weak” beats.8 In sum: small-scale and large-scale musical goals are moments at which we can expect to find heightened mimetic participation. The implications for the feeling and conceptualization of musical motion are considerable, and I describe some of these in chapter 6. 9. MMA and MMI occur in real time, recall, and planning. Let us focus first on real time and recall. Real-time MMA and MMI occur roughly simultaneously with the observed action, and recall occurs after the fact; however, Mimetic Comprehension of Music  43

it is probably more helpful to think of a continuum between real time and recall. We can see the differences in the context of private music lessons, in (1) deliberately imitating a teacher’s gesture simultaneously, (2) imitating this gesture immediately afterward, (3) practicing this gesture later the same day and throughout the week, and (4) performing this gesture weeks, months, and years later. At some point one takes ownership of this gesture, even if it ultimately remains mimetic. Much the same continuum applies to involuntary imitation. That said, there are also cases where one loses an ability that was once learned via imitation, such as a particular dance step, or how to tie a certain knot. In these cases we might try to regain the ability by recalling the original model and reimitating it as well as we are able. I believe that this is in fact integral to the nature of musical imagery, as the following example helps demonstrate. When I listen to the slow movement of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, I covertly sing along with the English horn solo; this is real-time imitation. When I recall this music, I recall the sound of the English horn (in nonmimetic auditory imagery) and I simultaneously sing along with it. In other words, this recall is a kind of reenactment of the real-time experience that had included both nonmimetic perception and mimetic participation. If we want to say that I have developed a model, or a schema, of this melody, then this schema includes both the potential sounds and my mimetic production of the potential sounds—in other words, such musical schemas are auditory-motor schemas (or auditory-motorvisual schemas when we include music notation and/or the sight of performers). As I integrate such a schema into my repertoire of possible actions, the sense of imitation fades, as in the case of “Happy Birthday,” which I originally learned via overt, deliberate imitation but have since integrated into my repertoire. At some level all singing and playing are mimetic to varying degrees. This gradual integration of musical repertoire is a special case of the gradual integration of action repertoire generally (e.g., handwriting, riding a bicycle, etc.). It is also roughly analogous to the integration of ideas and habits of conceptualization (ways of thinking). In cases of music learned from reading notation, we develop a similar auditory-motor schema (or concatenated and nested schemas), and imitation plays a role in two ways. One is similar to the examples above: we are influenced, to some extent or another, by any other performances we may have heard. This includes the entire work and particular portions of it, but it also includes stylistic tropes shared by other works and by other performers within a given practice (e.g., how much vibrato or rubato to use). The other way involves imitation of oneself, in which each repetition in practice or performance is, to some extent, a reenactment of one’s own prior performances. To the extent that such schemas are integrated into oneself, each reenactment is an imitation of one’s self—an auto-imitation, if you like. Lastly, a similar continuum bears upon planned actions. To the extent that planning is based on recall, all of the preceding considerations are relevant to planned actions. At one end are plans that involve deliberate imitation of a 44  Theoretical Background

model, and at the other end are plans to perform with no sense of imitation in mind, even if one’s plans are nevertheless influenced by imitation.

Mimetic Behavior That Is More Specific to Music 10. MMI and MMA take three forms: • Intramodal, or direct-matching (e.g., finger imitation of finger movements) • Intermodal, or cross-modal (e.g., subvocal imitation of musical sounds generally) • Amodal (abdominal exertions that underlie limb movements and vocalizations) This discussion relates to the discussion of cross-modal and amodal mimetic behavior in chapter 1. The three forms identified here lie along a continuum of abstraction in comprehending heard sounds. Intramodal imitation involves feeling, for example, what it would be like to sing like the singer, or to play what the pianist is playing. The next degree of abstraction is cross-modal imitation, and it is of two main sorts: acoustic and nonacoustic.9 Acoustic cross-modal imitation involves imitation of the sounds produced. The most common form is likely mimetic subvocalization of instrumental sounds, but it also includes any imitation of the heard sounds in a different performance medium. (For example, learning melodies by ear on one’s own instrument, regardless of the original medium, is deliberate cross-modal imitation.) The boundary between intramodal and cross-modal is fluid, as in viola–violin or tenor–soprano imitation, which are nearly in the same modality, but such cases are simply finer distinctions within the continuum of abstraction. Nonacoustic cross-modal imitation includes congruent movements such as head-bobbing and swaying. We can extend nonacoustic to not primarily soundproducing and thereby include many forms of dancing to music. For dancing in which sound production is integral, such as tap and clogging, we could create a third category, but the main point is that cross-modal mimetic participation in any form retains some degree of congruency with the musical sounds being mimetically comprehended. In both acoustic and nonacoustic imitation, what is maintained is a schema: the pattern (rhythm), duration (speed), rate of recurrence (tempo, if there is recurrence), and something of the intensity (strength) of the original sounds. The notion of imitating or maintaining “the beat” is useful to the extent that it is understood to include these more specific features. The amodal form of imitation differs from both intramodal and cross-modal imitation. It involves the exertions of the abdominal muscles, and it is amodal in that it underlies the limb movements and vocal exertions of intramodal and cross-modal imitation. In chapter 1 I suggested that it could also be thought of as supramodal, except that it has its own more or less specific modality that involves the muscles of the abdomen, or the core. The muscle activity here is a Mimetic Comprehension of Music  45

clenching and relaxing in the gut that matches something of the energy dynamics, or energy schema, of the music.10 Because these exertions underlie those of the limbs and voice, in part they also match the pattern, rate, and intensity of those exertions evident in the musical sounds, but a broader sense of “energy dynamics” is likely more significant. For those of us not in the habit of attending to such basic biomechanics, these exertions are also abstract, in that they can be relatively challenging to bring into full awareness. A lack of awareness of these exertions is integral to their power in shaping musical experience, because they contribute to a feeling, even if it is ineffable, without our knowing how we are being affected.11 11. Any and all features of sounds can or will be represented mimetically: pitch, duration, timbre, strength, and location. We can understand every sound as comprising the following five overlapping features: pitch, duration, timbre, intensity, and location.12 The pitch of a sound varies between definite and indefinite, and this variable is contingent upon the stimulus and upon a given listener (some hear pitch where others do not). Durations combine into rhythms, meters, and form. We can think of timbre as the property that distinguishes the sound of, say, a clarinet, guitar, and piano when playing the same melody. I am using strength to stand for acoustic intensity, known more loosely as volume, or how loud a sound is or seems to be. Location refers to the actual or apparent location of a sound’s source in relation to a listener, whether in actual space or in psychoacoustic space (as in film soundtracks and other stereophonic recordings). Each of these five features is imitable to some degree of fidelity and thereby shapes one’s mimetic experience by way of what it feels like to make various sounds. For example, when a cellist plays harmonics, or con sordino (with mute), or sul ponticello (at the bridge), or when electric guitars play with various kinds of distortion, this affects both the sound and what it feels like to mimetically make such sounds, and this in turn shapes what we feel and think. I am referring to the combination of these five features as the acoustic-auditory fact, or the sound that is in effect given to us as the objective sonic “material.”13 12. Different kinds of music “invite” (motivate) different kinds of mimetic engagement, and this contributes to the different feel (quale) of different kinds of music: • Different passages, works, and practices feel different partly via mimetic participation • The history of musical practices can be understood partly in terms of the degree and nature of the “singability” and “danceability” of particular works and styles • Composers compose the mimetic invitation • Performers shape the mimetic invitation 46  Theoretical Background

• Listeners may like or dislike what the music invites them to do: listeners will have a feeling about what the music invites them to do Mimetic Invitation. In my mimetic response to music, it is as if I am responding to an invitation to move, sing, and/or play along in some congruent way, whether overtly or only in imagery.14 The often involuntary nature of one’s mimetic response can occasionally feel like a mimetic imperative, which reflects the importance of imitation in human experience. If music can be understood as inviting mimetic participation, then different kinds of music invite different kinds of mimetic behavior. Since any action has a phenomenological feel—its quale, or what it feels like to exert in a particular way—then any mimetic behavior will have a feel, differing somewhat according to whether it is overt or covert and according to the habits of each individual. Mimetic behavior will range according to congruency with, or fidelity to, the music being imitated, including the modality (intramodal, cross-modal, and amodal) and the details within a given modality. Singability and Danceability. I think it is fair to say that the history of Western music, classical and vernacular, has been dominated by music that is either easily singable, or easily danceable, or both. By easily singable I mean music that has a clear and simple melody: mostly diatonic and stepwise, with a limited range, and with relatively simple rhythms. Similarly, easily danceable music has a regular beat, with relatively simple and regular rhythms, at a tempo that affords efficient whole-body mimetic movements.15 What counts as singable or danceable will vary according to the music and according to particular listeners, but I am simply referring to the plainly evident fact that people commonly like a tune to sing and/ or a beat to move to. Note also that, in connection with MMI, it is not necessary that one overtly sing or dance along in order to find music to be singable or danceable. With this in mind, it is not enough to say that some music is song-like or dance-like, since these terms can be taken in a more object-oriented manner.16 In many cases the differences between various passages, works, and styles can be understood in terms of their relative singability and danceability (as found by different listeners), and aesthetic preferences are likely informed by implicit preferences with regard to these variables. I consider this more carefully in the discussion of principle 13. The Composer’s Contribution. We can say that composers most often create the mimetic invitation, or at least a schema for it. A composer might or might not have the audience’s mimetic response in mind; a composer might even imply or specify that a mimetic response is ancillary or even undesirable, and awareness of a composer’s preferences can shape one’s mimetic response. The Performer’s Contribution. With composed music, we can say that perform­ ers realize, shape, and/or extend the mimetic invitation. As with composers, performers need not have the audience’s mimetic response in mind. On the relationship between composer and performer, consider Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, which begins with a two-octave leap in the left hand. A performer can “cheat” and use both hands, but, as one pianist put it, this would be like admitting defeat from the very start.17 On a recording this may or may not be audible, Mimetic Comprehension of Music  47

but in live performance audience members are in a better position to feel the difference via MMI, and they will evaluate the performance based in part on their mimetic experience. Beethoven has created a challenge for performers, who then implicitly shape and extend a mimetic invitation based on their choice. Liking and Disliking the Invitation: The Listener’s Contribution. Consider John Coltrane’s and Julie Andrews’s renditions of “My Favorite Things.” Coltrane’s is more elaborate harmonically, rhythmically, and melodically, and thus invites a more complex kind of mimetic engagement. Expanding the singability/danceability issue above, to like this rendition is in part to like what it invites one to do, and the same applies to Andrews’s more straightforward rendition. By the same token, the relatively constrained embodiment invited by the Andrews rendition might motivate an aversive response in some listeners. I was initially surprised to find objections to the proposition that liking or disliking music is based in part on liking or disliking what it invites us to do and be. However, MMA and MMI have an affective dimension, and if mimetic comprehension of music is the norm, then this will contribute to how one feels about one’s experience of the music. I return to this in chapters 8–10. 13. Music is sometimes found to “resist” mimetic participation. This principle is an extension of the previous one. If all sounds are imitable to some degree of fidelity, then in principle all music invites mimetic participation. But while some music invites or even “compels” mimetic singing or dancing, other music can seem to “resist” mimetic participation, or to otherwise offer an attenuated mimetic response. To understand this situation, it will help to recall the continuum of imitability, which depends upon both the musical features and the habits and proclivities of individual listeners. In my teaching I used to use the beginning of Ligeti’s Atmosphères as an example of music that does not invite mimetic participation. The opening mass of sound, a sustained “chord” of nearly indistinguishable pitches, is about as far from singable and danceable music as I can imagine. But then one of my students said, “I don’t know—it kinda makes me want to do this,” as she very, very slowly extended her arms and rotated her head and torso. This example approaches that of printing fonts (discussed under principle 3) in terms of being near the minimal end of the continuum of mimetic comprehension. Both examples are consistent with the principle that the mimetic invitation never attenuates to zero (as corollary to principle 13), even if a given invitation may fall below the threshold of what a particular listener is able to, or inclined to, respond to mimetically. We can identify several factors that shape a listener’s mimetic proclivities. One of the most important factors is the mere exposure effect. As David Huron explains (Huron 2006), when we give our attention to music we implicitly analyze it (regardless of whether we also explicitly analyze it), and through repeated exposure we come to understand, appreciate, and even prefer the music in question. Huron suggests that we can think of this as the prediction effect, since ex48  Theoretical Background

posure increases our ability to predict what will happen next, and successful prediction is rewarding. But we also get better at predicting what we will vicariously do next, as mimetic participants, and successful mimetic participation is also rewarding (principles 17 and 18). Through repeated exposure one finds a way to mimetically engage with the music; it requires no voluntary, conscious, or overt imitation, but only attention, which co-occurs with MMI. The common experience of coming to like music that one initially disliked can thus be understood partly in terms of having found a way to mimetically engage with the music; it is a way of making sense of the music. Two other interrelated factors can create resistance to music. In one, certain features of the sound might be found to be disagreeable, such as the timbre, the intonation, the amount of dissonance, and so forth. In the other, one might associate the music with something disagreeable, whether culturally or personally. Both kinds of factors can attenuate or preclude aesthetic and mimetic engagement for certain listeners, even if other listeners find the same music especially appealing. Lastly, some music invites a relatively quiescent bodily state, with no straightforward melody or meter to engage with. Ambient or atmospheric music, for example, whether entire works and albums or specific passages and tracks, might be found to resist mimetic engagement, but it is more accurate to think of it as offering a nonnormative mimetic experience. How one feels about the mimetic invitation is then another matter. 14. Ensemble music offers multiple invitations: • Each voice or instrument offers its own invitation • The invitations can conflict in one or more ways • Harmony can be understood as a special case of multiple invitations While mimetic comprehension of a single voice or instrument may be relatively straightforward, we should ask what happens when there are two or more sound sources, as in the case of Bach’s two-part inventions. From one perspective these inventions feature two equal instrumental voices that offer two mimetic invitations; but while I might feel overall that I am attending to both equally, at any given moment it seems to me that my attention is given more to one than to the other. In fact, this attending seems to be intimately tied to mimetic participation: the voice that I am attending to at a given moment is the voice that I am singing along with. Over the course of a listening experience my attention and mimetic participation switch more or less continually between the two voices, with both receiving more or less equal attention. From a nonmimetic perspective the matter of making sense of multiple voices involves auditory scene analysis (Bregman 1990), but it seems likely that auditory scene analysis normally goes hand in hand with mimetic comprehension: they are two real-time ways whereby we make sense of what we are hearing. The more complex the auditory scene, the greater the challenge for mimetic comprehension. For example, in the case of Tallis’s forty-voice motet “Spem in Mimetic Comprehension of Music  49

alium,” when most or all of the voices are singing at once, mimetic participation with particular voices becomes largely impossible. And yet there is still a straightforward mimetic invitation in connection with the composite vocal exertions. The meter, rhythms, and tempo emerge from a recurring general pattern of vocal exertions, and these combine with a shared strength (acoustic intensity) and manner of articulation. At this level, mimetic participation in effect is with the composite emergent musical entity. In general, the nature of this level of participation is shaped by the relative homogeneity of the various parts of the ensemble, where a hymn or a chorale is near one end of the spectrum and a work such as Ferneyhough’s La Chute d’Icare is near the other. In the case of the Ferneyhough, the challenge for mimetic participation involves not only the complexity of each of the eight individual parts, but also their relative heterogeneity. Upon first listening to this work I was bewildered, but the more I listen to it, the more my experience approaches that of listening to tonal chamber music: I get better at predicting and mimetically participating with ever more details. Of course, the majority of ensemble music is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, but the matter of multiple invitations is normally integral in each case. Mimetic Comprehension of Chords Since chords are composites of multiples voices, perception of chords ought to be a special case of perception of multiple voices, and this implies that it ought to involve mimetic motor imagery. In the case of a three-voice chord, such as a major triad, at one level we hear the composite chord, but in my experience I also find that I subvocalize each note in the chord, one at a time, as my mimetic and nonmimetic attention more or less continually jump from one voice to another. It seems to me that the composite chord emerges from these specific mimetic representations and perceptions. An analogy with visual perception, specifically face perception, may be helpful. Face perception involves scanning various parts of a face and creating a composite (Yarbus 1967). The scanning involves saccadic eye movements: the very small and very quick movements of the eyes that occur continuously and automatically. The scanning and composing are generally nonconscious, and all that we are normally aware of is the composite image of a face. While it is possible to attend to these saccadic movements, and while it is also possible to deliberately focus on a single part of a face (by continually refocusing after each saccadic movement), for everyday purposes normally we simply perceive the composite image of a face. The pertinent difference in perceiving chords is that each voice invites mimetic engagement, but in both music and vision our attention most often is given to the composite. 15. MMI and MMA can be stronger in live performance than in recorded performance. A good deal of music is notably more pleasurable to listen to live than via recordings, and the hypothesis here is that this is partly because the immediacy of live 50  Theoretical Background

performance enhances mimetic engagement. We can understand this enhancement in connection with what is at stake: in a live performance we do not know exactly what will happen, and whatever does happen is more ephemeral than in a recorded performance. Both of these increase attention and the mimetic participation that comes with attention. In live contexts we can also witness the actual movements of performers, which offers a visual avenue of imitation, and we also have the opportunity to participate along with other listeners, even if only covertly. This communal mimetic participation can enhance the overall experience. Listening to livestreamed performances attenuates somewhat the sense of community and presence while nevertheless sharing a significant portion of the live, in-person experience. However, sometimes mimetic participation is stronger when listening to recorded music. We can understand this paradox, or the ambiguity of principle 15, in terms of the ambivalent value of the factors just described: knowing exactly what will happen enhances the accuracy, and thus the success reward, of mimetic participation; and not having the visual “distraction” of live performers and fellow audience members allows a listener to devote more mimetic attention to the sounds produced. The value of these factors is contingent upon the music in question and the listener in question. 16. MMI and MMA vary in strength and accuracy among different people. Just as some people are more emotionally empathetic than others, it appears that some people are more musically empathetic in the sense of MMA and MMI. It seems likely that this variable involves a combination of innate and acquired differences. I broached the matter of differences in mimetic responses in discussing the mere exposure effect under principle 14, where familiarity with music and strength of mimetic participation go hand in hand, and here I describe additional aspects of such differences. Specialized Knowledge One source of these differences involves first-hand knowledge of how sounds are produced on different instruments. We can imagine a continuum of familiarity, extending from one’s own instrument, to members of the same instrument family, and beyond to other instruments. For example, if I am a trumpet player, my mimetic comprehension of trumpet playing is informed by my direct experience. I can extrapolate from this experience when comprehending the sounds of other brass instruments, somewhat less so with woodwinds, and much less so with percussion and string instruments. Compared to an oboe player, much would be missing from my mimetic comprehension of oboe playing per se, and the same principle applies to every performance medium to the extent that the actions differ from those of my specialty. And yet my mimetic engagement with music performed in any medium can still be quite strong, and there are at least two reasons for this. Mimetic Comprehension of Music  51

One reason is that I can imagine something of what it must be like to move my fingers and arms like a woodwind, string, or percussion player. The fact that any overt imitation on my part would result in, let us say, nonnormative playing does not preclude enthusiastic mimetic participation with these specialized movements, particularly in the case of virtuosic passages. The other reason is that I can always participate via cross-modal MMI, particularly in the form of mimetic subvocalization. I will never know what it is like to play the Cha­conne of Bach’s D-minor Violin Partita on a violin, but I do know what it is like to perform it vicariously through a combination of intramodal and cross-modal MMI. Benefits and Costs of Inaccurate MMI One of the works that I use to increase awareness of MMI is the Kyrie of Byrd’s Mass for Three Voices as recorded with one on a part by the Hilliard Ensemble. This performance is very legato, quiet, non vibrato, and relatively slow, and as reported during class discussion it usually produces a shared subjective feeling of something like calmness and ease. In theory, this feeling comes partly from mimetic engagement, in connection with the extent to which these vocal exertions are congruent with the affective states of calmness and ease. Paradoxically, however, singing like this actually takes a good deal of effort and it is, in this respect, incongruent with calmness and ease. For those who have not sung in this way the incongruity is not apparent, and a “wrong” interpretation is thus perfectly logical. This paradox is relevant to performance in general, where a quiet sound often does not reflect the exertion involved (as in the Mozart oboe quartet mentioned under principle 8). Such cases are strengthened in practices where creating the illusion of ease is a deliberate goal. The opposite illusion is also common, as with the electric guitar, where a relatively easy exertion can create a powerful sound, and where mimetic participation can be more congruent with the resulting sounds than with the finger exertions.18 If inaccurate mimetic comprehension can sometimes enhance an experience, it might also weaken or limit mimetic immersion. For example, in “Juliet’s Funeral,” from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, the second statement of the theme is in the horns. The theme ascends to a high B (sounding E5), which is near the customary limit for horns. The effort involved in achieving this note is available mimetically, amplifying the dissonant context in which it occurs (as the 7th of a minor-major7th chord), and the majority of musicians I have asked have acknowledged that they empathize with this effort and achievement. However, a few musicians have reported that this note does not seem particularly high or effortful and that they experience no particular empathy at this moment in the music. Given the narrative context of this example (Juliet’s funeral, or mock funeral), I am inclined to say that such listeners, through no fault of their own, are missing something that they might otherwise value. What is missing is some portion of the feeling of what it would be like to do what the performers are doing, which is part of how this and other music works. Although some portion of one’s mimetic proclivities 52  Theoretical Background

may be innate, education, opportunity, and chance will shape one’s mimetic understanding of music. Educators shape this avenue of experience and knowledge in the extent to which we integrate it at the various levels of education, whether through enhancement or neglect. The succeeding chapters are an attempt to describe part of how this might matter. 17. Mimetic participation results in a sense of belonging and shared achievement. Because of the general benefits of mimetic participation in evolution, development, and everyday adult life, it is positively valenced—that is, mimetic participation normally feels good. This includes both one-on-one contexts and group contexts, with the positive rewards plausibly originating in the specific benefits of communication, learning, clan formation, and access to protection and shared resources. For musical performers a form of this reward is available in ensemble contexts, where nonmimetic and mutually mimetic participation go hand in hand, as in performing the same part in a section (e.g., the violas in an orchestra or the altos in a choir), or, more generically, in mutual imitation of the beat.19 For listeners, the reward comes via mimetic participation with one or more performers, and/or via mimetic participation with other listeners (whether sitting quietly together or dancing together). The appeal of mimetic participation can overwhelm cultural constraints, as we saw in the previous chapter with the story of the elderly gentleman singing along with Thomas Quasthoff. In the case of performers, Miles Davis tells the story about a section of a tune where saxophonist Bob Berg was not supposed to play but joined in anyway (Alkyer 2007). Davis recounts that he asked, “‘Bob, why do you play in this spot? You not supposed to play in this spot.’ He said, ‘It sounded so good, Chief, I had to play it.’ I said, ‘The reason it sounded so good is because you wasn’t playin’.’ As soon as he jumps in, he fucks it up. It’s a hard thing playin’ with a group” (134).20 Participation offers an ancient positive reward, and mimetic participation in aesthetic contexts offers a reward that is derived from the more ancient value of participation. The various forms of mimetic participation each offer a particular version of this positive reward. 18. Mimetic participation is a central source of musical affect. The social reward in principle 17 is one of the ways that mimetic participation contributes to one’s affective (emotional) responses to music. In chapter 8 I explain this in more detail, where mimetic participation is one of eight avenues of music affect. In the present context all that needs to be said is that a mimetic response to music is already an affective response. When music gets into the muscles and/or the corresponding portions of the brain, this feeling is already part of the musical experience. Mimetic Comprehension of Music  53

19. Mimetic comprehension motivates and constrains conceptualization (metaphoric or otherwise). In 1987 Mark Johnson published a book on the bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason, and his ideas were subsequently applied to music by a number of music theorists (whom I cite in later chapters) with respect to the bodily basis of our metaphoric concepts. These writings opened the door to the ideas presented in this book, and the mimetic hypothesis in particular emerged from an attempt to understand more precisely how it is that musical experience is embodied for listeners, and how this embodied experience might motivate, ground, and constrain conceptualization. The succeeding chapters present my thinking on these matters. 20. Mimetic comprehension is part of human cognition generally: • MMI and MMA occur in comprehension of actions, events, and entities in real life and in aesthetic contexts • MMI and MMA are part of how we answer the following questions: – What is that? – What’s it like to do/be that? – What’s going to happen next? Mimetic behavior and cognition are common in animals, from the ancient activities of schooling, flocking, and herding, to learning tool use and other skills via imitation. In humans, mimetic behavior and cognition appear to involve a greater variety of forms and contexts than in other species. Basic human cognition includes implicitly and explicitly asking and answering three questions, the first of which is What is that? This question is a matter of categorization, and it involves making both objective (object-oriented) and subjective comparisons. Objective comparisons are nonmimetic, as in the identification of something as a tree or a bird according to its observed appearance and behaviors. Subjective comparisons are based more centrally on one’s response to an observed entity’s appearance and behaviors, including one’s mimetic response. In observing behavior, MMI and MMA are part of how we answer the second question, What’s it like to do/be that? The feeling of what it is like to perform the observed behavior is then one of the bases of categorization, including metaphoric categorization of musical phenomena known in terms of motion. Musical motion is, arguably, not so much heard as it is felt, and part of this feeling is tied to MMI. We answer the third question What’s going to happen next? by way of the implicit and explicit prediction processes discussed in Huron (2006). This question subsumes the question What am I going to do next?, and in the context of listening to music, mimetic participation turns this latter question into What am I going to vicariously do/be next? With mimetic immersion, the answer to this latter question subsumes all three versions: “What’s going to happen next is that I’m going to vicariously do and be this.” 54  Theoretical Background

Notice that we can understand the behaviors of nonhuman animals as implicitly asking and answering these same basic questions. Although language makes it possible to ask these questions explicitly, we still ask them implicitly and we do so far more often than we ask them explicitly. This occurs in the continuous stream of seemingly inconsequential perceptions and categorization of objects throughout each day, in the nonconscious mimetic comprehension of the behaviors of others, and in the low-level predictions involved in mundane matters such as each step while walking. These questions originate in the service of maintaining homeostasis, and the majority of their work, in both implicit and explicit forms, still serves this ancient purpose. But humans, and perhaps some other animals, also invent aesthetic contexts where we can ask and answer these questions primarily for pleasure. The arts and athletics give us the opportunity to feel what it’s like to do and be something other than ourselves, in a play of the imagination that is rightly highly valued.

Questions, Concerns, and Doubts In sharing the mimetic hypothesis I have found that, whether one finds it intuitively agreeable or disagreeable, it raises many questions. This is inevitable, because there are many variables, the details of this perspective are relatively unfamiliar, and it takes time to try out the numerous propositions. Nevertheless, I respond here to three recurring questions, concerns, and doubts that I have received from colleagues, students, and nonmusicians. “But I can imagine notes in octaves that I cannot actually sing.” At first blush, this might seem to be a significant problem for the subvocal portion of the mimetic hypothesis. My reply begins with a reminder that (1) we represent sounds mimetically as far as experience and ability allow, and (2) this always occurs in parallel with nonmimetic processes. Consider the song “Summer Madness,” by Kool & the Gang, which features a synthesizer ascending by octaves from F♯ 3 to F♯7 (beginning around 0:40) at the relatively slow rate of one note per bar. The overall effect of this ascent is enhanced in the song’s use in a 2006 Nike commercial featuring LeBron James, in a white suit, diving in slow motion from a high-dive platform into a swimming pool. The ascent begins just after he is challenged to jump into the pool, signifying mounting drama, and this signification is grounded in mimetic participation in the octave ascent and the muscular tension and sense of effort that this involves. As I listen and watch, I cannot help but mimetically subvocalize along with the synthesizer, including the highest note, even though I have never sung above F♯ 6. I find the last note thrilling (in the limited context of a television commercial), and I believe that this feeling comes in part from feeling something of what it would be like to transcend my usual limitations. The possibility of such transcendence, in many forms, is one of the implications of the hypothesis, but the specific question Mimetic Comprehension of Music  55

here is how it might be possible to imagine singing higher than one can actually sing. Subvocal imagery is based on the experience of vocalizing, which involves greater and lesser muscle tension (in stretching and relaxing the vocal folds, or vocal cords) and a corresponding feeling of effort (even if some singers train to minimize both). While there is a physical limit to what can be achieved in an ascent, to imagine going beyond one’s limit involves imagining doing “more of the same.” I can certainly feel something of what it must be like for me to sing that highest note, even if I simultaneously feel my actual limits. In this sense, my imagination is akin to imagining creating timbres with my voice that are in fact beyond my ability to create with much fidelity. The capacity to extrapolate from direct experience and to transcend, in imagination, one’s physical limitations via MMI could almost stand as a separate, twenty-first principle. “Isn’t it possible to listen attentively without mimetically participating?” It is possible, and even common for some listeners, to listen without mimetic activation of the muscles (without MMA). It is also possible and even common to listen without awareness of mimetic motor imagery (MMI). But according to the hypothesis, based on evidence such as that included in chapter 1, attentive listening normally involves activation of MMI whether we are aware of it or not. I imagine that the majority of exceptions involve music that attenuates the mimetic invitation, and/or the innate and acquired abilities and proclivities of individual listeners. There is plenty of music that attenuates normative mimetic participation, but we should distinguish initial listenings from subsequent listenings. For listeners with normal mimetic abilities, an initial exposure might well involve little or no measurable mimetic engagement, but repeated exposure and familiarity theoretically correlate with increased MMI. In the case of music that offers a more normative mimetic invitation, we can note that disorders such as schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder may limit mimetic comprehension of the gestures of others (Heyes 2001, Williams et al. 2001, Nadel 2002, Dapretto et al. 2006), including music-making gestures. For other listeners, the hypothesis acknowledges a likely range of innate mimetic abilities, which can then be shaped by listening habits and ways of understanding one’s relationship with musical sounds, which might contribute to an atrophy of mimetic abilities. In addition, absolute pitch might contribute in some cases to a limited development of mimetic abilities and/ or it might otherwise further obscure MMI (see appendix I). I should say that, when I have encountered this question it often seems to reflect an implicit commitment to “disembodied” or object-oriented listening. The notion that listening normally involves some form of mimetic participation is counter to many people’s understanding of their relationship with music, and while some embrace the notion upon discovering it, others are rightly concerned about the implications. 56  Theoretical Background

“Do we imitate performers or the sounds that they perform?” Recall the discussion of speech perception in chapter 1. As infants, our first mimetic comprehension of human-made sounds involves imitation of the vocal sounds of our caregivers. In imitating these sounds we necessarily imitate the actions that produce these sounds, and in this formative context the two kinds of imitation go hand in hand. This concurrent form of imitation applies to all subsequent intramodal imitation, but in cross-modal imitation the two kinds diverge. For example, vocal imitation of nonvocal sounds is an imitation of the sounds produced (most often the pitch, rhythm, and tempo), but it is not imitation of the specific nonvocal actions of playing a particular nonvocal instrument. However, it is an enactment of the same exertion schemas (principle 10), including the pattern (rhythm and meter), rate of recurrence (tempo), and something of the strength involved in producing the sounds, and at this more schematic level it is indeed imitation of the nonvocal actions of the performer(s). The answer to the original question, then, is that we imitate both the performers and the sounds that they perform, with the qualification that cross-modal imitation is at a schematic level. The following related question also arises: Do we not imitate the music? To answer this question we would have to agree on what is meant by “the music.” We imitate musical sounds and we imitate the humans actions that produce these sounds (in music performed directly by human exertions), and often these two occur simultaneously. Once we objectify or personify music, so that “the music” becomes an entity or a kind of agent, then in such a fictional world there is some sense in imagining that we imitate music. The subsequent chapters analyze the logic of such fictions.

Concluding Remarks If comprehension of observed human behavior normally involves mimetic motor imagery (MMI), then it would be strange if this did not apply to the behaviors involved in musical performance. What would not be strange is if one were unaware of this. As I hope to make plain, this hidden nature of most mimetic comprehension is integral to musical experience and, paradoxically, to how we understand that experience. The many variables that I have described in this chapter are integral to musical experience and to the meaning we construct from our experiences. The overall chaos that the mimetic hypothesis addresses nevertheless coalesces into relatively stable cognitive structures. These structures are the concepts upon which we rely in forming explicit conceptualizations of music, and these concepts in turn are specific versions of more generic concepts. The embodied logic of most of these generic concepts is examined in the chapters that follow, but to prepare these examinations I first need to establish some general principles with regard to embodied metaphoric reasoning. This is the purpose of the next chapter. Mimetic Comprehension of Music  57

3 Metaphor and Related Means of Reasoning And Silence, like a poultice, comes To heal the blows of sound. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Throughout each day we implicitly and explicitly ask What is that? and the most direct way in which we answer this question is via categorization, as in naming or recognizing things according animal species, kinds of vegetables, types of musical instruments, and so on. This basic question often takes the richer form of How shall we understand this? which we sometimes answer via metaphor—that is, by conceptualizing something from one category in terms of another category to which it normally does not belong. Literary examples, such as Shakespeare’s prating stones (Macbeth) and Maya Angelou’s “I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide” (“Still I Rise”), achieve their effects in part by drawing attention to the breach of category boundaries, but the metaphors of interest here and in the following chapters seldom draw attention to themselves, and they achieve their effects in part by way of this largely silent nature. To explore the role of metaphor in our conceptualizations of music, I will be applying the conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999; Johnson 1987). This theory has been applied to music by others, but the difference here is in the extent of the focus on the bodily experience that motivates and grounds metaphoric reasoning (that is, reasoning via metaphor).1 In what follows, I describe some basic principles of conceptual metaphor theory alongside related cognitive processes, tailoring these to suit musical experience.2 I begin by laying out four premises. First, as a term, metaphor is similar to imitation in that it is commonly assumed to involve a conscious and deliberate act, as when one decides to create a poetic or otherwise novel metaphor (that is, a new metaphor) or to use one created by someone else. While this is certainly an important component of metaphoric reasoning overall, it is relatively rare compared to the nonconscious components of this type of reasoning; like the conscious portion of cognition in general, it is the tip of the iceberg.

Second, the connection to embodiment is more plainly evident when we understand metaphoric reasoning as a biological process: it is something performed by the nervous system as a way of categorizing stimuli and actions according to their actual and possible effects upon the organism. It is a solution to the problem of how to understand an experience and how to respond appropriately (adaptively, in connection with survival). This is part of the motivation, if not the central motivation, behind metaphoric reasoning. Third, metaphor most often involves conceptualization of relatively abstract experience in terms of more concrete experience. By “abstract” I mean for the most part experiences of things that cannot be seen or touched, like time and music. If one explores the histories of English and other Indo-European languages, one finds a pervasive pattern in which the oldest terms tend to concern concrete experience, whose meanings are subsequently applied metaphorically to more abstract experience. For example, a step was originally a place to support an object, which extended to steps in walking, and which extended further to musical steps and steps in baking a cake or solving a mathematical problem. This pattern of extension from concrete to abstract is the norm in the etymological evolution of Indo-European languages. It is also the norm in the development of cognition in individual humans (beginning in infancy).3 Fourth, the fundamental form of metaphor is A is B, as in Juliet is the sun, where A is metaphorically B. A is the thing to be understood and is often relatively abstract; B offers the basis for understanding A and is normally relatively concrete. Individual metaphoric expressions do not necessarily take the form A is B directly, as we will see in the examples below, but if an expression is metaphoric we should be able to recast it in the normal form A is B. Music’s invisibility, intangibility, and ephemerality make it particularly susceptible to metaphoric conceptualization. To prepare the analysis of some fundamental metaphors in subsequent chapters, in this chapter I address the following topics: 1. Some Basic Principles of Conceptual Metaphor Theory  (60) 2. Objective and Subjective Bases  (62) 3. Categorization  (62) 4. Image Schemas  (64) 5. Etymology, Polysemy, and Homonymy  (66) 6. Metaphors and Conceptual Blends  (67) 7. Levels and Kinds of Metaphor  (69) 8. Logical Entailments  (71) 9. Nominalization and Verbification  (72) 10. Anthropomorphization  (73) 11. Metaphor in Human Cognition  (74) 12. The Human Voice as a Source Domain  (77) 13. Kinds of Metaphors in Music Conceptualization  (79) 14. Representing Action+Sound with Notation  (79) 15. The Reach of Metaphor  (80) Metaphor and Related Means of Reasoning  59

1. Some Basic Principles of Conceptual Metaphor Theory The term metaphor is often used loosely to refer to any term or description that is not literal, or, more problematically, to expressions that are imprecise or otherwise opaque. For present purposes, an expression is metaphoric if it is presented in, or can be recast in, the normal form A is B. The simplest elaboration of this includes expressions that use an adjective, such as Silence is golden, which is shorthand for Silence is a golden thing. The related form of simile likewise compares A with B but with, we might say, less conviction. In the Holmes epigraph, silence is like a poultice (a salve or balm), which can be understood as a looser form of the metaphoric proposition that silence is a poultice.4 While the hedge of “like” may matter in some respects, the primary concern here is with the motivation to use B (in this case a poultice) to understand A (silence). The experience of silence is being conceptualized in terms of the experience of a poultice on a wound. The name Richard the Lionheart similarly uses an adjective as an expression of the implicit metaphor Richard’s heart is a lion’s heart. Nicknames such as Richard “the Lionheart,” “Tiger” Woods, and “Grizzly” Adams take part in a more general habit of conceptualizing humans in terms of animals, and each example can be paraphrased into a form that reflects the conceptual metaphor humans are animals (short for humans are nonhuman animals), or human qualities are animal qualities. Conceptual metaphors are inferred from various individual expressions—in the present case, every animal nickname is a specific expression of humans are animals, as is every description of someone as a fox (e.g., sly as a fox), a snake in the grass, and so forth. In analysis, conceptual metaphors are signified by the use of small caps (e.g., humans are animals) to distinguish them from particular linguistic expressions of a conceptual metaphor. For example, “He’s such a jackass” is a metaphoric expression of the conceptual metaphor humans are animals; “He’s such a jackass” is not itself a conceptual metaphor, and conceptual metaphors are not normally expressed directly in language. The purpose and value of distinguishing conceptual metaphors from their linguistic expressions will become clearer as we consider more examples below and in subsequent chapters.5 Target Domains, Source Domains, and Cross-Domain Mappings The experience (of some thing) to be understood metaphorically is the target, while the experience used to understand the target is the source. In the case of humans are animals, humans (or human qualities) are the target, and animals (or animal qualities) are the source. Because the target and source are categories that may include many examples, they are known as domains—in this case, the domain of humans is the target domain, and the domain of animals is the source domain. In the most generic case, A is B means target domain is [metaphorically] source domain, or the target domain is to be understood metaphorically in terms of the source domain. Conceptual metaphor theory offers two levels of understanding that are of particular interest here. One is the cognitive structure in which diverse metaphoric 60  Theoretical Background

expressions can be understood as expressions of a particular conceptual metaphor, as in the various expression of humans are animals. The other is crossdomain mapping, which specifies precisely which details are mapped from the source domain to the target domain. Specifying the mappings often proves to be quite challenging, but the logic of a metaphor is in these details, and our understanding of how a metaphor works corresponds to our ability to specify the crossdomain mappings. Metaphoric and Not Real There is a traditional understanding of metaphor as involving a falsehood, as in the expression Juliet is the sun: Juliet is not really purported to be the sun, and the same applies to metaphoric expressions generally. This aspect has given metaphor a connotation of not real, which I believe underlies aversive responses to the proposition that, for example, musical motion is metaphoric. The musical experience is real, and it can feel so much like motion that to refer to it as metaphoric can seem to deny something essential about the experience. The analyses in chapters 4–6 demonstrate instead that an understanding in terms of conceptual metaphor embraces both the experience and the cognitive process of metaphoric conceptualization. The Issue of Motivated Metaphors According to conceptual metaphor theory, metaphors are motivated and they are logical, but a given metaphor is not guaranteed to emerge within any particular culture. As I suggested in describing the second premise above, metaphoric reasoning is a solution to the biological problem of conceptualizing of an experience. The kinds of metaphors that are most relevant to understanding musical experience are those involving experience of something relatively abstract (invisible, intangible, and perhaps ephemeral) that is important to us and yet is difficult if not impossible to understand on its own terms (that is, literally). For example, one of the most pervasive conceptual metaphors in English is greater is higher, along with its complement, lesser is lower (in Lakoff and Johnson 1980: more is up and less is down), whereby we regularly understand greater quantities and magnitudes as “higher” quantities and magnitudes, as in higher prices, higher quality, and higher education. Most everyday uses of high and low reflect the same metaphoric reasoning, and the majority of definitions of high and low are based on the same pair of conceptual metaphors. As Lakoff and Johnson reason, this conceptual metaphor is motivated by the ancient and pervasive correlation of quantity and height in everyday experience: stacks and piles of objects, water in the river, and the growth of animals and plants commonly correlate more with increased height in a nonmetaphoric way.6 There are of course plenty of exceptions—more water also spreads outward, and many plants grow outward and/or downward—but the conceptual metaphor does not imply that all quantities and magnitudes are literally higher or lower, and it does not imply that all quantities and magnitudes are understood metaphorically as higher and Metaphor and Related Means of Reasoning  61

lower. Neither does it implicitly deny the existence of other metaphoric conceptualizations of quantities and magnitudes, such as the less common greater is wider, as in “expand your horizons” or “expand your vocabulary,” or greater is larger, as in “enormous” challenges. Instead, greater is higher merely refers to a given linguistic-cultural practice, with the assumption that there is some experiential motivation for the practice and that there is an underlying logic to metaphoric concepts such as high prices, high quality, and high notes (chap. 4). If you happen to be thinking that “expand your vocabulary,” “high prices,” and “high notes” do not seem to be metaphoric, or that they seem to be “dead” metaphors, this is also part of how metaphor works: the metaphoricity (metaphoric quality—more on this below) can be hidden while the underlying logic nevertheless structures understanding and meaning. 2. Objective and Subjective Bases Many metaphoric concepts are based on objectively observable features, such as the computer “mouse” by way of its appearance, or the “mourning” dove (Zenaida macroura and Columbina passerina) by way of its song. Many other examples, however, are based in small or large part on subjective-affective experience, as in the Holmes epigraph, where the effect of silence upon one’s affective state is compared to the effect of a healing balm. Similarly, the terms warm person and stiff drink, and the expression It hit me like a ton of bricks, refer more directly to their subjective effect than to objective properties of the external thing referred to: arguably, a “warm” person makes me feel something like warmth; a “stiff” drink has an impact that is something like being impacted by a solid object; and my response to news is occasionally something like being hit by something solid, heavy, and unexpected. While we can specify the objective properties of such stimuli, the logic of the metaphoric expressions is dually contingent on these properties and one’s subjective-affective experience of them. With the subjective factor in mind, we should then reconsider the example of the mourning dove. To the extent that aesthetically attending to the singing of a mourning dove involves mimetic subvocalization, its song not only sounds somewhat like mourning, it also feels like mourning, in the form of sobbing. This is one avenue of meaning. For those who have never overtly or covertly imitated the song of the mourning dove, this name might be based solely on objective comparison with the sound of mourning; or, as in the case of a friend of mine, the name might be misunderstood as the morning dove; and of course one might know the bird instead by one of its various other names (turtle dove, rain dove, etc.). 3. Categorization Metaphor can be understood as involving categories, recategorization, and metacategorization. In the case of poetic metaphors such as Juliet is the sun, the reasoning involves, in effect, proposing that something from one category is to be 62  Theoretical Background

understood as belonging to a different category: Romeo proposes that Juliet, who normally belongs to the category of humans, belongs instead to the category of suns (or the sun). Such imagery requires that there first be established categories, and this is what the target and source domains are. Like figuration in architecture and in music, poetic metaphors, similes, and analogies tend to draw attention to themselves, often or normally also demanding a bit of conscious cognitive work to make sense of the breach of category boundaries.7 By contrast, conceptual metaphors such as greater is higher normally do their work without drawing attention to themselves. Each conceptual metaphor is a systematic reconceptualization of members of one category (the target domain) in terms of another (the source domain), as in the general practice of conceptualizing quantities and magnitudes in terms of height (high prices, high quality, etc.). The result is a metacategory (in this case, nonvertical properties and relations conceptualized metaphorically as vertical properties and relations) which is referred to by a mnemonic such as greater is higher.8 Members of this particular metacategory include all of the metaphoric uses of high and low. Paradoxically, however, the establishment of a metacategory and the habitual use of its logic tend to hide the breach of category boundaries inherent in its members, with the result that the member expressions (such as “high prices”) can seem to be nonmetaphoric. The logic of such expressions continues to involve metaphor, regardless of their relative lack of salience as metaphor, and this hidden aspect is integral to their role in meaning construction. Binary Categorization and Category Boundaries One of the most ancient forms of categorization can be seen in the feeding behavior of bacteria and the binary categorization of food/not-food.9 Countless generations later, with our capacity to deliberate, we still rely on binary categorization for everyday survival, including edible/inedible, good/bad, and more general approach/avoid behaviors. One thing that is plain in such ancient categorizations is their dual contingency, involving not only the objective properties of the external stimulus, but also the stimulus’s effects upon us, especially in our affective response (e.g., desire, satisfaction, aversion, nausea, etc.). We rely upon and value binary categorization because it is, overall, both beneficial and efficient: efficient cognition is positively valenced (it feels good) because, overall, it is good for survival. However, binary categorization is also brute cognition, and in many instances its lack of subtlety has pernicious effects. The overall effectiveness of binary categorization contributes to two problems: the mistaken sense that categories in general are given and not constructed; and a preference for, and assumption of, definite category boundaries (see Lakoff 1987b). Both of these are reflected in, for example, the persistent notion of binary sexes and genders.10 The valorization of binary categorization and definite category boundaries exemplifies the fundamental relationship between affect and cognition: to consider subtler views of categorization requires an effort, which is less efficient, and which for many of us motivates an aversive response. Metaphor and Related Means of Reasoning  63

Larger cultural values that may come into play (e.g., gender roles, categories of “good music,” how to classify musical works according to form, etc.) likewise simultaneously involve affect and cognition. The emotional investment in debates on how best to understand things can be understood as reflecting the ancient correlation between categorization, affect, and survival. 4. Image Schemas Conceptual metaphor theory depends upon the notion of image schemas, as defined by Johnson, one of which is the path schema.11 Upon first reading the term path schema one might understandably picture some portion of a particular path or a generic kind of path, as if it were a kind of visible, spatial object; however, the path schema is an abstraction derived primarily from one’s enactments of path-related movement, including exertions, maintenance of balance, and the motivation to move along a path in the first place, all commonly combined with visual imagery.12 In a specific case such as the path to my local grocery store, my mental representation of this particular path combines visual, motor, and other sensory imagery along with the affective correlates of moving along this path, especially in connection with the desire that motivates my locomotion, the feeling of exerting and maintaining balance, and the satisfaction, however mundane it may be, that comes with reaching my goal. From my experiences, beginning in infancy, of moving along particular paths for various purposes, I implicitly distill the path schema: a series of locomotive actions, with temporal-locative starting and ending points, movement along a set of contiguous locations in between, and a sense of motion toward a goal, including especially the feeling of exerting to achieve a desired state (a desire to be in a particular location).13 One might draw or otherwise picture a schematic representation of the path schema from a third-person perspective, but as I argue in subsequent chapters, the primary relevance of this schema for music is in the first-person experience of moving along paths and in the quasi-first-person experience of listeners’ mimetic exertions, and these are not easily represented in fixed visual representations on the page.14 These same considerations apply to the other image schemas that we will examine. The term image in image schema thus does not refer specifically to a picture but to an internal representation, much as motor imagery and mimetic motor imagery refer to imagined action (representations in motor-related brain areas), except that the imagery related to image schemas includes more than motor imagery, as I have described above (following Johnson 1987). Musical Schemas Musical genres, forms, individual works, and various synchronic and diachronic features and components of these can be understood as kinds of schemas, and the question here is how these might relate to image schemas.15 The relevance of image schemas for music is usually understood such that image schemas structure 64  Theoretical Background

certain features of music, such as metaphoric paths, containers, verticality, and so forth.16 In addition to this perspective, we can also understand recurring musical schemas as approaching the nature of a special class of image schemas. For example, musical schemas such as musical forms (e.g., minuet and trio, 12-bar blues, etc.) and figuration (suspension, passing tone, etc.) are schemas of sounds+actions: although we can focus on the sounds, they are the sounds of performers’ actions. When we focus on the performance component, musical schemas become action schemas: things that we do to realize a given musical form or figuration. For example, the experience of performing a musical schema such as 12-bar blues then includes the affective correlates of playing and singing in a particular manner (Delta blues, Chicago blues, etc.) in realizing the recurring 12-bar pattern. Because such musical schemas rarely if ever generalize beyond the domain of music, it would be unhelpful to think of these as image schemas, but it is useful to think of them as functioning similarly in emerging from and organizing embodied activity. We can distinguish several levels of action that inform musical schemas. At a global level of musical forms, the actions are relatively abstract: a minuet and trio involves a pattern of repetition within which many of the generic actions are unspecified—themes, motives, figuration, etc. Within this form is the metric schema of triple meter and the manner in which one will perform rhythms—usually straight (neither swung nor inégale) and with little or no rubato. In a 12-bar blues the 12-bar pattern of repetition can subsume implicitly specified chord changes (e.g., folk blues versus a generic jazz blues) and treatment of rhythm. Local-level schemas include every embellishment for which we have a name: suspension, portamento, scoop, side-slip (side-step), etc. All levels are patterns of sound-producing actions.17 As it happens, in some cases these musical schemas are in fact conceptualized in terms of more general schemas, such as steps and leaps, which correspond to the more generic step and leap image schemas. In the bigger picture we might refer to these as action schemas, as distinct from the container schema for example, but for reasons that I explain next it can be helpful to refer to them as exertion schemas. Exertion Schemas Every recurring action can be understood as a realization of a particular action schema, such as turning a doorknob, stirring coffee in a cup, or tying shoes laces. The same applies to music-making actions, including those that realize musical events known as steps and leaps. As a musical concept, leap refers to both the action (means) and the sonic product (end), and the leap schema, in musical contexts, integrates both action and sound, even if we can choose to focus on one or the other when talking about music. The main benefit of focusing on the action element is that it helps account for how a term that originally applied, and still applies, to the physical leaps of humans and other animals, is an apt description of a class of musical events. Metaphor and Related Means of Reasoning  65

The leap schema in music is a subset of the more general leap schema, which is realized in nonmetaphoric acts of leaping and which is thus an action schema. However, since action schema may connote specific actions, the somewhat more generic term exertion schema can be helpful for understanding the extension of the term leap to music. The physical leaps of gazelles and humans are realizations of the generic leap schema. Each specific type of leap is a realization of a specific action schema— the jeté and echappé in ballet, practical leaps over mud puddles, and so forth— all of which share the more generic exertion schema of leap. Since physical leaps are a form of locomotion, the leap schema for locomotive leaps includes a starting point, end point, space in between, and trajectory—in other words, the leap schema is a special case of the path schema. However, deliberate human leaps also include the less visible or invisible components of desire, planning, exertion, and some measure of satisfaction/dissatisfaction (evaluation). While musical leaps may have spatial and visible correlates in their production (in the visible actions of performers), and while they may be visually representable in notation, the core of the event is the sound and the feeling of some kind of effort involved in producing it. The feelings of desire, planning, exertion, and degree of satisfaction are integral in the source domain of actual leaps, and they are integral in the target domain of musical leaps (prior to metaphoric conceptualization). These shared components motivate and ground the logic of conceptualizing music metaphorically in terms of leaps, and the sound of a musical leap is named for the feeling of enacting a locomotive leap.18 When we add the mimetic exertions of listeners, the physical basis of the logic becomes relevant for listeners as well as performers.19 5. Etymology, Polysemy, and Homonymy The meaning of a word expands as it is applied to more and more objects and actions.20 Such expansion (or extension) can involve literal or metaphoric processes, and in both cases this eventually produces additional categories, which are new definitions of the original term. In some cases the new definition maintains the original spelling, while in other cases the etymological relationship is obscured as the extension crosses the linguistic boundaries. The latter case is evident in the following terms: razor, corrode, rodent, rasp, erase, and tabula rasa, all of which relate back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *red-, to scrape, scratch, or gnaw (that is, to scrape with the teeth).21 At the surface today these terms are distinct categories and appear to be unrelated or only incidentally related. Beneath the surface, however, they all share the ancient schema of red-, which involves a generic action of something like scraping or scratching and the wearing away of a surface. Another example is repeat, which ultimately traces back to the PIE root *pet-, to rush or fly, and is thereby related to moto perpetuo, petition, compete, competency, petulant (to rush at), pterodactyl, pinna (the outer 66  Theoretical Background

ear), and feather. Superficially, a musical repetition has nothing to do with pterodactyls, but they are united by a sense of motion. When two terms share the same spelling, the question arises as to whether we have a case of homonymy, which refers to multiple unrelated meanings of a word, or polysemy, which refers to multiple related meanings of a word.22 A classic example that is intended to demonstrate homonymy is bank, which refers to both the financial institution (bank 1) and to the bank of a river (bank 2). At the surface these are plainly distinct and apparently unrelated, but bank 1 comes from the word for the bench at which moneychangers once worked, much like a bank teller’s counter today, and its etymology is an offshoot of the etymology that gave us bank 2 (river bank). One might want to say that bank is homonymous at the surface and polysemous beneath the surface; however, it is important not to think that the two meanings are related only historically. Each still shares the schema of a lateral physical structure that delineates a separation by location, and according to the kinds of actions afforded by both the physical separator itself (on which things could be placed) and the kinds of actions afforded on either side. Such action-related considerations apply to the *red- and *pet- examples above, and to polysemous terms generally. The Rarity of Homonymy and Neologisms Genuine homonymy is relatively rare; multiple meanings of a word are more often polysemous extensions of a shared basic concept. This situation is consistent with the general cognitive process of comparing new experiences with familiar experiences. Occasionally, however, a genuinely new word (neologism) is called for, as in the case of grok, from Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The reason for going outside the English and even Indo-European lexicon is made clear by the definition: “[They] seem to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that observer interacts with observed through the process of observation. ‘Grok’ means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man” (Heinlein 1961, 213–214).23 Only a genuinely new word could point to the intended distinction from the cognitive-linguistic habits of earthlings, and only an exceptional, and in this case fictional, circumstance would generate the need. 6. Metaphors and Conceptual Blends If metaphor involves conceptualizing one thing in terms of another, a different way to understand this process is in terms of conceptual blending theory: instead of a hierarchical relationship between a target domain and a source domain, both domains contribute to a third, blended domain.24 We can compare metaphor Metaphor and Related Means of Reasoning  67

[Figure 3-1: Cross-Domain Mappings for Juliet-as-the-Sun]

Target Domain: Juliet

Source Domain: The Sun

terrestrial body

ß

celestial body

location on the balcony

ß

location in the sky

warmth via blood flow

ß

warmth via radiation

uniqueness for Romeo

ß

uniqueness for earth

overwhelmingness

ß

overwhelmingness

person of desire

ß

object of desire

potential danger

ß

potential danger

Untargeted Features: color, shape, size, etc.

Unmapped Features: color, shape, size, and masculine and Apollonian associations, etc.

Figure 3.1. Cross-domain mappings for Juliet-as-the-Sun.

theory and blending theory via Romeo’s description of Juliet (act 2, scene 2): “But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” Figure 3.1 shows one set of cross-domain mappings for Juliet-as-the-sun.25 Notice that figure 3.1 includes combinations of objective features and features of Romeo’s subjective experience. Even the objective features, such as Juliet’s position above and out of reach, matter because of their effect upon Romeo, while the hyperbole of comparing her to the sun could be said to give us an apt description of the feeling of first love. The unmapped features reflect the unshared properties of the two categories: Juliet (young female) and the sun.26 Granted, this may seem a lot of analysis for Romeo’s fleeting expression, but the analytical principle is the point. It is neither necessary nor likely that inventors and users of metaphoric expressions are explicitly aware of the logical details of a metaphor, but this kind of analysis reveals the underlying logic. Let us now consider Romeo’s description from the perspective of the theory of conceptual blending, where Juliet and the sun are each input domains that contribute to a blended domain, as shown in figure 3.2.27 A conceptual blend in effect shows the product of metaphoric reasoning: Juliet and the sun remain distinct entities, while we are simultaneously offered an image of a chimera of the two.28 The picture of a blended space is probably closer to a conscious understanding of the linguistic expression (“Juliet is the sun”) as something that intuitively makes sense while remaining paradoxical and obviously not literal. However, the hierarchy between the two domains, and the specification of corresponding features shown as the cross-domain mappings, are crucial, and conceptual metaphor theory shows these details more directly than does conceptual blending theory. The hierarchy between the two domains matters because normally we are trying to understand something (the target domain) that is difficult or impossible 68  Theoretical Background

[Figure 3-2: Conceptual Blend of Juliet and the Sun]

The Sun

Juliet

inanimate object, radiates heat/light, unique & special, etc.

young, human, female, etc.

Juliet-as-the-Sun young female who/that radiates light & heat, is uniquely special, etc.

Figure 3.2. Conceptual blend of Juliet and the Sun.

to understand literally. With Juliet-as-the-sun, Romeo is not simply trying to understand the observable features of Juliet’s anatomy; he is trying to make sense of what he feels in response to Juliet. As I will try to demonstrate in the coming chapters, much the same applies when we conceptualize music, which is to say musical experience. 7. Levels and Kinds of Metaphor It can be helpful to distinguish the following three kinds of metaphor according to their degree of salience as metaphor: novel, conventional, and conceptual. The first two are temporally related, while the third is of a different sort. Novel and Conventional Metaphors Novel metaphors are those that are deliberately created, such as Juliet-as-the-sun, and are appropriately referred to as poetic metaphors. These metaphoric expressions stand out as metaphors, and they usually draw attention to the creativeness of the speaker or writer. Novel metaphors for music appear in concert reviews and occasionally in idiosyncratic performance instructions, as in Debussy’s Très égal—comme une buée irisée (very even—like an iridescent mist). Conventional metaphors are once-novel metaphors that have become part of our general vocabulary, such as She’s the apple of my eye, the various animal metaphors for humans, and the musical example of standing on the dominant (Caplin 1998). These metaphors do not have the luster of novel metaphors, but they often remain obviously metaphoric. However, in many cases their metaphoric nature becomes hidden, to varying extents, through repeated use. The majority of our musical concepts are of this sort, including style indications (swing), formal indications (coda, or tail), and basic concepts like step and leap, for which Guck (1991) has coined the term music-literal: we treat such terms as if we are speaking literally. Metaphor and Related Means of Reasoning  69

The practice of treating metaphoric terms as music-literal terms is a practical convenience in the construction of higher levels of meaning, but it risks disguising the role of embodied metaphoric reasoning in the foundations of such constructions. Even when the metaphoric basis of such terms is acknowledged, the value of such acknowledgment arguably corresponds to the extent to which one understands the role of performance-related exertions and the cognitive-affective dimension of these exertions. My arguments for this proposition are in the subsequent chapters. Metaphoricity The temporal-historical process whereby some novel metaphors become conventional is sometimes known metaphorically as sedimentation; hence, “sedimented” metaphors. The process is also conceptualized metaphorically in terms of gradual death, the end result of which are “dead” metaphors.29 The temporalhistorical process, however one conceptualizes it, creates one of two dimensions of metaphoricity, or the degree to which the metaphoric nature of a term or expression is salient—novel metaphors have a high degree of metaphoricity and conventional metaphors have a low degree. The second dimension involves the difference between the two domains in the first place: the more similar the two domains, the less an expression will seem to be particularly metaphoric from the start. Debussy’s “iridescent mist” presumably had a relatively high degree of metaphoricity originally, which it maintains today. But from the perspective under consideration here, greater metaphoricity does not correlate with greater significance. As conceptual metaphor theory emphasizes in other terms, the lesser metaphoricity of conventional metaphors often correlates with their more pervasive role in structuring our thinking. Conceptual Metaphors Conceptual metaphors implicitly underlie all novel and conventional meta­phors, which is to say that any metaphoric term or expression is an expression of some conceptual metaphor. Identifying the conceptual metaphor that underlies a particular expression can be challenging, but once this is done, one can then see the logical structure in which a particular expression takes part. For example, consider the term high frequency in reference to sound waves. Since the number of cycles per second (frequency) is literally a quantity, this term is a metaphoric expression of greater is higher (greater frequencies are higher frequencies), which is a special case of states are locations (states [of greater quantity] are locations [of greater height]), which in turn is a special case of the generic metaphor abstract is concrete, and which in turn is a special case of the most generic form a IS b. Within this hierarchy, each conceptual metaphor at each level underlies its own particular set of conceptual metaphors. Figures II.1 and II.2 in appendix II show a selection of this hierarchy, featuring the relationship between states are loca70  Theoretical Background

tions, change is motion (change-of-state is change-of-location), and greater is higher.30 Like greater is higher, the states-are-locations and change-is-motion metaphors have a literal foundation in ancient experience, where the concepts of states and change presumably concerned concrete locations and literal motion, and they have a literal foundation in the concrete-to-abstract development of individual minds. These original spatial correlates of states and change participate in the conceptualization of nonspatial states, where emotional, financial, developmental, and musical states are conceptualized as locations: I can be “in” a good mood, “in” debt, “in” adolescence, and “in” a major or minor key, and I can be “in” multiple metaphoric locations simultaneously. Any change in emotional, financial, or musical states is then conceptualized as motion (change of location), so that one can “fall into” and “get out of” a funk (a state of depression), “get into” and “out of” debt, and “move into (modulate into)” and “out of” the key of B-flat. Prepositions (under, over, behind, etc.) originate as literal terms and are subsequently extended to include metaphoric state-locations, including prefixes such as ex- (out of) and ad- (toward). The sedimented state of most metaphoric uses of prepositions reflects the depth of the role of states are locations and change is motion.31 As I explain in chapters 4–6, musical states and changes of state are literal, but since they are also relatively abstract, we regularly conceptualize them metaphorically in terms of locations and motion. This musical practice takes part in the more general practice of conceptualizing states and changes-of-state in terms of locations and motion, which in turn is part of the overall cognitive structure of conceptual metaphors (of which figures II.1 and II.2 in appendix II show a portion). 8. Logical Entailments of Conceptual Metaphors In metaphoric reasoning we import (transfer) the logic of the source domain into the target domain. For example, the conceptual metaphor greater is higher correlates quantity with height, and in linguistic expressions that reflect this metaphor one can infer the implicit theory (or folk theory) that to increase is to raise (or ascend) and to decrease is to lower (or descend); hence, we have prices and melodies that metaphorically rise and fall. (This implicit theory is also based in part on change is motion, but I am focusing on greater is higher for simplicity’s sake.) The notion that prices “rise” and “fall” is a logical entailment of the metaphor because it is part of the logic of the source domain. Prior to this metaphoric conceptualization, we implicitly ask how we might understand relations among abstract quantities; there are no high or low prices until we conceptualize them via metaphor, and once we do, we also gain the metaphoric manner of rise and fall, including speed and angle (prices that jump or fall sharply), duration (how long prices have been rising or falling), and pattern of change (fluctuating prices vs. stable prices). Metaphor and Related Means of Reasoning  71

In considering the logical entailments of a given metaphor, it is necessary to distinguish what is metaphoric from what is native to the target domain. For example, while rise and fall and melodic contour are logical entailments of the importation of greater is higher, any effect on listener embodiment is another matter. This is because musical experience already involves performance-related exertions for both performers and mimetically engaged listeners, prior to metaphoric conceptualization in terms of motion. So, while a sense of exertion may be imported along with a spatial conceptualization, it would be a special use of the term to describe this as a “logical entailment,” since the term normally refers to features that become part of the target domain only as a result of the cross-domain mapping. In this case, not only are exertion and relaxation already integral to the target domain, they are part of what motivates and grounds conceptualization of music in terms of locations and motion. 9. Nominalization and Verbification Nominalization is like metaphor in that it involves conceptualizing one category in terms of another, but it will be more helpful to think of nominalization and metaphor as distinct processes. Nominalization refers to our tendency to conceptualize actions as things: to objectify actions or, loosely speaking, to turn verbs into nouns.32 Music-related examples include step, leap, beat, repeat, and many other examples that are both actions and objects, or verbs and nouns. The objectification of actions goes hand in hand with categorization of actions, as when throwing becomes a throw or repeating becomes a repeat. The near opposite of nominalization is verbification, which involves conceptualizing a thing or a property as an action, as in the verbs mail (originally a noun) and sweeten (from the adjective sweet). Verbifications may be less common than nominalizations, and they tend to be marked, or conspicuous, as in the term verbify itself.33 A musical example is the verb trumpet (to proclaim or announce, derived from the noun trumpet), but other candidates, like sound (e.g., to sound the alarm) and bow (the act of bowing a stringed instrument), actually originate as actions (PIE *swen-, to sound, and PIE *bheug-, to bend). Given the central role of music-making actions throughout most of the history of music, and given the relatively abstract nature of the sonic products, we might expect that most music terms would originally refer to actions. Nominalization and verbification refer to two aspects of experience: being and doing. Examples such as step, leap, and beat always reference both action and object (nominalized action), even if a particular linguistic utterance, or a larger cultural practice, highlights one or the other. Both the action and the action-object are integral parts of the whole; and while this may seem obvious once recognized, there is nevertheless a tendency for discussions of music to privilege the objective component. An awareness of the relationship between sound, action, and the multivalence of words can help keep the relevant components in balance. 72  Theoretical Background

10. Anthropomorphization Anthropomorphization, or personification, involves attributing humanlike properties to nonhuman entities, including inanimate entities (e.g., “angry” seas), animal pets, and music. As with nominalization, anthropomorphization is like metaphor, but it is helpful to distinguish these processes. In the case of music, personification is manifest in descriptions of music as an entity with volition, as when we describe notes as “wanting” to move in one way or another. When we attribute volition to music, we implicitly (or explicitly) conceptualize music as an agent, whose nature can be specified to varying extents. The question at hand concerns how and why we do this, and here I offer a sketch of a three-part answer in connection with mimetic and nonmimetic engagement.34 First is a nonmimetic tendency to focus on the sounds, separating them from their physical sources. Second is mimetic comprehension of the sounds, distinct from the specific actions that produce them, and the resulting feeling of what it would be like to make the sounds and/or to perform analogous exertions. The result of such mimetic engagement is the experience of a subjectivity (a way of doing and being) within the fictional (imaginary; constructed) world of the music, manifest specifically in the sense that we move in certain ways through certain kinds of spaces. Third, we nevertheless maintain our ongoing identity as listeners, separate from the fictional musical world, knowing that we are not actually doing and being what the music invites us to do and be, which creates the sense that the imagined actions are those of an entity that is neither the performer nor the listener.35 From this perspective, the musical agent is the residue of one’s mimetic immersion, which is continually renewed throughout a listening experience. Hearing-as It is also possible to think of personification as an example of hearing-as: we hear the music as the actions of an agent. According to the mimetic hypoth­esis, however, such hearing-as is actually a combination of nonmimetic hearing and mimetic participation, so that the mimetic account sketched above is already implicit in a hearing-as account. This assertion is consistent with the normally hidden nature of mimetic motor imagery (MMI). Hearing-as can apply to any analogical or metaphorical conceptualization of musical sounds: one hears music as, for example, motion through space, or more specifically as the motion of some agent through some kind of environment.36 But to the extent that this term prioritizes hearing over mimetic participation, it disguises the role of mimetic comprehension. It would be more accurate to speak of feeling-as, understanding-as, or experiencing-as, but more important than any hyphenated term is the point that, while hearing-as honors the roles of sound and hearing, it does so at a cost of obscuring the bodily engagement of listeners and its role in conceptualizing what is heard and felt.

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11. Metaphor in Human Cognition The proposition that metaphor is a normal feature of human cognition requires evidence of the use of metaphor beyond English and its Indo-European language family. The proposition that metaphoric uses of verbs, as in the expression kick the bucket, are actually grounded in ancient physical action such as kicking likewise requires evidence. In this section I consider both of these in turn. Evolution of Metaphoric Reasoning In the evolution of our species, and in the development of individual persons, cognition begins with the concrete and immediate and gradually extends to the abstract and less immediate. In this expansion there is an asymmetry such that the abstract is, by and large, compared to and conceptualized in terms of the concrete. This is reflected in the etymological structure of English (Grady 1997), the Indo-European language family to which English belongs (Kövecses 2002, Sweetser 1990), and other language families of the world (Kövecses 2000, 2005). Alongside this general pattern there are many exceptions, but the overall concrete-to-abstract pattern is plain. If metaphoric conceptualization of the abstract in terms of the concrete is a general feature of human cognition, then we should expect to find at least a few fundamental conceptual metaphors that are shared by otherwise unrelated languages. Here I describe the cross-cultural metaphors happy is up, states are locations, and change is motion. Concrete and immediate experience is more directly tied to physical actions, such as grasping objects and walking along paths, while the “abstract and less immediate” is more mental. For example, for most of our evolution all paths were literal: there were no seven steps to heaven or ten steps to a better you; and while we may be said to have been on the path of enlightenment all the while, the conceptualization of this and other metaphoric paths is very recent. Similarly, all locations were actual spatial locations: while one could experience panic or calm, these were not conceptualized in terms of being “in” a state of panic or calm. And all higher things were literally higher: there was good quality but not high quality, and great stress but not high stress. From these premises, we should expect to find this concrete-to-abstract pattern reflected in human languages around the world, but we should not expect to find that everyone uses the same metaphors. As it happens, however, there are at least a handful of basic crosscultural metaphors. English, Mandarin (Chinese), and Hungarian belong to three language families that have been distinct for thousands of years, and yet each appears to have the conceptual metaphor happy is up (or positive affective state is up) (Kövecses 2002, 2005).37 Examples in English include expressions related to feeling “up” or “high” (or “down” or “low”), as in being on cloud nine and one’s spirits soaring (or being down in the dumps and feeling overwhelmed). In Chinese (Yu 1995): 74  Theoretical Background

Ta hen gao-xing. he very high spirit He is very high-spirited/happy. Ta xing congcong de. he spirit rise-rise His spirits are rising and rising. / He’s pleased and excited. Zhe-xia tiqi le wo-de xingzhi. this-moment raise my mood This time it lifted my mood/interest.

And in Hungarian (Kövecses 2002): Ez a film feldobott. this the film up-threw-me This film gave me a high. / This film made me happy. Majd elszáll a boldogságtól. almost always-flies-he/she the happiness-from He/she is on cloud nine.

With regard to this apparently shared conceptual metaphor, Kövecses asks, “How is it possible for such different languages and cultures to conceptualize happiness metaphorically in such similar ways? Three answers to the question suggest themselves: (1) it has happened by accident; (2) one language borrowed the metaphors from another; and (3) there is some universal motivation for the metaphors to emerge in these cultures” (2002, 65). The possible influence of English on other languages certainly deserves serious consideration, but while its influence around the world is extensive, as an explanation in this context it competes against something that is shared more deeply and that has been shared for a much longer time: basic human physiology and its integrated cognitive processes. Let me emphasize basic. There are significant differences in embodied experiences between any two people, and even for oneself during the course of one’s life, let alone between people in different cultures. But all humans must, for example, negotiate gravity, maintain balance, and metabolize food, and while the specific details of emotional expression may differ, all humans experience fear, joy, and various other emotions.38 The conceptual metaphor happy is up is a special case of emotional states are vertical locations (to experience an emotional state is to experience being in a vertical location), which in turn is a special case of states are locations. To the extent that emotional states correlate with literal verticality in their physical manifestation in posture and/or facial expressions, happy is up has a relatively low degree of metaphoricity: the literal upward pull of a smile, for example, correlates with the use of “up” to describe happiness (or positive affective state).39 A fuller investigation of each of these languages would likely reveal disanalogies in certain details, but the main point is that, in three distinct Metaphor and Related Means of Reasoning  75

language families (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Uralic), the domain of affect is conceptualized metaphorically in terms of a spatial domain. As with happy is up, any other indigenous metaphor shared by languages from distinct language families would likely have to be relatively generic and thus have a low metaphoricity. Additional examples of metaphors shared by Mandarin and English can be found in Kövecses (2005), based on Yu (1998), including two that are fundamental to conceptualizations of musical motion and space: states are locations and change is motion. From one perspective it is remarkable that something so fundamental to each language is also shared, despite the ancient divergence of the two languages and the great independence of the two cultures until recent decades. But from another perspective it is perhaps not surprising at all, because at issue are basic human experiences. The identification of cross-cultural conceptual metaphors takes nothing away from the differences in their particular expressions in different languages. Like the diversity of mammalian species, the relationship between shared low-level features and unique surface expressions is itself something to marvel at. Bodily Comprehension of Metaphoric Concepts Metaphoric concepts in which the source domain is physical action, such as a leap that one might make in reasoning, theoretically draw upon our experience of actual leaping in order to understand more abstract domains (such as reasoning). If this is indeed the case, it is reasonable to ask whether and to what extent an expression such as a leap in logic might activate motor imagery related to literal leaping. On the one hand, Aziz-Zadeh et al. (2006) and Raposo et al. (2009) investigated this proposition and found no activation of motor imagery. On the other hand, the findings discussed in Rohrer (2005) and Lacey et al. (2012) indicate activation of motor-related imagery, which is more consistent with the approach to metaphor under consideration here. Note that this issue concerns top-down processes, from language to embodiment, which is the complement of bottom-up processes such as mimetic motor imagery (MMI) motivating linguistic conceptualization. In a top-down manner, reference to a musical leap, for example, theoretically imports our everyday experience of leaping into our understanding of music. In a bottom-up manner, mimetic comprehension of music theoretically motivates metaphoric conceptualization of certain events as leaps, and linguistic references to musical leaps already refer not only to sounds but also to the experience of performing and vicariously performing (via MMI) the musical phenomenon in question. In underscoring the physical correlates of musical concepts, I also want to acknowledge that there may well be contexts in which we comprehend a verbal or written reference to concepts, such as a musical leap, in a manner that is dissociated from the relevant action(s) and even from the relevant sound. This would be analogous to comprehending a reference to a plié without feeling what it is like to perform one, or a reference to coffee without imagining its smell or the feeling of sipping and swallowing it. Accordingly, we can imagine a continuum of 76  Theoretical Background

the extent to which action experience informs understanding of music-related nouns—but with the caveat that motor imagery can and does occur without awareness. 12. The Human Voice as a Source Domain In the metaphor that we are about to explore, one domain within the larger domain of music (instrumental sounds) is conceptualized metaphorically in terms of another domain within music (vocal sounds). The conceptual metaphor here, instrumental sounds are vocal sounds, is unlike the majority of metaphors that we have been considering, in that both domains are more or less equally abstract and involve the physical production of invisible, intangible, and ephemeral sounds. Since the two domains are equally abstract, we might expect there to be no clear basis for determining a source-target hierarchy; however, in the way that we normally talk about both domains, the voice is clearly the source domain— that is, overall, instrumental sounds are conceptualized in terms of vocal sounds. As I explain below, we can understand this as reflecting the relative ancestry of the voice and the significance of mimetic subvocalization in music conceptualization generally. If we examine the vocabulary for describing instrumental music in English, German, and the Romance languages, we find a clear pattern of vocal descriptions of instrumental sounds (see figure 3.3).40 This pattern is asymmetric because, while vocal music and vocalizations in general certainly can be described in terms of instrumental sounds, the overall pattern is from the voice onto instrumental sounds. In other words, the human voice is the source domain and instrumental music is the target domain, and the conceptual metaphor is instrumental sounds are vocal sounds. As with conceptual metaphor in general, this metaphor does not assert that instrumental sounds are always conceptualized in vocal terms, and it does not assert that vocal sounds are not sometimes conceptualized in instrumental terms; it simply refers to a pervasive practice. We can understand the asymmetry of this relationship in two related ways. In one, the situation reflects a plausible historical priority: If the human voice was the first pitched musical medium in human history, then it would have been available as a basis for comparison as other media (instruments) were invented. The other way of understanding this asymmetry involves recognizing the overall importance of the voice in daily production and perception of communicative sounds. If communicative sounds are comprehended via mimetic subvocalization, it is plausible to imagine the extension of this perceptual apparatus to the comprehension of musical sounds. (From an alternative perspective in which musical sounds are subsumed within the category of communicative sounds, the proposition simply concerns communicative sounds generally.) The evidence for the mimetic hypothesis supports such a conjecture, and the cross-domain mappings in figure 3.3 reflect the combined aspects of nonmimetic sounds-likevocalizations and the mimetic feels-like-vocalizations. Metaphor and Related Means of Reasoning  77

[Figure 3-3: Mappings of the Human Voice onto Instrumental Music]

Target Domain: Instrumental Sounds instrumental music instrumental melodies playing very quietly playing quietly jazz trumpets in highest register rock guitars solos (high, loud) notes sounding clearly gospel/blues/jazz solos mechanically quieted instruments playing as if speaking a single polyphonic part modifying hammers, pipes, chords sets of strings played as one

Source Domain: Vocal Sounds ß ß ß ß ß ß ß ß ß ß ß ß ß

melody songlike (cantabile, cantilena) whispering voice (sotto voce) medium voice (mezza voce) screaming screaming speaking testifying muted voice (con sordino) reciting voice (recitativo) voice voicing choir

Figure 3.3. Mappings of the human voice onto instrumental music.

Still, one might embrace the historical priority and yet see the mimetic part of the story as superfluous. This would have to be reconciled, however, with the evidence for the general role of mimetic subvocalization. Principles 7 and 16 of the mimetic hypothesis and appendix I, on absolute pitch, are pertinent. Melody I want to use the example of melody to emphasize something about the relationship between mimetic comprehension and metaphoric conceptualization. The first mapping in figure 3.3 indicates that melody is originally a vocal term, and that instrumental “melody” is thus metaphoric. If it seems strange to assert that we are speaking metaphorically when we speak of instrumental melodies, this is because the term metaphor applies to different levels of metaphoricity. Melody here is a sedimented metaphor (or a music-literal term), but it still involves two distinct domains of experience: singing and playing music. Its sedimented status, and the similarity of the two domains in the first place, might seem to make this issue a matter of only etymological interest.41 But if mimetic subvocalization is a normal part of how we comprehend instrumental music, then in effect we enact or live the metaphor because mimetic subvocalization transforms nonvocal sounds into a form of vocal sounds. The various other voice-related terms applied to instrumental music, such as bel canto in reference to Chopin’s music, the Lieder ohne Worte (Songs Without Words) of Mendelssohn, and instrumental “arias” by Bach, Beethoven, and Franck, are extensions of the same metaphoric process.42 Similarly, a voice-based performance instruction such as cantabile means to play in a manner that emulates the quality of singing, where the “quality of singing” includes not only the quality of the sounds but also what it would feel like to sing the melody that one is playing. 78  Theoretical Background

The common exhortation to “sing” in instrumental lessons and master classes reflects the same reasoning. 13. Kinds of Metaphors in Music Conceptualization We have already considered the hierarchy of conceptual metaphors in relation to greater is higher (see appendix II), and this hierarchy offers one way of classifying the diverse linguistics expressions that we use in talking and writing about music. Here I connect this kind of hierarchy to more traditional ways of classifying metaphors.43 Spitzer (2004) has explored how descriptions of classical music favored pictorial metaphors in the Renaissance, linguistic metaphors in the Age of Reason, and organic metaphors in the nineteenth century. In conceptual metaphor theory these would be music is painting, music is language, and music is organic life, and we could specify the underlying logic in terms of the specific cross-domain mappings. For example, the elements of language that map onto music correspond to the specific analogical terms, such as “phrase,” and the elements that are unmapped correspond to the disanalogies. But consider the question of what, precisely, a linguistic phrase is and how its specific details map onto the thing known as a musical “phrase”—and respond to this question without relying on metaphor in specifying any of the mappings. In general, the degree to which we are able or unable to do this corresponds to the nature of our understanding of the descriptions we use. In addition to the pictorial, linguistic, and organic metaphors, we also rely upon conceptualizations of music-as-object, music-as-system (music with functional components), music-as-agent (animate or inanimate), music-as-narrative, and so forth. In each case, however, there are more fundamental and generic processes on which these depend, particularly mimetic participation and its affective consequences, and the relationship between these and the conceptual metaphor states are locations and its more specific forms, greater is higher and change is motion. The analyses in chapters 4–6 specify some of the details of these fundamental processes. 14. Representing Action+Sound with Notation Staff notation is, in part, a visual representation of metaphoric pitch height and musical motion. But staff notation also indicates the actions required to realize the specified sounds: for performers, staff notation is a set of instructions in what to do, which is to perform actions that will produce more or less specific sounds. From this perspective, staff notation primarily represents action+sound, and secondarily represents conceptualizations of action+sound in terms of height, motion, specific intervals, and so forth. With this in mind we should ask to what extent this performance-related meaning applies when one is reading staff notation with no intention of perMetaphor and Related Means of Reasoning  79

forming the indicated music. It might seem that one could simply “hear,” in the form of nonmotor auditory imagery, the sounds represented on the page; however, the findings in Brodsky et al. (2008) suggest that this might be an illusion. The study focused on comprehension of what was read, with no intention to perform what was read, and yet both subvocal and manual motor activity occurred. If this is the norm, and yet it nevertheless seems that music reading can be done in the absence of performance-related motor imagery, we can understand this illusion as informed by a habit of focusing on abstract, metaphoric relations among sounds—that is, the secondary features represented by notation. Another way to understand the situation is that it is possible, and sometimes useful, to focus more on the sounds than on the actions, and the issue is simply a matter of balance. 15. The Reach of Metaphor You may have noticed that the discussion of metaphor in this chapter has itself somewhat tautologically relied upon a good number of metaphors. John Locke put the more general problem this way: So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with. If you have not noticed this, you are more likely to do so in the next three chapters as we examine some spatial metaphors and look for nonmetaphorical alternatives. To prepare the way, I want to examine the metaphoric basis of the terms metaphor, conceptualize, and domain. Metaphor comes from Greek meta-pherein, to carry across (across-carry), and it is still used in its literal sense today, as in the logo on a Greek moving van, ΜΕTΑΦΟΡΕΣ (METAPHORS), in a photo shown in Deutscher (2005). The cognitive practice in question involves conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another—and here we already encounter sedimented metaphors before we even get to the word in question: conceptualize, ultimately from PIE *kap-, to grasp, and domain, from Latin domus house. These fundamental concepts (“graspings”) are founded on the even more ancient and fundamental experiences of grasping objects and being in physical locations, and the concept of metaphor is similar. The term metaphor refers to the practice of using the logic of one kind of experience to make sense of another experience. The search for a way to conceptualize this practice is the search for an analog in prior experience, and we find one in the concrete experience of carrying something from one place to another; hence, Greek meta-phor and Latin trans-ferre. In conceptual metaphor theory this becomes the analogously metaphoric term cross-domain mapping.44 I am not sure what a literal, nonspatial description of the practice of metaphoric reasoning might be, and the difficulty in imagining an alternative is exemplary of the fundamental role of metaphor in cognition. In general and in the case of music, it is not the fact of our reliance upon metaphoric reasoning that I find interesting but rather the processes that produce our metaphoric concepts. This is reflected in the analyses in the coming chapters. 80  Theoretical Background

Conceptualizing Experience One implication of the mimetic hypothesis is that musical imagery is a combination of auditory, motor, and often visual imagery. Since conceptualization depends on imagery, musical concepts integrate auditory, motor, and visual imagery. In principle, the same applies to metaphoric conceptualization: what is conceptualized is not simply musical sounds but musical actions, whose performance we can sometimes see and whose products we hear. One of the benefits of acknowledging the motor component of perception and imagery is that actions have an affective dimension, so that what we conceptualize includes the feeling of exerting in various intramodal and cross-modal ways. With this in mind, and with the basics of conceptual metaphor theory laid out, we are now in a position to consider how this plays out in the conceptualization of musical motion and space.

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Part two Spatial Conceptions

4 Pitch Height . . . But this rough magic I here abjure; and when I have requir’d Some heavenly music (which even now I do) To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fadoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611) V/1, Prospero

“Pitch height” refers to the apparent height of musical pitches: for the most part, height is not a perceptible property of sounds, but the sense that melodies ascend and descend, and that some notes are higher or lower than others, is both strongly motivated and logical. It is the sense and logic of fictional and illusory height that is at issue in this chapter.1 We can begin this exploration by asking what is high about high notes. Various answers may come to mind, perhaps having to do with frequencies, staff notation, and so forth, all of which are part of the story and none of which is the answer. In this chapter I describe ten things that are high about high notes. Among these ten, some involve literal height but the extent of their relevance is questionable, while others are metaphoric but their logic needs explanation. This mixture of literal and metaphoric sources implies that the binary question of whether or not pitch height is metaphoric is misleading; it is partly metaphoric and partly literal. There are two key elements in the following account: the conceptual metaphor greater is higher (chap. 3) and mimetic subvocalization (chaps. 1–3). Tables 4.1 and 4.2 (pp. 102–103) offer both a preview and a summary of the gist of this account. The account itself is in two parts: preliminary considerations and analysis. The preliminaries include (1) an introductory note on the history of the concept of pitch height, (2) a discussion of the general metaphoric use of “high” and “low” in English, and (3) a discussion of historical and contemporary correlations between singing, exertion and effort, and pitch height. The analysis includes (4) a description of the ten sources, (5) specification of the cross-domain mappings, and (6) a consideration of some of the implications of this account.2

On the History of Pitch Height in the West A number of scholars have pointed out that pitch height is a Western concept. Zbikowski (1997, 2002) notes that some cultures use the terms young and old (the Suyà of South America) or small and large (Balinese and Javanese) to distinguish pitches. Ashley (2004) identifies several source domains in African cultures that involve continuous and categorical attributes of objects and persons (such as size, age, and gender), and family relationships between persons. Eitan and Timmers (2010) have demonstrated that, even in the West, musicians who use the concept of pitch height nevertheless commonly use other conceptualizations of pitch as well. And with regard to the history of the concept, Duchez (1979) and Barker (1989) emphasize that the central terms for the Ancient Greeks were sharp and heavy (oxys and barys), which bear no necessary relationship with height. The first use of the noun pitch to refer to music (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) is in Thomas Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Musicke (1597, about one decade before Shakespeare’s use in The Tempest): “Take an instrument . . . being in the naturall pitch, and set it a note or two lower.” The English term “pitch” had been nominalized in 1542 from the verb for thrusting or driving a pointed object into place, and it originally referred to a slope and incline (as of a hill). Morley’s extension of “pitch” to music presumably was influenced by staff notation, but the concept of pitch height did not originate in eleventh-century staff notation. As we will see, the medieval scholars Martianus (fifth century) and Isidore (seventh century) were already speaking of vocalizations in terms of ascent (ascendit) and descent (descendit), and there are precedents in Ancient Greek and possibly Ancient Hebraic writings as well. In the account that I am offering, staff notation originates as a visual representation of a metaphoric conceptualization of (A) the greater and lesser exertions involved in singing, in terms of (B) greater and lesser height. This is where greater is higher becomes relevant in the origin of the concept.

The Metaphoric Extension of high and low Most definitions of high and low are metaphoric expressions of greater is higher (see chap. 3 for the basics on this conceptual metaphor). Consistent with the general abstract-to-concrete pattern in metaphoric reasoning, the target domains in the metaphoric definitions below are relatively abstract: advancement, quality, flavor/scent, social status, and so forth. The domain of height imports a visible, or visualizable, spatial conceptualization of relations among quantities or magnitudes into these otherwise nonspatial domains. The following thirteen definitions of the adjectival form of high are distilled from the tenth edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (1993). These definitions are thirteen categories of distinct meanings, ten of which reflect the conceptual metaphor greater is higher. The only straightforwardly literal meaning is #1, while #4 (far from the equator) and #13 (tongue position) have elements with literal height.3 86  Spacial Conceptions

1. Extended upward • literal 2. Advanced (high summer, high baroque, higher reasoning) • more (further) advanced (the use of high correlates advancement with ascent) 3. Elevated in [musical] pitch • high notes involve greater exertion and effort (plus the other sources) 4. Far from the equator • greater quantity of degrees of latitude; also literal, from a given perspective 5. Rich in quality • rich refers to greater value and/or greater quantity 6. Slightly tainted [meat] • tainted meat has a greater strength of smell (more smell)4 7. Exalted in character • exalted (Latin ex + altus) is of greater esteem5 8. Of greater degree, amount, cost, value, or content than average, usual, or expected • greater degree, amount, etc., is metaphorically higher 9. Important; also rank or standing • important is of greater meaning 10. Forcible, strong (high winds) • forcible and strong refer to greater force and strength 11. Stressing matters of doctrine and ceremony (high church) • to stress doctrine and ceremony is to give them greater importance 12. Filled with joy or excitement; also intoxicated • to be filled with joy is to have greater (more) joy than usual6 13. Articulated with the tongue close to the palate • metonymic for the tongue’s literally vertical position These definitions are not all used equally, but in reflecting on my own experience I find that most often when I use high I am speaking metaphorically to refer to great quantity or magnitude.7 Notice that, in the metaphoric definitions, high can be replaced with the terms greater, more, or increased (if more smoothly in some cases than others). This replaceability can motivate the sense that each is merely a conventionally figurative way of understanding a particular domain of quantities or magnitudes. The problem with such a view is that removing high also removes meaning: prices, for example, can increase and decrease but they no longer rise and fall, shoot up and drop, skyrocket, and so forth. Such “poetic” descriptions are superfluous to understanding quantities and magnitudes per se, but they are integral to our understanding of experience of quantities and magnitudes; our experience of them is integral to their meaning. Metaphoric concepts such as upward and downward pressures on food prices, the need to bring down prices, and items that are priced out of reach reflect a first-hand experience of greater and lesser prices and the consequences that these can have for one’s psychological Pitch Height  87

and physical well-being: it is not just that a price is more, but that the thing thus priced cannot be obtained, as if it were out of reach. What is conceptualized is not simply quantities but experience of quantities, and this is conceptualized metaphorically in terms of our experience of heights. Much the same applies to the concept of pitch height. The thirteen definitions of high have fourteen counterparts in low in the same dictionary. While most of the definitions of low are simple opposites of their high counterparts, the exceptions include: dead (used as a predicate adjective), flat, and low as in keeping a low profile. Although we might be able to imagine their high opposites, these and some of the other definitions have shades of meaning that are not simple opposites of high. This asymmetry is consistent with the asymmetry in our experience of height in general and in our experience of pitch height. In many contexts, up is not the simple opposite of down, whether in climbing trees or stairs, or in singing and playing musical scales. The musical case is demonstrated quite plainly in Eitan and Granot (2006), as I explain later in this chapter.

The Feel of Singing In considering possible bases for the concept of pitch height, the general pervasiveness of greater is higher suggests a search for what might be greater about high notes and lesser about low notes. From the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory, this search should be for a basic embodied experience that might apply to musical sounds in general. In reflecting on my own experience of recalling instrumental melodies it became clear that this recall included subvocalization: “singing” along with the music that I was otherwise “rehearing.” I found this surprising and odd at first, since, up to that time, it had seemed plain that recall of heard melodies was a matter of “rehearing.” But eventually this realization of the role of subvocalization in my own experience led to the mimetic hypothesis, whose pertinent implication in the present context is this: if musical recall and real-time perception normally involves mimetic subvocalization, then we have an embodied experience that is shared by most music listeners and that is also a possible avenue whereby greater is higher becomes relevant to music conceptualization generally.8 In this context, the question of what is high about high notes becomes a question of what is greater about high notes and lesser about low notes in the production of vocal sounds. I begin with some ancient descriptions of vocal experience, and then consider some general features of vocal production. Hebraic “Lifting” and Aristotelian Effort When Hagar lifts up her voice and weeps (Genesis 21:16), this “lifting” is a translation of nasaʹ.9 Hebrew nasaʹ has to do with lifting (vertically) and then conveying (horizontally), and it extends to metaphoric senses such as to grant. In Isa88  Spacial Conceptions

iah 58:1, the people are urged to “Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up [rohm] your voice like a trumpet.”10 Rohm has to do with lifting but little or nothing to do with conveyance in either concrete or extended senses.11 Both nasaʹ and rohm are used commonly throughout the Bible with regard to vocalizations, and we still use these meanings when speaking of voices “carrying,” and when we keep our voices “down.” Since it is possible to “raise” one’s voice without “raising” the pitch, it is possible that the only intended correlation here is between vocalizing and lifting, which involves understanding one kind of exertion in terms of another: vocalizing is lifting. However, Hagar lifts her voice in lament, so that the correlation is between lamenting vocalizations and lifting. While the pitch of Hagar’s vocalizations is a matter of conjecture, a comparison with vocalizations in similar contexts today is suggestive. Similarly, while the pitch of the trumpet (the shofar, made of a ram’s horn) as played in ancient times is a matter of conjecture, its ancient use for military purposes suggests a correlation between exertion and great volume (acoustic strength), if not also greater pitch “height.” At the least, the use of nasaʹ and rohm indicate a correlation between vocal exertions and the exertions of lifting, with lifting importing an element of verticality into the conceptualization of these particular kinds of vocalizations. Several centuries later in Greece we have a more explicit correlation between greater vocal exertion and greater pitch height in the Aristotelian Problemata— a collection of writings that were likely compiled by Aristotelians in late fourth to early third century bce (Barker 1989). The collection includes a notable section on singing that correlates greater size, quantity, effort, power, tension, sharpness, and upper location. At the time, the central binarism for pitch was oxys (sharp) and barys (heavy), so that the use of ano (upper) and kato (below) in the following passage is conspicuous: Why is it, given that high pitch [sharpness] in sound goes with smallness and low pitch [heaviness] with large quantity (since what is low-pitched is slow because of the quantity, while what is high-pitched is swift because of the smallness), that it is harder work to sing high pitches than low ones, and few people can sing the upper notes [ano], and the Orthioi and Oxeis nomoi are difficult to sing because they are tightly stretched? Yet it is a lesser task to move what is small than what is large, and hence that is true of air too. Or is being naturally high-voiced not the same thing as singing high, but all naturally high-voiced things are so through weakness, because they cannot move much air but only a little, and a little air travels swiftly, while in singing, high [sharp] pitch is a sign of power? For what travels vigorously travels swiftly, and hence high pitch is a sign of power. That is why healthy people have high [powerful] voices. It takes an effort to sing the upper notes [ano], but the lowpitched [heavy] ones are below [kato] (trans. Barker 1989, 94; emphasis added).

This passage concerns the paradox that greater quantities and magnitudes can produce opposite results in sounds—for example, greater string length produces a lower pitch, while greater string tension produces a higher pitch. What is particularly notable is the explicit use of ano (literally, upper) and kato (literally, below) Pitch Height  89

alongside the more customary oxys (sharp) and barys (heavy). Barker notes that, while the use of ano is unusual, it is nevertheless consistent with other descriptions at the time. Not only is the conceptual metaphor greater is higher in effect well before the development of staff notation in the eleventh century ce, but the conceptualization of sounds in terms of height is tied explicitly and causally to the experience of vocalizing. From Prosodia to Accentus to Staff Notation This part of the story, from antiquity to the emergence of staff notation in the eleventh century, is too complex to explore in detail in this context, but I can list some of the relevant issues. Atkinson (1995) describes how the accent signs of fourth-century ce grammarian Donatus—the acute, grave, and circumflex (´, `, and ˆ)—were interpreted in terms of pitch height by Martianus Capella (fifth century) and Isidore of Seville (seventh century). These writings then influenced ninth-century writings on music, including Aurelian of Réôme’s Musica disciplina, such that a concept of musical pitch height was established prior to its representation in staff notation.12 The cloudier part of this story concerns the design of Donatus’s accent signs in the first place: Why should the acute accent rise and the grave accent descend? One path of pursuit would be to consider Donatus’s reliance upon Greek concepts related to vocal sounds, including the translation of Greek prosodia into Latin accentus (both meaning, in a schematic sense, “toward a state of singing”: pros- + oide, ad- + cantus). Although oxys and barys were the central Greek concepts for pitch, greater/lesser, increase/decrease, and upper/lower were part of the constellation of concepts for vocal-musical pitch. While it is possible that Donatus was not thinking at all of pitch height, the shape of his signs, read left to right, is more consistent with this constellation than with an arbitrary representation of sharpness and heaviness. Exertion, Effort, and Pitch Change of pitch in vocalization is accomplished by tightening and relaxing the vocal folds (often called vocal cords) via activity in the laryngeal muscles, in coordination with activity in other muscles (such as the diaphragm) that force air through the vocal folds. “Higher” pitch corresponds to greater tightening, which is to say greater muscular tension and a feeling of greater effort. Classical singers learn efficient forms of exertion that lessen the sense of effort, but in general greater pitch height correlates with greater muscular exertion and a greater feeling of effort.13 This general correlation makes the conceptual metaphor greater is higher relevant in conceptualizing vocal experience in terms of singing higher and lower notes. There are, however, several qualifications to consider. The greater and lesser exertions and sense of effort applies within normal voice (or chest voice) and within falsetto, but not between them; it is commonly 90  Spacial Conceptions

easier to sing high notes in falsetto than in chest voice.14 While Western classical singing involves training to minimize effort, in other practices a salient feeling of tension and effort is integral to the aesthetic; as one amateur singer put it, “If it don’t hurt, it ain’t bluegrass” (Koufman et al. 1996, 536). I have known at least two classical sopranos and one tenor who reported that singing high notes (nonfalsetto) involved no particular effort. There is still tensioning of the relevant muscles, but for these musicians this tensioning corresponds to a sense of relative ease, with the result that greater is higher and lesser is lower are less relevant in the experience and conceptualization of pitch height for these musicians. There are also musicians and music lovers with very limited singing experience, which likewise limits the relevance of greater is higher and lesser is lower. However, most of the musicians and other people I have known experience something more like that described in the Problemata excerpt above: the “upper” notes tend to be harder to reach. When I listen to or recall Pavarotti, Björling, or Corelli singing Puccini’s “Nessun dorma” I cannot imagine precisely what that is like for them, but at the same time I cannot help but feel something of what it would be like for me, based on my own untrained experience. The sustained high B of the final Vincero! feels like a great physical-artistic accomplishment: it does not simply sound like this, it feels like it, and mimetic subvocalization helps account for this feeling. The feeling of great exertion in performing notes such as this is perfectly consistent with the logic of greater is higher. To varying degrees, the same applies in my mimetic comprehension of instrumental sounds: mimetic subvocal representations of ascent and descent in a melodic line performed on wind, string, percussion, or electronic instruments involve imagery related to tightening and relaxing the laryngeal muscles, if not also actual activation of these muscles. The logic of greater is higher is enacted anytime ascent and descent correlate with greater and lesser exertions, whether in actual exertions, or in motor imagery (imagined actions), or in mimetic motor imagery (imagined imitative actions). However, the feeling of pitch height can vary greatly from one context to another, in both production and mimetic comprehension. For example, the high notes near the end of Beethoven’s op. 111 Piano Sonata, or the conclusion of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, feel very little like the climax of “Nessun dorma.” Lesser volume can undercut or negate the otherwise greater correlates of high notes; however, this does not undermine the logic of the concept of pitch height. Instead, it simply reflects the fact that pitch height is only one component of musical sounds and experience. Moments like those in the Beethoven and Schoenberg are special in part because the normal sense of greater effort is set aside or is transcended. Difficulties of the “Lowest” Notes There is a paradox in singing, with regard to greater is higher, in that the lowest notes of one’s range can also be hard to reach. If the lowest notes of a perPitch Height  91

son’s vocal range were equivalent to the highest notes in both frequency of occurrence and musical significance, this would makes greater ambiguous with respect to pitch height; however, in practice this does not appear to be the case. Both of these aspects (relative rate of occurrence and significance) are empirical questions, but here I offer only a few thoughts on the matter. There is an asymmetry in melodic ascent and descent that is reflected in the tendency of large intervals (leaps of a 4th and larger) in music from Europe and around the world to ascend rather than descend (Huron 2006). The upper note in such leaps is salient because of its prominence in the melodic contour and because of the exertions involved in its production and its mimetic comprehension. When this note is a dissonance, this aspect only amplifies the salience. Similarly, the goal-oriented nature of tonal music often involves the creation of climactic moments that feature melodic highpoints (see Eitan 1997). These highpoints commonly correlate greater pitch height with greater volume (acoustic strength), thereby amplifying the sense of more and the sense of achievement and the sense of an emotional “highpoint.” Climactic moments often involve a spread in texture, engaging both the lowest and highest registers, but to the extent that the melodic interest is in the upper voices, the lower notes serve as a foundation and as a contrast that amplifies the height of the upper notes. If counterexamples come to mind, in which the melodic interest is primarily in the lowest notes, whether alone or juxtaposed with higher notes, the question of their relative occurrence is something that can be answered empirically. Again, the conceptual metaphor greater is higher does not imply that greater quantities and magnitudes are always conceptualized metaphorically as higher. It only refers to a general practice, and it allows for counterexamples and paradoxes such as that reflected in the Problemata excerpt above, where greater is sometimes lower.15 With the logic and some of the history of greater is higher laid out, along with the connection with exertion and effort in both singing and mimetic subvocal comprehension, we can now consider the proposed ten things that are high about high notes.

What is High about “High” Notes? When I ask musicians and nonmusicians what is high about high notes, I commonly receive four answers. Frequencies and staff notation are the two most common, and the third is “head voice” vs. “chest voice.” The fourth response is that It’s just a metaphor, which gives the appearance of an explanation without actually explaining anything, as does the slightly more sophisticated version, that high notes are musically high. High notes certainly are “musically high,” and the question is just what this actually means. In the blend of ten sources that we are about to consider, three contribute literal height, while the other seven contribute metaphoric height via the conceptual metaphor greater is higher. But this blend of ten sources is complicated not only in that it combines elements 92  Spacial Conceptions

of both literal and metaphorical height, but also because some of both kinds of sources become relevant only via mimetic comprehension. In order of presentation the ten sources are:  1. Frequencies 2. Staff Notation 3. Head Voice and Chest Voice 4. Propagation 5. Magnitude of Exertion 6. Magnitude of Sense of Effort 7. Loudness 8. Timbral Intensity 9. Emotional States 10. Correlation of Frequency and Elevation This order does not reflect their relative importance. Instead, it corresponds roughly to the order in which they seem to occur to the musicians I have known (students and scholars), although most often only the first three sources are identified. There does not appear to be a firm basis for establishing an absolute hierarchy among the sources in terms of their general relevance, particularly since the relevance of each source varies according to the particular musical context. Nevertheless, some sources do appear to be generally either more or less relevant than others—for example, timbre may prove to be the least relevant source of all, and yet it still contributes to the full meaning of pitch height. By the same token, sources that initially may seem especially important might ultimately prove to be less so. The number of sources, and the variability of the relevance of each, implies that pitch height is a flexible thing with no fixed meaning. Although we can specify fixed details, as in frequencies and interval sizes, such fixed details are only part of the meaning of pitch height. 1. Frequencies (metaphoric height, via greater is higher) This source has an objective and quasi-scientific appeal; but while frequencies are of course relevant, they are not so in a straightforward manner. First, we have to acknowledge that most of us seldom if ever actually hear frequencies as such (that is, acoustic pressure waves of a given frequency). The auditory system transforms pressure waves into pitch (but not pitch height) prior to awareness, and what we hear is the product of this transformation. More important, however, is the fact that frequencies and the numbers we assign to them are not literally higher and lower but are instead greater and lesser. For example, the 440 in A-440 is not literally higher than the 415 in A-415 but is instead greater. Our arrangements of numbers horizontally, vertically, or around a circle are metaphoric spatializations of the otherwise abstract relations among quantities. In Pitch Height  93

the case of “high” and “low” frequencies, the notion that 440 is higher than 415 reflects the conceptual metaphor greater is higher, and the concept of high and low frequencies thus reflects the metaphoric reasoning described in the previous chapter. The concept of high and low frequencies contributes to the concept of pitch height in some measure, but only for those with knowledge of acoustic frequencies, and only via metaphoric reasoning. 2. Staff Notation (literal in presentation, but ultimately from greater is higher) Staff notation certainly contributes an objective and literal sense of verticality for those who read staff notation. In my own experience, I seldom picture staff notation when listening to music, even if my literacy in reading staff notation nevertheless contributes to my conception overall; but I know that there are people who automatically picture staff notation when listening to music, and this would seem to make staff notation even more relevant for their conception. Apart from the challenge of measuring the differences in the influence of notation among individuals, there are two things to consider when estimating the overall influence of staff notation. One is that a conception of pitch height emerged in the West long before the invention and proliferation of staff notation, as we considered above. The other is that a conception of pitch height has emerged in other cultures in the absence of staff notation or other heighted notation, as in the case of the Kaluli of New Guinea and the Australian Aborigines. The Kaluli employ a vertical conception of pitch by way of waterfall metaphors (Feld 1990). For example, what we would describe as melodic descent they describe in terms of flowing like a waterfall, and our concept of sustained pitches is for them the pooling of water. (The Kaluli also map the smoothness and roughness of water flow onto continuity and discontinuity of airflow in singing.) The Australian Aborigines similarly conceptualize pitch in terms of height in the absence of notation. Bruce Chatwin (1987) describes their metaphoric mapping of terrain onto music, which produces what they refer to as songlines, and which in turn they use as maps of the terrain: Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes. So, if the Lizard Man were dragging his heels across the saltpans of Lady Eyre, you could expect a succession of long flats. . . . If he were skipping up and down the McDonnell escarpments, you’d have a series of arpeggios and glissandos. . . . Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the actions of the Ancestor’s feet. One phrase would say “salt-pan”; another “Creekbed,” “Spinifex,” “Sandhill,” “Mulga-scrub,” “Rock-face,” and so forth. An expert song man, by listening to their order of succession, would count how many times his hero crossed a river, or scaled a ridge—and be able to calculate where, how far along, a Songline he was. (108; cited in Dissanayake 1992, 178)

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The Kaluli example follows the general cognitive principle of understanding the relatively abstract (pitch relations among sounds) in terms of the relative concrete (the movement of water). In the case of the Australian Aborigines, the two domains appear to be less distinct, as the term songline suggests: to some extent the songs and the human locomotion over the local terrain mutually define one another. In the West, the Ancient Greeks had multiple ways of conceptualizing pitch, including the qualitative properties of sharpness and heaviness, the quantitative property of string lengths, the binarism of masculine/feminine associations, and a metaphoric conceptualization of pitch height in relation to the degree of effort in vocal production (these and others can be found in Barker 1989). While it seems plain that staff notation shapes the concept of pitch height for those who read staff notation, this visual source leaves implicit a number of crucial components of the experience and meaning of pitch height. The sense of height comes from more than its representation on the page, much as the meaning of height in everyday life is about more than something that can be seen. 3. Head Voice and Chest Voice (literal height, but dependent on MMI and metaphor) Head voice and chest voice refer to the sensation that the internal resonance of the voice seems to move from the chest to the head as one sings from low to high.16 This source of pitch height is attractive in that it involves literal verticality in the human body, but there are least four issues that bear on its relevance. The first is that there are people who use the concept of pitch height who have neither heard of head voice and chest voice nor reflected on the vocal experience to which these refer. The second is that some women who are familiar with the terms nevertheless report (anecdotally) that a sensation of difference in resonance between the registers of head voice and chest voice is hardly noticeable, even when focusing attention on it. We might point to the male bias in the history of music, such that that male vocal experience might have a disproportionate influence, but the difference in experience would still remain. The third issue is that, to some extent, the vocal resonance only seems to move from the chest to the head. The resonance in the chest is more salient with slower frequencies (“low” notes), and as the frequency increases (as pitch goes “up”) the resonance in the chest attenuates. This attenuated resonance gives the impression that the resonance has moved to the head, when in fact the head (mouth, face, sinuses, cranium) has been resonating all along. (You can investigate this by singing from low to high—by glissando, scale, or arpeggio—first while holding a hand against your chest, and then again while holding one or both hands on the throat, face, and/or scalp.17 This can also be investigated, without the hands, by simply attending to the vibrations in the head, particularly in and near the face.) Although this movement is illusory it is certainly available as a possible source, but it leads us to the fourth and most important issue: How is one’s vocal experience relevant to comprehending even the head voice and chest voice of someone Pitch Height  95

else’s singing, let alone musical sounds generally? The mimetic hypothesis offers an answer: One’s own vocal experience becomes relevant because part of how humans comprehend musical sounds, vocal and otherwise, is by way of mimetic vocalization and subvocalization. There is a trap to be avoided here. It might seem that there is a simpler answer, that we simply recognize, objectively, the sound of head voice and chest voice much as we recognize the sound of, say, a congested voice. But imagine that you had never had a cold and the congestion that comes with it. Although you could certainly learn to recognize the sound of a congested voice, it would be an empty recognition, uninformed by direct experience of vocalizing in this way. The normally hidden nature of mimetic comprehension fosters the sense that we objectively recognize congestion, emotional expression, and head/chest voice, and other states signified by vocal sounds. In practical contexts, the means of such recognition are unimportant, but in trying to understand how, for example, head voice and chest voice contribute to the concept of pitch height, the normally nonconscious processes are essential. As a source of the concept of pitch height, the difference between head voice and chest voice involves literal verticality (with respect to the actual locations of the head and chest), but its relevance depends upon mimetic comprehension. To the extent that this vocal experience is part of the basis for conceptualizing pitch height in nonvocal sounds, it is then also metaphoric (see topic 12, The Human Voice as a Source Domain, in the previous chapter). The experience of head voice and chest voice is not metaphoric, but it is part of the source domain in conceptualizing pitch height in instrumental sounds. 4. Propagation (literal, but of relatively limited relevance) In certain contexts one can feel low sounds (slow frequencies) in the floor, especially at a rock concert, an organ concert, or a movie theater. Slower frequencies (longer waveforms) can create a palpable vibration in the solid material of the floor, with which our feet are in contact, so that the locus of our experience is literally low. One can also feel some of these sounds in the chest, and to the extent that one might be feel the locus of one’s identity to be the head, this chest resonance might also be felt as relatively low. This is a source of literal verticality, but it is limited in that the sounds must have sufficient acoustic power in order to be salient, and I am not sure what percentage of sounds this might include in general. People who regularly listen to amplified music with a heavy bass might have a different experiential basis than people who listen to music in which the bass resonance is less regularly salient. At the opposite end of the spectrum, in my own experience of organ concerts, for example, I have felt a buzzing in the ears for “high” notes more often than I have felt the “low” notes in my chest or in the floor. I have had similar experiences at classical electronic music concerts, but overall this is relatively rare in my experience. 96  Spacial Conceptions

The experiential differences among individual listeners are integral to the relevance of this source, but in general the sounds have to be powerful enough and “low” or “high” enough for this source to apply. 5. Exertion, and 6. Effort (metaphoric height, via greater is higher) As we considered above (in “The Feel of Singing”), theoretically the greater and lesser exertions in singing motivate metaphoric conceptualization of vocal sounds in terms of height. In listening to vocal music, these exertions are comprehended both nonmimetically (looks like and/or sounds like) and mimetically (feels like). More broadly, to the extent that we comprehend both vocal and instrumental sounds in part via mimetic subvocalization, vocal exertions become relevant to music comprehension generally. Here I make a distinction between muscle exertions and a resulting feeling of effort, and I give consideration to exertions and effort in playing various instruments.18 Muscle exertions are an exertion of force, as in the amount of force required to open a pickle jar, or the force required to produce a given pitch at a given volume on a given instrument. Effort, as I am using the term, is the phenomenological feeling that attends a given human exertion—for example, the force required to lift a twenty-five-pound bag of flour is the same no matter who exerts it, but it will feel like more of an effort for some than for others. If some listeners underestimate or overestimate the exertions and effort of a performer in certain contexts (principle 16 of mimetic comprehension), this this can then shape the sense of height for those listeners.19 The pairing of muscle tension and sense of effort applies variously to the embouchures and abdominal muscles of brass and woodwind players: in all cases, changes in pitch height correspond to greater and lesser exertion, but we must consider at least two qualifications. First, efficiency can minimize the sense of effort, as we considered above with regard to classical singers. Second, the range of exertions in some instruments, such as the recorder, is small enough to make the relevance of this source negligible (in the context of playing this instrument).20 Theoretically, intramodal mimetic comprehension of instrumental music (that is, in terms of the specific actions involved in playing a particular instrument) combines with the more general process of mimetic subvocalization. Presumably, the balance of these varies not only in measurable bodily activity (vocal and instrumental imagery and muscle activation) but also in one’s awareness of such activity and of the balance. The composite feeling of exertion and effort is one the most significant sources of affective responses related to melodic ascent and descent. For example, if a metaphoric descent after a climax is found to be relaxing, or perhaps reflective of a sense of exhaustion, we can understand such feelings and concepts as resulting in part from mimetic comprehension of the sounds in terms of a lessening of exertion and effort in the production of the sounds. At a more local level, the Pitch Height  97

downward and upward resolutions of dissonances shape musical experience via the same principle. And then more broadly, the use of melodic descent and ascent in text-setting arguably operates on the basis of mimetic subvocalization: if musical descent and ascent are taken to signify specific actions or affective states, this signification is partly motivated by and grounded in mimetic exertions and effort. 7. Loudness and Volume (metaphoric height, via greater is higher) When we “turn up” the volume on a stereo (or “crank it up” or “pump it up”), we use the logic of greater is higher (more is up), much as we do when we speak of “raising” awareness of social issues. The core reference in “higher volume” is to acoustic strength, not pitch height, but because higher pitches can seem louder than bass pitches, the metaphoric height of volume reinforces the concept of pitch height. In this brief overview I address the loudness effect, some other correlations with volume, and the matter of making oneself heard. Loudness, or the loudness effect, is a technical term in the field of acoustics, the most salient feature of which is that, all things being otherwise equal, the “lowest” frequencies tend to sound quieter—that is, roughly speaking, “lowest” (least) frequency correlates with “lowest” (least) volume. The effect is more noticeable when the overall volume of a performance, or the playback of a recording, is quieter. These two factors make the loudness effect of relatively limited relevance, but it is part of the general metaphoric correlation of sonic magnitude (volume) with height.21 A crescendo can create the impression of approach, and a diminuendo can the impression of departure, in a manner consistent with the everyday experience of the approach and departure of trains, automobiles, and so forth. The actual approach of entities directly toward us creates the phenomenon of looming, wherein the entity gradually fills more and more of one’s field of vision, particularly the vertical dimension: an entity that makes a continual sound as it approaches becomes both “louder” and “taller” for the perceiver. To some extent, a musical crescendo can activate this spatial correlation; and even if the primary sense is that of increased size (crescendo, allargando, or even colossale, as in the cadenza of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto), the vertical dimension of this increase contributes to the correlation between volume and height. In connection with this, Eitan and Granot (2006) describe research by Nakamura (1987), Neuhoff and McBeath (1996), and Neuhoff, McBeath, and Wanzie (1999), who found that crescendos and diminuendos created an illusion of congruent rise and fall in pitch, and vice versa. But Eitan and Granot also found that when listeners were presented with a series of sounds of the same duration (or more precisely, sounds of isochronous inter-onset interval), they interpreted the rate of events as accelerating if volume or textural density were progressively increased, and as decelerating if volume or textural density were decreased. (This is consistent with the

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tendency in youth ensembles to rush (accelerate) when they crescendo and drag (decelerate) when they diminuendo.) In this case, greater volume correlates with greater speed, not greater pitch height, which is to say that volume correlates with more than pitch height. Lastly, in everyday communication we increase the chance of being heard by “raising” our voices. While it is possible to speak louder without increasing pitch height, the two often go hand in hand. When raised voices do in fact involve increased pitch height, this also increases the timbral intensity, which is part of source 8, and it tends to correlate with heightened affective states, which I have set apart as source 9.22 8. Timbral Intensity (metaphoric height, via greater is higher) In playing or singing a given pitch, one can “brighten” or “darken” the timbre by various means. Apart from such efforts, however, the higher pitches on a given instrument or in a given voice tend to sound brighter and the lower pitches tend to sound darker. Similarly, within a given instrument family, the higher instruments tend to have a brighter timbre, as with the piccolo trumpet, the soprano clarinet, the smallest pipes of an organ, and tenors versus basses. In connection with the effect of timbre upon listeners, we can refer to this variable as timbral intensity, analogous to the effect of color intensity in color theory.23 Timbre is not commonly understood in terms of height, and so it does not contribute to pitch height in this direct way. Instead, it contributes via greater and lesser timbral intensity, which we can think of as the relative piercing or penetrating quality of different timbres. As in the case of whistles and screams, greater timbral intensity tends to correlate with greater pitch height and greater volume. Composers and performers can then amplify or attenuate this correlation and thereby shape the acoustic impact of sounds, as I discuss in chapter 8. From one perspective oxys and barys, acutus and gravis, and sharp and flat (or heavy) are curious ways to refer to pitch. It is difficult to imagine how these might apply literally to sounds in general; and if they are metaphoric then we ought to ask, for example, what is sharp about sharp notes, much as we are asking what is high about high notes. Following the example of exploring the general uses of high and low beyond music, we would then explore the various uses of “sharp,” “heavy,” and “flat,” as in the case of sharp knives, sharp pencils, sharp words, sharp minds, and sharp cheeses (e.g., aged cheddar cheese), each of which has a focused, penetrating, and/or piercing effect. More specifically, what sharp notes, cheeses, and words have in common is their effect upon the perceiver, and in the case of sounds this effect is part of a sound’s timbral intensity. Although sharp and flat are now used in musical contexts to refer to intonation and chromatic alteration, the relative sharpness and flatness of sounds nevertheless also shape the intensity as experienced by listeners, which is plausibly part of the motivation for the original application of oxys (acute; sharp) to sounds.24

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9. Emotional States (metaphoric height, via greater is higher) One of the ways that we conceptualize emotional states is in terms of height, as in feeling high and low, getting worked up, calming down, and so forth, as discussed in Lakoff and Johnson (1980). When such states are expressed vocally, the sounds tend to correlate with greater and lesser volume, timbral intensity, and pitch height, with the result that vertical conceptions of emotional states reinforce the concept of pitch height. Mimetically, comprehension of sounds involves feeling what it would be like to express oneself in a particular way, and to some extent this feeling will then be isomorphic with the expression of actual emotional states, which in turn are already conceptualized metaphorically in terms of height. Accordingly, the correlation with sonic expressions of heightened emotional states reinforces the concept of pitch height both nonmimetically and mimetically. 10. Correlation of Frequency and Elevation (literal height, dependent upon metaphor) In an online lecture on the concept of pitch height, David Huron (2011a) offers the following remarkable example. When we hear an airplane taking off, the pitch ascends, and when we hear it landing, the pitch descends—and yet, if you record this event with a microphone and then play it back, the change in pitch is not recorded.25 The difference between the live experience and a recording, as Huron explains, is that microphones do not have the pinnas (pinnae) of the human auditory system. The pinna is the exterior portion of the human ear with its curving, irregular shape, and the pinnas on either side of the human head modify the acoustic waveform in correlation with the height of the airplane so that, for an earthbound listener, the sound changes as the plane ascends or descends. To the extent that we experience this kind of correlation in everyday life, we learn to correlate certain sounds with height (elevation): we can normally determine the height of a sound source (a bird, a person) relative to our own position. We can refer to this as the environmental frequency–elevation correlation. This correlation is acquired by about the age of five, it is learned independently of language, and it depends on correlation with visual information, as evidenced by the fact that congenitally blind persons do not normally acquire this correlation (Eitan, Ornoy, and Granot 2012, Huron 2011a, Parkinson et al. 2012).26 It is not plain to me precisely how this correlation might actually be learned—it would seem to require that we hear particular sound sources at different elevations often enough for it to become significant—but however it is learned, the next question is how it becomes extended to pitch generally.27 To be relevant to the concept of pitch height in music, it must extend to contexts in which sound sources (e.g., performers and their instruments) do not literally change elevation, while the sounds produced nevertheless seem to be higher and lower. 100  Spacial Conceptions

Huron (2011a) describes this extension of the correlation as involving metaphor. The general source and target domains are relatively straightforward: musical pitch is conceptualized in terms of, let us call it, environmental pitch— that is, pitch in the environmental frequency–elevation correlation, where height is literal. The implicit reasoning, then, is that listening to musical sounds in which the sound sources (performers) do not literally change elevation, is like (or is) listening to sounds in which the sound sources do in fact change elevation. This is not to assert bluntly that when an oboe melody ascends and descends, it sounds as though the oboist is changing elevation. Instead, the change in sound is enough like that in the environmental correlation to motivate a conceptualization of melodic pitch change in terms of change in height. We can understand this cognitive process as involving metaphoric reasoning because one domain of sonic experience is being conceptualized in terms of another domain of sonic experience. As Huron explains, this correlation is independent of language; but of course cultural-linguistic habits shape its role within a given culture. For cultures that conceptualize pitch in terms of height, this correlation is an attractive explanation for the emergence of this concept, but notice that it is independent of both greater is higher and mimetic comprehension. Notice also that its relevance depends on separating the sound from its source: it is the melody or the music that ascends and descends, regardless of who performs it and how. On its own the correlation might foster a less fully embodied account of the logic of pitch height, but since mimetic comprehension is more or less equally ancient and pervasive, and since a role for greater is higher in conceptualizing sound appears to be relatively ancient as well, I am inclined to see these as operating in concert historically as well as today.

Summary of the Ten Sources of Pitch Height The proposed ten sources of the concept of pitch height are summarized in table 4.1. This table summarizes the point that four of the sources involve literal height, and six involve metaphoric height, with staff notation falling into both categories since it involves literal height in its presentation on the page, but its height is metaphoric in origin.28 Of the four that are based on literal height, however, only propagation is independent of metaphor in its relevance for the concept of pitch height. Table 4.1 also helps to clarify why it is misleading to speak of “the metaphor of pitch height,” in that the concept of pitch height is a composite of literal and metaphoric sources, and three of the sources of literal height (staff notation, head/chest voice, and the frequency-elevation correlation) become relevant only via metaphor. With these complexities in mind, we might think of the concept of pitch height as a conceptual blend, with these ten sources as ten input domains; but in the present context I want to keep the focus on metaphor.

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Table 4.1. Ten Sources of Pitch Height Based on literal height

Based on metaphoric height

  2. Staff Notation (in presentation)   3. Head Voice / Chest Voice   4. Propagation/Resonance 10. Frequency-Elevation Correlation

1. Frequencies 2. Staff Notation (in conceptualization)

5. Magnitude of Exertion 6. Magnitude of Effort 7. Loudness and Volume Levels 8. Timbral Intensity 9. Emotional States

One thing that emerges in this confluence of sources is that some of the sources involve the logic of more than one metaphor, as shown in table 4.2. The second column shows the manner in which each source is experienced, and three of these are indirectly relevant to musical experience: 1. Frequencies are indirect in that we do not normally hear frequencies per se; 2. Staff Notation is indirect insofar as we do not need to see or picture a staff in order for it to have an influence, but it is also direct in that we can look at or picture notation while listening; and 10. Frequency-Elevation Correlation is indirect in that it involves understanding musical sounds as environmental sounds involving literal elevation. The third column indicates which sources involve the logic of greater is higher, and the fourth column indicates which sources involve instrumental sounds are vocal sounds (see chap. 3), with the Frequency–Elevation Correlation involving its own metaphor. The two “layers” of metaphor in Table 4.2 are not necessarily chronologically related; we can think of them as parallel processes. To clarify how this table relates to experience, let me offer a specific example. When listening to the English horn solo in the Largo of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, listeners normally comprehend the sounds both nonmimetically (as in traditional perception) and mimetically. All ten sources are relevant but, as in most listening, frequencies (1) are only indirectly relevant, staff notation (2) is only indirectly relevant unless I am picturing it, and the frequency– elevation correlation (10) is only indirectly relevant. Head and chest voice (3) are relevant via mimetic subvocalization, which contributes to pitch height via greater is higher and instrumental sounds are vocal sounds, in that mimetic subvocalization involves comprehending the sound of the English horn in terms of my vocal experience. The influence of propagation (4) is presumably negligible in a direct sense, but it is relevant indirectly in that, unlike an amplified bass, the sound is not felt as a vibration in the floor. Exertion and effort 102  Spacial Conceptions

Table 4.2. Layers of Metaphor Manner experienced Layer 1: Source by listeners of height

Layer 2: Manner in which source becomes relevant

  1. Frequencies

indirectly

greater is higher indirectly

  2. Staff Notation

indirectly and directly

greater is higher indirectly and directly

  3. Head/Chest directly, primarily literal height Voice mimetically

intramodally and cross-modally (instrumental sounds are vocal sounds)

  4. Propagation directly, primarily nonmimetically

(not metaphoric)

literal height

  5. Exertion directly, primarily greater is higher mimetically

intramodally and cross-modally (instrumental sounds are vocal sounds)

  6. Effort directly, primarily greater is higher mimetically

intramodally and cross-modally (instrumental sounds are vocal sounds)

  7. Loudness

directly, both mimetically and nonmimetically

greater is higher directly

  8. Timbre

directly, both mimetically and nonmimetically

greater is higher directly

  9. Emotional directly, both greater is higher States mimetically and nonmimetically

intramodally and cross-modally (instrumental sounds are vocal sounds)

10. Frequency– indirectly literal height Elevation Correlation

musical pitch is pitch correlated with the actual evelation of the sound source

(5 and 6) are relevant via both intramodal and cross-modal mimetic comprehension: the intramodal feeling of playing the English horn, and the feeling of any other kind of congruent exertion, particularly vocal. Mimetic subvocalization involves both greater is higher and instrumental sounds are vocal sounds. Loudness, timbre, and emotional state (7, 8, and 9) become relevant both mimetically and nonmimetically, but their influence may be relatively subtle in this particular context. As the melody “ascends” to its highpoint, if the sound seems Pitch Height  103

louder, and/or the timbre seems “brighter” or more penetrating, and/or if it seems or feels as though there is a “heightened” emotional state, then these contribute via greater is higher, while any mimetic subvocalization also involves instrumental sounds are vocal sounds. In my own experience of listening to this solo, the most salient sources are head and chest voice, exertion, effort, and, in connection with these, a heightened emotional state, all of which become relevant primarily via mimetic subvocalization. By contrast, when I listen to drumming, in general, the balance of the relevance of the ten sources differs, as it does when I listen to drumming in the specific contexts of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, taiko drumming, jazz, or rock, with finer distinctions within each genre. Much the same applies to any sound source and genre of sound sources; and different genres of sound sources (winds, voices, percussion, electronics, strings) contribute differently to the concept of pitch height. Table 4.2 represents the general complexity, but its shape in a given context, including the musical stimulus and particular listeners, varies a great deal. Apart from representing the general complexity of the concept of pitch height, the main point to be drawn from table 4.2, and from the preceding discussion of the ten sources that it summarizes, is that pitch height is not simply or even primarily a conceptualization of what is heard. Via both mimetic and nonmimetic comprehension, pitch height is a conceptualization of what we feel in response to what we hear and, to some extent, what we see. The nature of the resulting concept is thus contingent not only on the acoustic-auditory stimulus but on the innate and acquired capacities and proclivities of individuals in terms of audition (hearing), vision, and mimetic comprehension. If we take this to say that the experience and meaning of concepts related to pitch height are “subjective,” then these considerations not only specify the nature of this aspect of musical subjectivities, they show something of the extent to which the concept of pitch height is a conceptualization of subjective experience. Because this subjectivity already includes an affective dimension, via the feeling that is conceptualized, this view of ten sources specifies some of the bottom-up portion of affective responses to music that are related to pitch height (as we considered previously in connection with exertion and effort). With the foregoing in mind, consider again the particular appeal of frequencies and staff notation as explanations of the logic of pitch height. They offer relatively straightforward quantification via visual representation, which makes them both public (objectively shared) and verifiable. They are also the least visceral of the ten sources.

The Source and Target Domains The fifth part of this account includes discussions of (a) the challenge of specifying the conceptual metaphor and target and source domains, (b) the cross-domain mappings, and (c) the relevance of gravity in experiencing and conceptualizing pitch height. 104  Spacial Conceptions

The Conceptual Metaphor and Target and Source Domains If pitch height is metaphoric then we ought to be able to specify the relevant conceptual metaphor and the target and source domains. Identifying the conceptual metaphor in this case proves to be a challenge, and engagement with this challenge reveals something about musical sounds and our relationship with them. The first problem is that we do not want a metaphoric term in the target domain. For example, a reasonable first approximation is pitches are high and low things, but because the term pitch is already spatial (involving a slope, as explained above), this makes this first approximation tautological (roughly, high and low things are high and low things). Among the alternatives, musical sounds does not distinguish pitch from timbre, duration, etc., and tone is metonymic (the stretching of a string, from Greek teinein).29 Fundamental frequency will not serve because, apart from the metaphoric height of fundamental, normally we hear pitch, not frequency, and it is the experience of pitch that is in question. At the heart of the matter is the abstract nature of the property known as pitch. Around the globe, the challenge of conceptualizing this feature of musical experience is met via the processes of metaphoric and metonymic reasoning, as reflected the use of paired terms like sharp/heavy, small/large, young/old, and so forth. In our use of pitch and pitch height, metaphor is at the very foundation of conceptualization. About as close as we can get to a concise nonmetaphoric description, I think, is to say that the property known as pitch emerges when the human auditory system transforms the fundamental (principle) frequency of an acoustic pressure wave into what we hear as sound.30 With all of this in mind, let us then make a pragmatic compromise and use the term pitch after all, understanding that it refers not to height but to the nonmetaphoric relationship between fundamental frequency and the human auditory system.31 Focusing on pitch as a property of sounds gives us the conceptual metaphor the property of pitch is the property of height, or pitch is height. Because of the relational nature of both pitches and heights, however, we can capture the logic of pitch height more simply as pitch relations are vertical relations, which in turn facilitates a view of the kinship of pitch height with other metaphoric heights. For this purpose, it will help to recast greater is higher and lesser is lower as follows: relations among quantities and magnitudes are vertical relations, which subsumes the following more specific conceptual metaphors: relations among prices are vertical relations . . . temperatures . . . . . . styles. . . . . . qualities . . . . . . musical tones. . .

(high and low prices) (high and low temperatures) (high and low styles) (high and low qualities) (high and low pitches)

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Table 4.3. The Two Conceptual Metaphors for Pitch Height

In Musical Contexts

In General

states pitch states are vertical states

states of quantity and magnitude are vertical states

relations pitch relations are vertical relations

relations among quantities and magnitudes are vertical relations

Since these relations are relations among states, we also need to identify the conceptual metaphor pitch states are vertical states. The two conceptual metaphors for pitch height are thus special cases of two more general conceptual metaphors, as shown in table 4.3. In turn, all four of these are special cases of states are locations (discussed in chap. 3). The Cross-Domain Mappings The principal cross-domain mappings that specify the logic of the vertical conceptualizations of pitch are shown in figure 4.1. The next step in analyzing the logic of pitch height, which I am not going to take, would be to show the mappings for each of the ten sources of pitch height, including the two layers of metaphor shown in table 4.2. In lieu of that step, let me simply invite readers to consider the extent and complexity of the logical matrix involved. What emerges from this, or what can emerge from this, is a feeling that melodies actually rise and fall, which we can understand to a great extent in connection with a combination of the components that involve literal height and vicarious exertions. When this melodic motion also seems to be illusory or fictional, we can understand this in connection with the components that do not involve literal height. In the bigger picture, the concept of pitch height is a particular manifestation of the most generic spatial metaphors: states are locations and its corollaries, change is motion (change of state is motion between locations) and difference is distance (difference of state is distance between locations). These are reflected in the mappings in figure 4.1, and they are at the heart of all metaphoric conceptualizations of music motion and space. Gravity If gravity shapes our bodily experience and understanding of verticality in every­ day life, it is reasonable to imagine that it contributes to our understanding of verticality in music. Larson (2012) and others whom he cites have shown that this does indeed appear to be the case, and this raises the question of precisely how gravity becomes relevant to music. Larson’s answer emphasizes the top-down part 106  Spacial Conceptions

[Figure 4-1: Mappings of Verticality onto Pitch]

Target Domain: Pitch States and Relations

Source Domain: Vertical States and Relations

pitch pitch states (particular pitches) possible pitches change of pitch (increase/decrease)

ß ß ß ß

difference in pitch

ß

verticality (height) vertical states (particular heights) possible vertical states (possible heights) change of height (increase/decrease, which is motion upward/downward) difference in height (distance; interval)

Figure 4.1. Mappings of verticality onto pitch.

of the story, where verticality and gravity both are entailments of our more general mapping of motion onto music: when we conceptualize music metaphorically in terms of motion, we import our experience of moving in a three-dimensional world, which includes the experience of negotiating gravity. But this top-down perspective raises the question of the motivation for the mapping of motion onto music in the first place, which is the subject of the next two chapters. A bottom-up account would start with the phenomenology of negotiating gravity in everyday life and then look for nonmetaphoric correlates in musical experience. The most relevant of these are the exertions involved in maintaining and changing states: vertical states in everyday life, and pitch states in music. Nonmimetic and mimetic exertions in music can then be understood to motivate the cross-domain mapping of vertical change onto pitch change, in concert with the ten-source account given above and with the account of locomotion that follows. From this perspective, gravity is relevant to the fuller concept of pitch height but it is not a primary source of either the feeling or the concept.32

Implications If we ask what is high about high notes, one answer is that there are at least ten things, most of which are based on the conceptual metaphor greater is higher and some of which involve literal height. Of these ten, some of both kinds are relevant only via mimetic participation (see table 4.2). I have already discussed one of the most significant implications of this account, which is that pitch height is for the most part inaudible: although we hear pitch, pitch height is a conceptualization of what is felt in response to what is heard. If the concept itself also contributes to what is felt in a top-down manner, it is complementary to the bottomup part of experience. The conceptualization of pitch in terms of height is motivated and logical, as are alternative conceptualizations of pitch in terms of sharp and heavy, young and old, small and large, and so forth. Recognition that pitch height is thus one among various human conceptualizations of pitch then implies that ordinary assertions about music in terms of pitch height, such as those involving the “upward” and “downward” resolution of dissonances, are founded on a fiction, by Pitch Height  107

which I simply mean a musical world that we tacitly create by way of embodied metaphoric reasoning.33 Within this fictional world, it is true that dissonant suspensions normally resolve downward by step, much as it is true that Atticus Finch is the father of Scout (Jean Louise Finch). But while it is additionally nonfictionally true that Gregory Peck portrayed Atticus Finch in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, the nonfictional musical analog of Gregory Peck is another matter. While we might speak of Gregory Peck nonfictionally, for many of us it is less easy to speak of pitch without relying on the fiction of pitch height and pitch space: the fiction becomes part of the foundation of musical understanding, and this brings us to the last implication that I want to mention. The ten variables in this account create an inherently unstable foundation for the concept of pitch height. If the balance of these ten sources of pitch height varies not only from one musical context to another but also from one person to another, then any meaning based on the concept of pitch height likewise varies. If this seems a flawed basis for understanding or explaining music, it is nevertheless the basis that we have, whether we divide the bases of the concept into ten or into some other greater or lesser number. The central advantage of recognizing and understanding this situation is in the explanatory possibilities that it opens up, particularly in connection with the role of embodied conceptualizers. Instead of pitch height being an audible property of an external entity, it emerges as we try to make sense of musical experience—that is, of what is heard, done, and felt.

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5 Temporal Motion and Musical Motion Architecture is frozen music. Music is liquid architecture?1

In this chapter I focus on the “horizontal dimension” of musical motion and space. Unlike the concept of pitch height, there is no component of the concept of musical motion, as defined below, that directly involves literal motion. Or, as Viktor Zuckerkandl (1956) and Judy Lochhead (1989–90) have argued, in most cases musical motion is entirely imaginary. Even more than with pitch height, musical motion is thus not perceptible: what we hear and feel is something other than motion, which we then conceptualize metaphorically as motion. The proposition that we do not hear musical motion may conflict strongly with the way things seem, and so part of the following account involves resolving this conflict. The resolution in turn involves attending to the shared phenomenology of the target domain of music and the source domain of actual motion. As challenging as it may be to think of musical motion as metaphoric, we will go one step further: Musical motion is a special case of temporal motion—the motion through time, and the motion of time—which is itself a product of metaphoric reasoning. For this larger point I will borrow the analysis by Lakoff and Johnson (1999) and amplify it by considering more closely the phenomenology of temporal experience. So, the first task is to call into question our conceptions of temporal motion and space generally, and then to show how our conceptions of temporal motion and musical motion are products of very much the same embodied reasoning. While the account of pitch height in chapter 4 involved a mixture of ten sources of different kinds, the concept of musical motion involves a different set of complexities. To help simplify matters, in this chapter I focus on the relationship between temporal motion and musical motion, and in the next chapter I focus more specifically on musical motion and the role of mimetic participation. Before we turn to the analysis below, I want to contextualize this account with some preliminary remarks on four topics: kinds of musical motion, the question of where

music goes and comes from when it moves, why this analysis matters, and other approaches to musical motion.

Kinds of Musical Motion The kind of musical motion that we are considering is the most familiar kind: it is reflected in the notion of how a melody “goes,” akin to how a story “goes”; it is a metaphoric conceptualization of the temporal order of events. This is distinct from three other kinds of music-related motion: acoustic motion, psychoacoustic motion, and the apparent motion of music from one physical sound source to another.2 Acoustic motion is simply the physical propagation of acoustic pressure waves outward from a source, at the speed of sound, which is not what is commonly meant by musical motion. Psychoacoustic motion includes the apparent motion of sounds within the three-dimensional sonic space of stereophonic recordings (as in panning between left and right channels). The third kind of motion is the apparent motion of a melody, theme, or motive from one part of an ensemble to another, as when the fugue subject “moves” from the basses to the sopranos in the Kyrie of Mozart’s Requiem. Although this third kind of motion involves differences in the actual location of the sound sources (the mise-en-scène of the ensemble), the motion is illusory, as the analysis in this chapter should clarify. For the moment, it may help to compare music performed by marching bands and strolling violins, where the actual locomotion of the performers is distinct from the musical motion of what is being performed. The kind of musical motion in question here involves three metaphoric dimensions. We have already considered one of these in chapter 4, the vertical dimension of pitch height, which in combination with the horizontal dimension gives us the two-dimensional shape of melodic contour. The other dimension involves the relative prominence of the various sounds in a texture and the resulting illusion of a foreground and background, as in the case of melody and accompaniment. We can refer to this as textural depth in the horizontal plane, and I return to it along with the vertical dimension in the next chapter. Musical Motion and Temporal Motion as Metaphoric As we asked what is high about high notes, here we can ask where notes (tones) go and where they come from when they move. One answer is that they move through musical space, but this only begets the question of the nature and origin of musical space; and if we respond that “it is the space in which music moves,” then of course we are back where we started. Now note that the rhetorical remark we are back where we started involves some kind of metaphorical motion: where did we go, and where did we start, that in merely thinking and talking we could somehow return to a starting location? 110  Spatial Conceptions

In this kind of motion the mind wanders, discussions follow a course, and reasoning follows a line of thought, whether straightforward and easy to follow, or convoluted and difficult to follow. The origin and grounding of this cognitive-linguistic habit can be understood as an extension of our more ancient experience of corporeal location. In the story that I am going to tell, the key element is the feeling of temporality in locomotion, which is then extended to the feeling of temporality in other contexts. When we come to the end of an argument, or the end of a story, or the end of a song, we have in each case come to the same kind of place: a temporal end. When we come to the end of a journey, as in journeying from one city to another, we have similarly come to a temporal end; but we have also come to an end that involves actual motion (travel) and an actual location (the tangible realis of real estate). The metaphorical pathways of thought, stories, and music all share part of the phenomenology of physical locomotion without sharing its concrete aspect. The phenomenology in each case involves anticipation (of future events), presence (of present events), and memory (of past events), and it is this shared phenomenology that helps motivate and ground conceptualization of the otherwise abstract (intangible) events of stories and music in terms of motion. Why This Matters I happen to find it interesting in its own right that music can feel as though it moves despite the fact that nothing literally changes location. More practically, however, if we take musical motion as given, as something directly perceptible rather than as something conceived, this contributes to an object-oriented relationship with music which in turn shapes our understanding of affective (emotional) responses to music. If musical motion is understood as a conceptualization of a feeling, rather than as a perceptible property, we gain a different understanding of our relationship with music. There are also subtler reasons for why such an analysis matters. In Michael Spitzer’s application of Nelson Goodman’s theory of density (as shaped within Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory: Goodman 1976; Ricoeur 1994; Spitzer 2004), we are offered what we might describe as a nonlocomotive alternative view of music. The basic idea here is that as a work “progresses” it accrues greater density, as the recurrence of events refer to earlier occurrences in ever-increasing density. This view is in some respects incompatible with the more familiar locomotive, linear view of music, which can make it difficult to grasp. However, when motion is understood as a metaphoric conceptualization, the theory of density is put on more equal footing with linear theories. Adlington (2003) describes a related issue, in how our habit of taking musical motion to be an inherent feature of music can limit the ways that we experience music and the kinds of meaning that we draw from such experience. As part of this, a habitual focus on linearity can inhibit Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  111

appreciation of features such as texture, timbre, and a sense of relative weight. These are of course not incompatible with a sense of motion, but they are often treated as subordinate to motion in the emphasis on pitch organization and delineation of form (see for example Joseph Kerman’s celebrated remarks on the practice of analysis; Kerman 1980). Whatever value may be found in perspectives such as those offered in the theory of density, our access to them is shaped by the extent of our understanding of the underlying logic of what is in effect an implicit theory of musical motion. Other Approaches to Musical Motion In contrast with the case of pitch height, numerous music theorists have written on the topic of musical motion.3 Two approaches most similar to the one I am offering are those of Zuckerkandl (1956) and Lochhead (1989–90). Some of what follows can be understood as a distillation of what these and other writers have said, but situated within the theories of conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) and conceptual blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002).4 In fact, my approach is centrally an application and expansion of Lakoff and Johnson’s analysis of our temporal metaphors (1999, chap. 5).5

Preliminary Analysis We begin by calling into question some habits of thought related to time. The following analysis explores our apparent spatial orientation with respect to time, and the apparent motion of time and through time. Spatial Orientation In the way that most of us normally talk about time, the future is implicitly understood to be located ahead, the past behind, and the present here.6 This is evident in everyday concepts such as looking forward to holidays and looking back on past events, and in the notion of the present as being the here and now. In this conception we are located in the present and either we move toward the future (through the “landscape” of time) or future events move toward our location in the present (following the “flow” of time). This orientation is reflected not only in English and other Indo-European languages but also in other language families around the world (Nuñez and Sweetser 2006). This way of reasoning can feel so logical as to seemingly reflect an absolute truth about the way things are, independently of human perception and cognition. However, as Nuñez and Sweetser explain, for people who speak the Aymara language of South America (some two to three million people in the Bolivian, Peruvian, and Chilean Andes), this spatial orientation is reversed: the future is behind and the past is in front. From one perspective, someone has got it wrong—either the Aymara speakers or the 112  Spatial Conceptions

rest of the world. But this perspective assumes that there is some sort of temporal directionality and that some of us are facing the wrong way. Instead, we should consider another possibility: that the past and future do not have locations unless and until they are conceptualized in terms of motion and space. To understand this possibility we have to examine the logic and motivation of the two conceptualizations. The Past Is in Front Why would anyone imagine that the past is in front? To understand the logic here, imagine that you are working on some stationary task, such as building a model airplane, weaving a basket, typing an essay, or grinding corn. When you are done, what is in front of you? It is the evidence and product of all the work that you have just performed: your past, as represented by the products of your past efforts, is in front of you. As this correlation becomes established, the future implicitly becomes located elsewhere and, given our bodily front-back asymmetry, and perhaps under the influence of binary reasoning generally, this other location is behind. Nuñez and Sweetser (2006) offer a different motivation that involves the conceptual metaphor knowing is seeing (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). I consider this metaphor in detail in chapter 7, but basically it reflects the importance of visual information for humans, which contributes to a visual bias in the epistemologies of many cultures around the world. If you see what I mean or see what I am getting at, then you know what I mean, but if you find my meaning to be fuzzy or unclear (NOT KNOWING IS NOT SEEING), then I might have to draw you a picture to help you get a clearer idea in your mind. To the extent that past events are better known to us than future events, this should motivate a correlation between what is seen (what is in front of us), what is known, and what has already occurred (the past). Since the conceptual metaphor knowing is seeing is in fact reflected in Aymara (Nuñez and Sweetser 2006), the conception of the past as existing “in front” is thus doubly motivated: by knowing is seeing and by the manufacturing scenario that I described above. But this explanation then creates a puzzle: Since knowing is seeing is common in other languages, and since manufacturing scenarios are common in human experience, we need to account for the fact that most cultures imagine the future to be in front instead of behind. The Future Is in Front Why would anyone imagine that the future is in front? The gist of the explanation that I am about to offer is that, in the domain of locomotion, events that are yet to occur and in which we are immediately interested are normally located in front of us: I desire something (food, shelter, etc.), orient myself in its direction, move toward it, arrive at its location, and thereby satisfy my desire. Our evolutionary Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  113

history establishes this correlation, which is reinforced throughout each day. This habit establishes an ancient correlation between anticipation and desire, location-ahead, and motion-toward, which is then extended to anticipation of and desire for things that are not literally in front of us. When we “look forward to vacation,” or to 5:00, or to any particular moment in a musical work, anticipation and desire are literal, and they bring along the ancient correlates of locationahead and motion-toward. Anticipation, desire, and their fulfillment motivate the metaphoric extension of the more ancient spatial-temporal experience to the evolutionarily more recent nonspatial temporal experience. We can better understand this perspective by considering a plausible evolutionary history of the elements involved. Desire, Anticipation, and Literal Motion-Toward Let us go back in time, so to speak, prior to limbs, brains, and even multicellular animal life, to approximately one billion years ago. Here we have the basic behaviors that serve the maintenance of homeostasis: ingesting nutrients and avoiding predation.7 The subsequent evolution of vision, smell, and central nervous systems, of hearing, limbs, and bipedal locomotion, serve this same ancient purpose. In mammals, if not also in other classes of animals, the basic forms of attractive and aversive locomotion have been enriched by basic affective states such as desire, aversion, and fear. In humans, and to varying extents in other species as well, attractive and aversive behaviors have been further enriched by the capacities of memory and planning. Planning is informed by memory and is integrated with anticipation—anticipation of what we will do, what others will do, and what the circumstances will be like apart from and in addition to the actions of agents. Memory and planning remain functionally tied to basic affective states, regardless of the extent to which one might be aware of this con­ nection. In conceptualizing the future as being in front of us, the relevant scenarios are those involving desire, planning and anticipation, motion-toward, and satisfaction. For example, a desire for food motivates actions to satisfy this desire, and these actions involve planning, anticipation, and memory. The plan can be as immediate as reaching for an apple, or as complex as getting up and walking to the kitchen, or as long-range as going to a nursery to buy an apple tree, plant and tend it, and then harvest the fruit. In such actions the following become correlated: desire, anticipation, location-ahead (location of the thing desired), motion-toward (including the relevant exertions), arrival at the desired location, and satisfaction. The central proposition is that these correlations remain even in contexts where anticipation does not involve actual locomotion—that a feeling of anticipation and desire motivates a metaphoric sense of location-ahead and motion-toward, and a subsequent feeling of satisfaction-of-desire motivates a metaphoric sense of arrival. 114  Spatial Conceptions

The value of this proposition depends on the pervasiveness of such scenarios that involve actual motion and space. Our modern capacity to anticipate and desire objects and states of affairs in which actual motion-toward is only indirectly relevant might raise doubt as to the extent of the relevance of the ancient correlations. However, we still experience the ancient scenarios throughout each day: every time we move from one location to another, even if only reaching across a table or walking across a room to open or close a window, we enact the same ancient scenario in the service of maintaining homeostasis. Another possible source of doubt involves the fact that we commonly associate “anticipation” and “desire” (as with “imitation” in chaps. 1 and 2) with their fully conscious forms. However, as important as the fully conscious forms may be, the more significant forms here are those that are only marginally conscious or nonconscious, much as Huron (2006) explains with regard to the role of anticipation in the foundations of cognition. The mundane forms of anticipation and desire, as in reaching for an apple or walking down a hall, continually reinforce the correlations that plausibly motivated the notion of the future as “ahead” in the first place. That this spatial understanding of future events has emerged in most cultures around the world (Nuñez and Sweetser 2006) is consistent with the historical and current pervasiveness of such scenarios. The question at hand is why we understand future events as if they were located ahead, and the proposition is that this is a metaphoric extension of a correlation that dominated the lives of early humans and that still pervades the lives of modern humans. Other Future Directions Although most cultures conceptualize the future as either “located ahead” or “located behind,” various cultures and individuals nevertheless have alternative spatial conceptualizations of the future, whether to-the-right, or above, or below, or some combination of these.8 To-the-right is likely influenced by our third-person representations on the page: number lines, staff notation, calendars, and writing to-the-right. Compare Fuhrman and Boroditsky (2010), who found in three experiments that English speakers conceptualized temporal order from left to right while Hebrew speakers ordered the same events from right to left. Downward is also likely influenced by our visual representations, in the way that future events in a book or a musical score are below (on a given page). However, since the English language and music are also written to the right on a given line, these two directions represent two different directions toward the future. Compare also the findings of Boroditsky (2001) and Boroditsky, Fuhrman, and McCormick (2011) that Mandarin speakers were more inclined to understand the future as downward. As for upward, this is plausibly influenced by the upward growth of plants and animals, and by the increase in height as harvested and manufactured items are stacked. Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  115

The Australian Aboriginal Pormpuraawans have a fundamentally different spatial conceptualization of temporality. As Boroditsky and Gaby (2010) explain, this community conceives of the future as westward. The other directions that we have considered—ahead, behind, to the right, to the left, downward, and upward—are all egocentric, or oriented according to the bodily position of the speaker (the conceptualizer). However, with the Pormpuraawans the direction is fixed according to the geocentric direction of east to west—for example, if one is facing north, the future is to the left. Boroditsky and Gaby offer the straightforward conjecture that the apparent movement of the sun likely motivates this conception. Two Directions of Temporal Motion The Aymara and Pormpuraawan examples help to demonstrate the constructed nature of the notion of the future as “located ahead,” and for the remainder of this chapter I am going to focus on the conception in which the future is ahead and the past is behind. To continue this analysis let us ask the following pair of questions: Do we move through time toward the future, or does time flow toward and past us from the future? The answer to both questions is “yes,” but the motion in both cases is metaphoric, and this paradox is integral to our conceptualization of time. To explain, let me start with a somewhat simplified view and then consider a complication. As McTaggart (1908) discussed, and as Lochhead (1989–90) and Lakoff and Johnson (1999) explain, we have two common ways of describing temporal motion: as motion through time, and as the motion of time. The conception of one’s own motion toward the future implies a kind of temporal landscape through which one moves, with specific times corresponding to specific locations, as in “We’re coming up on 5:00.” Lochhead refers to this as static time (McTaggart’s B-series) and Lakoff and Johnson refer to this as the moving observer metaphor (and also Time’s Landscape). The other conception is nearly the opposite: we stand in the present as future events approach us, as in Sumer is icumen in (Summer has come in). Lochhead refers to this conception as dynamic time (McTaggart’s A-series) and Lakoff and Johnson refer to this as the moving time metaphor. In what follows, I use the terms moving observer scenario and stationary observer scenario.9 The paradoxical relationship between these two scenarios is demonstrated in the following example from Lakoff and Johnson (1999, 148). Imagine that we had scheduled a meeting for next month but that something has since come up and the meeting has been moved ahead one week. Is the meeting now one week earlier or one week later? The answer, it turns out, depends on which scenario one implicitly adopts. For the entity in motion (either the moving observer or the approaching future event), “a-head” is relative to its direction of motion. Accordingly, for the moving observer, moving the meeting “a-head” means moving it

116  Spatial Conceptions

88

The The Present: Present: Moving Moving Observer Observer Scenario Scenario

Original Original Date/Location Date/Location of the the Meeting of Meeting

New New Date/Location Date/Location Ahead Ahead

direction direction that that the the moving moving observer observer is is “heading” “heading”

The The Present: Present: Stationary Stationary Observer Observer Scenario Scenario

New New Date/Location Date/Location Ahead Ahead

Original Original Date/Location Date/Location of of the the Meeting Meeting

direction direction that that time time and and the the meeting meeting are are “heading” “heading”

Figure 5.1. Two directions of “A-head.”

in the direction we are moving, making it one week further ahead and thus one week later. By contrast, for the moving event (the approaching meeting), moving the meeting “a-head” means moving it in the direction that it is moving (toward us), making it one week closer to us and thus one week earlier. Both of these interpretations are represented in figure 5.1. When I ask a group of people if the meeting is now earlier or later, each time I receive a mixture of both answers, which is understandable because the expression is ambiguous with respect to direction and suits both scenarios equally well. But I have also found that some people insist that the expression means either one interpretation or the other, even after hearing the explanation. Insisting on one interpretation or the other does not reflect the absolute fact of the matter (as if half the people are simply wrong) but instead reflects one’s preference, as a result of habits of thought and efficient cognition, and a desire for certainty, which may be especially appealing when encountering something as abstract as temporality. Lakoff and Johnson also point out that the ambiguity of the expression highlights a figure-ground relation between the two conceptions, much like the two possible cubes in the Necker figure (figure 5.2). The basic idea with this and other ambiguous figures (such as the duck/rabbit figure, or the vase and two faces) is that one cannot see both interpretations at once, and neither one is the “true” interpretation. In the case of the Necker figure, however, some people can see only one cube (even when both are pointed out to them), and some people find it difficult to see either one, while others find it easy to switch back and forth between

Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  117

Figure 5.2. The Necker figure and two available cubes.

the two, and some claim to be able to see the twelve lines without seeing any cube. However, what is most pertinent here is an asymmetry in the perceptibility of the two cubes. The cube on the right in figure 5.2 is easier for people to see (see Wernery 2013 for a summary of clinical studies). This asymmetry is not in the stimulus, the lines of which are symmetric, but in the human perceivers, and we should ask why this might be. On the principle that we compare present perceptions to past perceptions, one straightforward explanation is that the cube on the right resembles something like a box on the floor, which is relatively common. By contrast, the cube on the left resembles something like the end of a beam overhead or perhaps a floating box, and presumably most of us spend less time looking up at such things. As we will see, there is a similar asymmetry in our conceptions of musical motion that reflects analogous asymmetries in the experiences of perceivers. There is another distinction to be made here. The Necker figure is commonly referred to as the Necker cube, for obvious reasons, but while this may be harmless for most purposes it adds a layer of confusion. There is no cube except in imagination. The figure can be seen as one cube or the other, but this is not a property of the figure. Instead, the cubes are motivated perceptions, or available perceptions. In fact, I do not even want to say that they are “perceptions” (or percepts) because of the difference between this two-dimensional drawing and the three-dimensional cubes that it is being seen-as. For example, note that one could construct a 3-D wire-frame cube that resembled the Necker figure, but it would be a manifestation of one cube or the other. If one nevertheless “saw” the alternative cube in looking at a 3-D wire cube, it would be an illusion or an illusory perception. The significance of the distinction between perception and illusory perception concerns the role of cognition in making sense of sensory information. The two scenarios of temporal motion are not things that we perceive. They are illusions 118  Spatial Conceptions

based on perceptions of temporal relations (e.g., yet-to-occur, occurring, and having-occurred) and our metaphoric conceptualization of these perceptions in terms of motion and space. The expression move the meeting ahead one week is not ambiguous with respect to two ways of perceiving time; it is ambiguous with respect to two metaphoric conceptualizations of temporal relations. A Potential Complication Before continuing the arguments for this view, I want to acknowledge a potential complication concerning the possibility that the two scenarios of temporal motion are not figure-ground related conceptualizations. Perhaps, instead, both scenarios reflect what actually happens and both occur simultaneously. For example, it is common enough that we approach someone at the same time that they approach us, whether in a hallway or on a highway. Similarly, perhaps we approach future events at the same time that they approach us. The first problem with this conjecture, however, is that this is not reflected in the way that we normally talk about time. We say, or sing, Christmas is coming (stationary observer) and Joni Mitchell sings It’s coming on Christmas (moving observer), but we do not say that we and Christmas are getting closer, or colliding, or meeting up at some place in time.10 One might well respond to this challenge by asserting that this simply reflects an impreciseness of conceptualization and language, and that the reality of time is difficult if not impossible for us to conceptualize.11 This response points to a second problem, which is that the conjecture—that future events really are approaching us, and we really are approaching future events “through time”—takes temporal motion and space as given, as if they existed apart from our conceptualization of temporality in terms of motion and space. I do not see how this conjecture might be verified or falsified. But there is an alternate approach that embraces the evolution of embodied cognition and the general practice of metaphoric extension from basic embodied experience to more abstract experiences such as temporality. In the third section (below) I explore the phenomenology of temporal experience (the ways that temporal experience seems or feels) to discover what I believe to be some of the crucial features of the logic of the illusion of temporal motion and space. Literal Terms for Temporality The last step in this preliminary analysis is to try to define time in a way that does not rely on space and motion (in order to avoid circular reasoning). The difficulty in doing this reflects the relative emptiness of time without spatial metaphoric reasoning. Time is a catchall term for temporal relations, which is the ordered relations among entities (living or not) and events (occurrences; things that happen). If we wanted to define it without using terms borrowed from the spatial domain, we Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  119

could not use order (Italic *ord-, to arrange objects) and relations (from Latin -latus, carried or borne), from which we abstract the temporal order of first, second, third, etc. Similarly, the following terms for temporality are metaphoric when used outside of actual spatiality: before: in front of, as in fore-ground after: be-hind, as in the aft (rear) of a ship series: serere, to join or connect sequence: sequi, to follow previous: pre-via, prior way, going be-fore prior: *prai- or *prei-, from *per-, forward, through next: cognate of nigh-est, or most near One might object that these terms refer to actions and states that have always been both spatial and temporal, to which I would agree. As a species and as individuals we learn temporality in locomotive and nonlocomotive actions, including one’s own actions and in observing the actions of others (animate and inanimate). Temporality is integral to experience, but the concept of temporal motion—the concept that there is motion toward and from the future—is derivative and illusory. When it comes to talking about temporal relations beyond actual spatial relations, we use the terms learned through actions. The concrete actions and space involved are the source domain, and the abstract temporality is the target domain. Nevertheless, we do have a small set of familiar terms with which we can define some basic features of temporality nonmetaphorically. The terms future, present, past, and order are each originally spatial, but they refer to basic nonmetaphoric features of temporal experience that can be helpful in distinguishing literal from metaphoric language: • Future: yet to be • Present: existing12 • Past: existing only as memory • Order: • sooner/earlier (but not later)13 • then, now • first, second, third . . . Etymologically, future does not necessarily refer to location-ahead or motion-toward. It is the irregular participle of Latin esse, to be, in turn from PIE (ProtoIndo-European) *bheue-, to be, exist, grow. Similarly, present (prae-, before, + esse, to be) does not necessarily refer to arrival-here, although in the concrete world, to be is to be in some location, so that present implies location. Past is the past participle of the locative verb pass, and order is from the Italic root *ord-, to arrange (applied early on to weaving), but the ordinal terms listed above do not necessarily refer to spatial relations even if they are closely associated. 120  Spatial Conceptions

Beyond the terms above, we have eon, eternal, ever, and coetaneous (contemporary), all from the PIE root *aiw-, vital force, life, long life, eternity. We also have recent: new, fresh, young, from PIE root *ken- (hence, -cene in Pleistocene and related terms). But beyond these, most of the terms are either relatively rare (as with etesian, annually, from Greek etos, year), or are more closely tied to spatial experience (as with perpetual, from PIE root *pet-, to rush, to fly, which became Latin perpetuus, continuous, unbroken, lasting, permanent).14 What these examples show is that we do indeed have a few terms for time that are not necessarily tied to space and motion, but that most of our temporal concepts nevertheless are borrowed from literal spatiotemporal experience. The last example that I want to consider is one that bears more directly upon music: duration. Like the ordinal terms, duration is not necessarily spatial, although it is ultimately metaphoric in a different sense. Music scholars will recognize the Latin origin in durus, hard. Since things of greater hardness tend to have greater duration, hardness is an apt source domain—but then what is the target domain, precisely? That is, what does duration refer to? We cannot say “temporal length,” since length is part of what is in question. To avoid circularity we could note that to endure is to remain unchanging. The nonmetaphoric target domain is thus the slightly clumsy unchanging-ness, onto which we map the property of hardness. When we speak of durable materials, we are speaking literally; when we speak of temporal duration and human endurance, we are speaking metaphorically. The property of unchanging-ness relates to the condition of no-change, which likewise is thus understood metaphorically as hard or firm, as when one “stands firm” on some matter of debate, and as in the other metaphoric extensions trust, betroth, and truth, all from the PIE root *deru-/dreu- (to be firm, solid) that gave us tree and duration. Temporal durations, including musical durations, reflect the same conceptual metaphor unchangingness is hardness. Metaphoric “duration” is an object-oriented conceptualization. It does not embrace the sense of motion through space that we might say is the heart of musical temporality. To understand locomotive conceptualizations of musical motion, we will have to examine in more detail the phenomenology that we considered above in connection with conceptualizing the future metaphorically as in front.

On the Phenomenology and Metaphoric Logic of Temporal and Musical Motion The logic of temporal and musical motion involves two overlapping sets of metaphors: those involved in the moving and stationary observer scenarios, and those involving the conceptual metaphor states are locations. The central premise for both sets is that motion and space seem to be literal properties of time because our experiences of temporality in general and in the specific case of locomotion have a shared phenomenology. The significance of this shared phenomenology is amplified by the extent to which the general and specific cases coincide on a daily Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  121

[Figure 5-3: Conceptual Blend of Spatiality and Music]

Input Domain: Spatiality

Input Domain: Musical Events and Relations

Location: ahead, here, behind Motion: approach, arrival, departure, passage Experience: anticipation, presence, memory

Location: (none) Motion: (none) Experience: anticipation, presence, memory

Blended Domain: Musical Motion and Space anticipated, heard, and remembered events & conditions heard/felt as ahead, here, and behind and understood in terms of approach, arrival, and departure/passage

Figure 5.3. Conceptual blend of spatiality and music.

basis, which includes every time we move from place to place and every time we reach for something. In order to understand cases in which they do not overlap, we need to examine the phenomenologies of both domains. Phenomenology of Anticipation, Presence, and Memory Our experience of locomotion divides into (1) our own movement, which gives us the moving observer scenario, and (2) our observation of the movement of others, which divides into second-person and third-person experiences: the motion of others toward us (second-person), which gives us the stationary observer scenario, and the motion of others toward some other location (third-person), which we comprehend in terms of our first- and second-person experiences. The moving and stationary observer scenarios both produce the following ancient correlations involving anticipation, presence, and memory: • Anticipation is correlated with location-ahead and approach • Presence is correlated with location-here and arrival • Memory is correlated with location-behind and departure Anticipation applies literally to events that are yet to occur, presence applies to events that are occurring, and memory applies to events that have already oc122  Spatial Conceptions

[Figure 5-4: Literally and Metaphorically Moving Observer]

Concrete Domain

General Event Domain

Musical Event Domain

location(s) of things physically passed

location of things physically present

location(s) of things physically approached

past

present

future

“locations(s)” of remembered events

“location” of present events

“locations(s)” of anticipated events

“location(s)” of remembered musical events

“location” of present musical events

“location(s)” of anticipated musical events

12

Figure 5.4. Literally and metaphorically moving observer.

Physical Domain

location(s) of entities that have passed

location of entities as they pass

location(s) of approaching entities

past

present

future

General Event Domain

“locations(s)”of remembered events

“location” of present events

“locations(s)” of anticipated events

Musical Event Domain

“location(s)” of remembered musical events

“location” of present musical events

“location(s)” of anticipated musical events

Figure 5.5. Stationary observer and literally and metaphorically moving entities.

curred. In the domain of actual motion, the spatial-locomotive correlations are literal. When we experience anticipation, presence, and memory in nonspatial domains like music, the ancient correlations create a sense of approach, arrival, and departure, which in turn motivate a sense of musical “locations” that are metaphorically ahead, here, and behind. This relationship between the spatial and temporal/musical domains is represented as a conceptual blend in fig­ure 5.3. Just to be clear, note that the dynamic concepts of approach, arrival, departure, and passage are all spatial in origin and thus do not belong to music until borrowed from the domain of actual spatial relations. From figure 5.3 we can distill three correlated continua which apply to both the literal and metaphoric versions of the moving observer and stationary observer scenarios: Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  123

• Phenomenological Experience: anticipation-presence-memory • Location: ahead-present-behind • Motion: approach-arrival-departure/passage We can see the correspondences between the spatial and nonspatial domains more directly in figure 5.4 (moving observer scenario) and 5.5 (stationary observer scenario). The location of the future to the right in these figures is merely a convenience that happens to reflect written English and Western music notation. Let us now cast all of the foregoing into something approaching a proper theory of musical motion and space. By the logic of the two scenarios of temporal motion, and under the motivations and constraints of the phenomenology of temporal experience, we can identify the following principles: 1. A given musical event will be anticipated (with some degree of specificity), then heard, and then remembered. 2. Location: We can expect the event to be conceptualized metaphorically, according to either scenario, and according to the following spatial continuum: a. first “ahead” and “in” the future, b. then “here” and “in” the present, c. and then “behind” and “in” the past 3. Motion: We can also expect the event to be conceptualized metaphorically, according to either scenario, in terms of “approach,” “arrival,” and then “departure/passage.” 4. Any two nonsimultaneous musical events will be experienced individually according to the first three principles and in relation to each other, including the sense of their being “separated” by some “distance.” Defining what constitutes a musical event is at least as difficult as defining the precise duration of the present (see Epstein 1995), but in this context I am concerned only with what you or I might refer to as “an event,” which includes anything that can be anticipated, then felt as present, and then remembered, from a single chord to an entire concert. (For a detailed consideration of the issue of what counts as a musical event, see Hasty 1981.) Because a musical work comprises many events, or nested events (e.g., notes within a theme, themes within a movement), we are talking about relationships between a listener and individual events, and relations among events as observed by a listener. All of the terms in quotation marks are metaphoric. Their logic may be apparent from what we have considered so far, but I specify the cross-domain mappings of such terms later in this chapter. Again, the keys to this spatialization of temporal relations among musical events are that (1) the experiences of anticipation, presence, and memory in the domain of music are literal and are fundamentally the same as in the domain of actual motion, and (2) this experience brings 124  Spatial Conceptions

along the spatial-locomotive correlations from the domain of actual motion. As a result, musical motion seems or feels like actual motion because the phenomenology of anticipation-presence-memory is shared by both domains. State-Locations and Musical Motion The moving and stationary observer scenarios represented in figures 5.4 and 5.5 give us two directions of motion and a sense of approach, arrival, and departure/ passage, but they do not give us locations that are any more specific than ahead, here, and behind. The conceptualization of specific locations, such as that of the recapitulation, the B section, or the downbeat, also involves the conceptual metaphor states are locations and its corollaries. The state-location metaphors give us motion and location but without specifying direction, and so they complement the moving and stationary observer scenarios, which give us direction but not specific locations. I introduced the state-locations metaphors in chapters 3 and 4, but it is here in the context of musical motion that they play their most extensive role. States are locations and its two correlates change is motion (change of state is change of location) and difference is distance (difference of state is distance between locations) are among the most pervasive and fundamental metaphors in English (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980 and 1999, and Kövecses 2002). States are locations is the metaphor whereby any kind of state or condition (including financial, emotional, and developmental states) comes to be understood as a place. For example, we can be “in” debt, a bad mood, high school, or adolescence, just as we can be “in” the month of May or “in” the key of B-flat. A corollary to this is that any change in one’s state motivates conceptions of motion “into,” “through,” “out of,” and “away from” metaphoric state-locations such as debt, adolescence, or the key of B-flat. Another corollary is that difference between states motivates a conceptualization of distance between states, as in being “near to” or “far from” an agreement, and as in “closely” and “distantly” related keys. Often, if not in fact most often, when we use prepositions (in, under, through, etc.) we use them metaphorically via the logic of states are locations and its corollaries. As with the two scenarios of temporal motion, the state-locations metaphors are extensions from the more ancient, nonmetaphorical experience of states, changes of state, and differences of state. In everyday human life, to exist is (1) to be bodily in a location and (2) to experience one’s overall physical-psychological state in connection with that location. To change locations (to move; to change one’s locative state) is also to change one’s physical-psychological state, whether a little or a lot (e.g., to move into or out of the sunshine, or to otherwise move in order to satisfy a mild or urgent desire). Although one’s overall state can change noticeably without one changing locations (e.g., becoming hungry while sitting in place), the motivation for the metaphoric extension to states in general requires only that the correlations in question be common, not exclusive (as with Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  125

greater is higher, which does not assume that greater always correlates literally with higher). The correlation between one’s physical-psychological state and one’s locative state motivates conceptualization of all states in terms of locations. In music, a feeling of a relatively unchanging state will motivate a sense of being in a place (as in being “in” a key), a feeling of change will motivate a sense of motion from one state-location to another (as in modulating “from” one key “to” another), and a sense of difference between states will motivate a sense of distance between location (as in interval and key “distances”). These correlations apply to object-oriented perceptions as well, in hearing states, changes of state, and differences between states in musical sounds. To the extent that music listening necessarily involves changes in a listener’s physical-psychological state, perceptions of musical states, changes of state, and differences between states necessarily are perceptions not only of what one hears but also of what one feels in response to what one hears. State-Locations and Our Two Scenarios of Temporal and Musical Motion In both of the scenarios of metaphoric temporal motion, the continua of futurepresent-past and anticipation-presence-memory are continua of states relative to a given observer. Accordingly, the sense of locations, motion, and distances that we associate with them reflect the logic of the state-locations metaphors, which is to say that most concepts of temporal and musical motion and space are products of states are locations and its correlates. Both scenarios involve states of relations among events and an observer. For example, yet-to-occur, occurring, and occurred are not absolute states but are states in relation to an observer whom we normally take to be located in the present. The specific state of yet-to-occur, for example, is conceptualized as the statelocation known as the future, which is in front of the observer who is located in the present. In the moving observer scenario, change of state is conceptualized as a result of the observer’s motion toward the future, and in the stationary observer scenario it is conceptualized as a result of the motion of events from the future. The locations provided by states are locations and the motion provided by change is motion are thus mutually defining and equally significant. The concept of temporal distances includes “intervening” events, each of which involves its own set of states of relations between event and observer. For example, nested within a week is one’s experience of seven concatenated days, wherein one’s relationship to each day changes from yet-to-occur, to occurring, and to occurred. In turn, each day is a concatenation, not primarily of hours, but of events (or “moments,” from Latin movere and the PIE root *meue-, to push away), where events are commonly comprised of briefer events. If some days seem longer than others, we can take a hint from the expressions of a “long day” and a day that “drags on” to understand why. The following explanation holds that the 126  Spatial Conceptions

logic begins with one’s own experience of motion (moving observer), which we then attribute to the “motion” of time (stationary observer). Let us say that the workday has a normal end-state. This state is anticipated, in at least a functional sense if not also as a desired state. By the logic of metaphoric temporal motion that we have already considered, this anticipated state becomes a locative state at some distance in front of us. In the source domain of locomotion (moving observer), greater length (distance) corresponds to greater exertion and effort, whether as normal exertion for greater duration, or as greater exertion (moving faster) for normal duration. If I exert a normal amount and do not achieve the usual goal, this implies a greater distance, and so the day seems longer. If I exert more and feel positively about it, the day will seem full but not necessarily long, whereas if I do not enjoy positive rewards for my efforts, my exertions will seem inefficient and it can seem instead as though, for example, I have been “dragging” something. Days that seem to “fly by” (in the stationary observer scenario) reflect roughly the opposite experience and corresponding reasoning. The Cross-Domain Mappings for Temporal and Musical Motion The cross-domain mappings in our temporal metaphors specify the structural details that are imported from the source domain of actual motion and space onto the target domain of temporal states and relations. As usual, this means that there should be no metaphoric terms in the target domain, since these are the terms whose metaphoric status is to be explained. The basic mappings are already apparent from the discussion above—for example, location-ahead and approach map onto anticipated events or states. Before I specify the other mappings, however, I should specify the relevant conceptual metaphor. As with pitch height, this specification proves to be a challenging task, and the challenge reveals something about the nature of temporal and musical motion. Time should of course be the target domain, which leads to the formulation of time is _____, but what precisely is the source domain? The challenge here has to do with what I mentioned above, that time is a catchall term for various kinds of temporal relations and thus subsumes a number of inconsistent conceptualizations. We should speak instead of temporal relations, which then leads to the generic conceptual metaphor of temporal relations are spatial relations. This generic metaphor then divides out into the following set of conceptual metaphors: • time is space; times are locations • time is motion; times are moving entities • time is ordered events; times are events • time is a plurality of states (conditions); times are states (conditions) • time is duration; times are events and conditions of a certain duration Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  127

Target Domain: Temporality

Source Domain: Spatiality

when (time, times)

ß

where (locations) (TIMES ARE LOCATIONS)

yet to occur (anticipated) occurring (present) no longer occurring (remembered)

ß ß ß

location ahead location here location behind

ever sooner now ever earlier

ß ß ß

approach arrival departure

states (conditions) change of state difference of state

ß ß ß

locations motion (change of locative state) distance (more intervening locative states)

continuous change of state rate of change of state characteristics of state-changes

ß ß ß

continuous motion (flow, passage) speed (tempo) characteristics of motion (kinds of motion)

duration no-change beginning and ending of a stat

ß ß ß

length (also distance) no-motion (stasis; duration) boundaries/borders of a location

Figure 5.6. Mappings from spatial states and relations onto temporal states and relations.

These reflect some of the ways that we conceptualize time, but to analyze the illusion of temporal motion and space it is helpful, and perhaps necessary, to omit the ambiguous “time” from the cross-domain mappings. We can better understand time, I think, as relations among states, which in most cases are relations among ordered states. This paraphrase then gives us the following pair of generic conceptual metaphors: • temporal states are spatial states • temporal relations are spatial relations The target domains, the things to be understood metaphorically, are temporal states and temporal relations (relations among temporal states). Figure 5.6 shows the principal cross-domain mappings for the two metaphors. The mappings in figure 5.6 apply to both the moving observer and stationary observer scenarios. In music, these mappings apply, respectively, to conceptions of music as a landscape (a fixed form) and music as a moving entity. It is important to keep in mind that these mappings are motivated by the phenomenology of nonspatial temporal experience. Without this motivation in mind, the cross-domain mappings can simply look like something layered on top of the facts of the matter. That is, if we ignore or reject the arguments above, along with the similar arguments of others within and beyond musicology, and instead take temporal motion and musical motion as given, then these mappings explain little or nothing. By contrast, as I discuss in the next chapter, with the motivations 128  Spatial Conceptions

in mind we can better understand the relationship between sound, action, and feeling that is implicit in musical terms such as steps and leaps, in notions such as interval and key distance, and in the many other spatial-motional concepts on which we rely. The benefits of the foregoing analysis also become clearer when we turn things around and use the moving observer scenario as an example. There is no necessary reason to think that we actually enter a new year (in some mode of temporal “motion”), that we can be near its middle or end, or that we pass through it, anymore than we must think that the sun circles the earth because that is how it seems; but there are very good reasons to imagine that we do so, in connection with the phenomenology and metaphoric reasoning we have been considering.15 The logical nature of the illusion of temporal motion makes it appealing to imagine that it is not an illusion. But the paradoxes that arise are not paradoxes of an objectively given time; they are instead by-products of our metaphoric reasoning. From this perspective, any blurriness or looseness of our general understanding of time reflects the blurriness of our understanding of the relevant metaphoric reasoning and our understanding of the nature of the two domains in question.

Additional Considerations and Implications of this Basic Story If the preceding analysis shows musical motion to be a special case of temporal motion, there remain nevertheless a number of other fundamental parts of the basic story that I want to tell. Some of these concern the role of mimetic participation, which I consider in the next chapter, but others are more closely tied to the temporal-musical relationship that we have considered so far. The Challenge of Accepting Temporal Motion as Metaphoric The preceding account calls into question a number of fundamental assumptions about the nature of experience and our relationship with the world. The web of values built on these assumptions can increase the challenge of accepting the arguments, apart from whatever merit they might have otherwise. To the extent that we normally take temporal motion as given, this understanding of temporality, in which time is commonly conceptualized as the “fourth dimension,” takes part in what is otherwise a nonmetaphoric world of three-dimensional space and motion, gravity, inertia, the movements of the sun and the moon, object permanence (the principle that objects continue to exist when we look away), and all of the other features of experience that we normally take for granted. Even if there are paradoxes in our metaphoric conceptualization of temporal motion, and even if our understanding of it is often incomplete, the conceptualization empowers us with a way of making sense of something that is crucial to experience and yet is otherwise quite abstract. The notion that future events, for example, have a fixed location that we move toward, or alternatively Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  129

that they have a fixed spatial relationship with other future events as they move toward us, offers a more concrete way of understanding our relationship with future events than the more literal but abstract sense of anticipated and yet-to-occur. The paradoxical relationship of the two scenarios of temporal motion takes little or nothing away from their reassuring value, since, as I imagine the situation, most often we do not notice or otherwise give much thought to the paradoxes. And even when we explore the paradoxes, it can be reassuring to assume that temporal motion is nevertheless given and that the paradoxes either inhere in the true nature of temporality, or they result from our limited understanding of this nature. The alternative proposition that temporal motion is not given, and that it is a result of our metaphoric conceptualization of temporal relations, challenges this reassurance while simultaneously offering a way of seeing past illusion and into the structure of the fiction upon which we commonly rely. Within this structure is a systematic conceptualization of our temporal relationship with events. To understand the relevant processes is to better understand our role in the creation of motion-related musical meaning.16 Carnegie Hall and Musical Scores There is a story told of a performance by Fritz Kreisler and Sergei Rachmaninov, during which Kreisler supposedly lost his “place” and whispered to Rachmaninov, “Sergei, where are we?”—to which Rachmaninov replied, “Carnegie Hall.” In this story Kreisler has metaphorically lost his place and is asking for the correct metaphoric location “in” the music, whereas Rachmaninov gives a literal answer. As it happens, there is another joke involving this locale. A young performer, new to New York City, asks a police officer, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”—to which he replies, “Practice, practice, practice.” This case is just the reverse: someone has literally lost their way and receives a metaphoric answer to their question. In this second case, Carnegie Hall is no longer a literal place but instead stands metonymically for a state of achievement in musical studies, much like Mount Parnassus is not a literal location in gradus ad parnassum (steps to Parnassus) and fourth grade (a “step” “between” third and fifth “grades”) is not a literal location in elementary school, despite being taught in the literal location of a particular classroom. Except when we are pointing at a score, there are no actual musical locations (save for the kinds mentioned at the start of this chapter), but even the rehearsal and bar numbers in a score are hardly literal musical locations; they are visual representations of metaphoric locations that reinforce conceptualizations of musical works as objects and as locations. Kinds of Anticipation Anticipation varies in the extent to which it involves specific events and states— for example, wanting some kind of resolution of a harmonic or metric dissonance 130  Spatial Conceptions

versus wanting a specific kind of resolution. Akin to this is the distinction between veridical and schematic anticipation (veridical and schematic expectation in Huron 2006). Veridical anticipation involves knowing how a piece “goes,” such as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and thus anticipating very specific events while listening to a performance of it. Schematic anticipation involves knowledge of a practice or style and thus the ability to anticipate likely kinds of events, as in the events that comprise the generic form of a Viennese symphony. The two kinds of anticipation tend to go hand in hand, especially in the process of becoming familiar with a work or practice, and they shape the sense of musical motion, especially when anticipation is attached to desire and we gain a sense of motion toward a goal. In many cases, however, it can seem as though one is not really anticipating anything when listening to music. This sense of no-anticipation can be a crucial feature of musical experience and it reflects the variability in the extent to which anticipation is conscious: fully conscious anticipation and desire are at one end of a continuum of anticipatory processes that also include, at the other end, implicit anticipation of each step on a stairway or each beat in music with a beat, or a vague anticipation that the weather will eventually change or that a present musical texture will eventually give way to a new texture. Such events and changes can be explicitly anticipated, but often we are only marginally conscious of them if we are aware of them at all. The low-level forms are fundamental to the conceptualization of temporal and musical motion, and all the more so precisely because they normally escape full consciousness. Stopping Time, and The End of Time Imagine time stopping, and then ask what is involved in this imagined scenario. In the movies, everything stops moving and it can feel very much as though time has stopped, to the extent that this creates a sense of no-change. But the movie portrayals cannot quite capture the entirety of it, because we remain aware of the lack of change in the portrayed world, and our own experience is flooded with iterative continuous change in our state and in our relationship with what we are viewing: the ordered events of breathing in and out, the heart beating, the eyes blinking, and most of all, the constant change of state of imagination as the processes of mental imagery continue in spite of the frozen world before us. If you can imagine nothing moving in all the world, and your own self not breathing, your heart not beating, your eyes not blinking, and your imagination having only a single and absolutely unchanging thought, then you can imagine time stopping. This impossible scenario would be one of literal no-change, and although the temporal process of thinking would be impossible, if we imagine that thinking were possible, this unchanging state of affairs would motivate a metaphoric sense of time stopping. Change of state is not a by-product of temporal motion; the metaphoric conceptualization of temporal motion is a way of understanding change of state. Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  131

If absolute entropy is the ultimate state of the universe, then this is when time will “stop,” but there could be no one to observe or experience this. More easily imagined is the world stopping and one somehow being “outside of time,” which is the scenario depicted in movies, where a character and/or the audience observe the stoppage. To experience this would be to experience a state in relation to the world, which is then conceptualized as a location “outside of time.” This imaginary location comes from the same place as all other metaphoric state-locations. Even in death (“in” death) our state is conceptualized by those we leave behind as resulting from motion to some other place, whether we are understood to be in heaven, hell, Valhalla, Sheol, or the afterlife, or in the memories of those who knew us. Speaking more loosely, in music we do have the concept of stop time (an interruption in the established “flow”), and otherwise we have fermatas and caesuras that can create a sense of musical time stopping. All such cases feature an attenuation of change in one or more components of the music. There is a literal stoppage of change, which can be understood metaphorically as a cessation of movement. Defining Musical Motion In the preceding pages I have tried to distinguish the literal and metaphoric elements in the concept of musical motion, since I believe that this helps clarify not only the logic of the concept but also our role in the conceptualization process. Two of the most helpful principles in this regard are that (1) the temporality of musical experience is not metaphoric, but it becomes so when we conceptualize it in terms of motion and space; and (2) the nonlocative states, changes-of-state, and relations-among-states are literal, and they remain so even after we have conceptualized them metaphorically in terms of musical-locative states. When Zuckerkandl (1956) and Wallace Berry (1976) focus on the importance of changeof-state in explaining musical motion, they are focusing on a portion of the same reasoning processes that I have considered above and that I explore further in the next chapter. As a starting point for a basic definition, we could say that the term musical motion refers to a metaphoric conceptualization of nonspatial change in the auditory stimulus in terms of spatial change (i.e., motion). However, “metaphoric conceptualization” implies the necessary role of a conceptualizing listener (including the listening performer), which involves the experiences of anticipation, presence, and memory, as well as the corresponding experiences of yet-to-occur, occurring, and having-occurred, in relation to a musical stimulus (experienced in real time and/or in recall). The central metaphors are states are locations and change is motion. Accordingly, musical motion is contingent on the acoustic and auditory properties of the stimulus, the experience of a listener, and the implicit metaphoric reasoning involved in conceptualizing musical states as locations and musical change as motion. This means, among other things, that motion is not a property of “the music” unless the music is defined to include all 132  Spatial Conceptions

of these contingent elements—including ourselves and our conceptualizing processes. I return to this issue in the last chapter. “Perceiving” Time and Musical Motion To paraphrase Zuckerkandl: to speak of the perception of time and of temporal motion is usually to speak loosely.17 What we perceive are states, changes of state (state-change), and differences between states (state-difference), along with the temporality in our experience of these perceptions (yet-to-occur, occurring, and having-occurred, corresponding to anticipation, presence, and memory). The same applies to musical motion.18 At the macro level it can be as if temporal and musical motion are perceptible, and for most intents and purposes there is no inherent problem with referring to temporal motion or musical motion. What we take to be the premises of this level, however, shapes our basic epistemology, and in this connection we can identify at least four perspectives. In one, musical motion is a nonmetaphoric, perceptible property of external musical stimuli; it is not “as if” it is perceptible. In a second perspective, musical motion is music-literal: it is metaphoric, but the underlying logical details of the metaphor are extraneous to everyday musical understanding. In a third perspective, musical motion is a special a case of metaphoric temporal motion (as analyzed in Lakoff and Johnson 1999), and the conceptualization of music in terms of motion imports our experience of actual motion into our experience and understanding of music. This is part of the perspective in Johnson and Larson (2003), and it specifies a great deal of the logic of musical motion. A fourth perspective in effect expands the third and attends more fully to the motivation for mapping spatiality onto nonlocomotive temporality. This is the perspective of the present chapter, and it focuses on the corporeal-phenomenological component of musical experience that motivates the spatialization of musical temporality. I continue this story in the next chapter.

Temporal Motion and Musical Motion  133

6 Perspectives on Musical Motion Between two worlds life hovers like a star, ‘Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge, How little do we know that which we are! How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar Our bubbles: as the old burst, new emerge, Lash’d from the foam of ages; while the graves Of empires heave but like some passing waves. Lord Byron, Don Juan

The other day I reached a milestone—several of them in fact. Near my home is a former railroad line that has been converted to a bike trail, and along this path are milestones: mile markers, made of stone, indicating the distance to the next large city. When used metaphorically to conceptualize significant events in one’s life, milestone is an expression of the conceptual metaphor states are locations and its corollaries, as are curriculum vita (life course), the “verge” of a scientific “break-through,” the concept of “eccentricity,” and the difficulty of “bringing oneself to believe,” for example, that temporal and musical motion are metaphoric (where believing x is a metaphoric state-location to which one might bring oneself). In chapter 5 we considered the logic and motivation of such reasoning, both generally and in the context of musical motion and space, but we did not consider the role of mimetic participation. Its role becomes apparent when we ask what perspective we implicitly adopt when we speak of musical motion. Are we observing this fictional motion, or are we taking part in the motion from a quasifirst-person perspective? In the case of observed motion, we should then ask whether this implies a second-person or a third-person perspective—and then we should ask who or what entity is implicitly moving. The analysis in this chapter responds to these questions and thereby fleshes out the basic story of musical motion and space in terms of embodied metaphoric reasoning. It is divided into the following topics: (1) the relationship between mimetic participation and musical motion, (2) four available perspectives on mu-

sical motion, (3) musical motion and musical agency, (4) the “third dimension” of musical motion and space, (5) the path schema and its paradoxes, and (6) the container schema and its paradoxes.

Mimetic Participation with Musical Motion The analysis in the previous chapter might give the impression that mimetic participation is not essential to the concept of musical motion, insofar as anticipation, presence, and memory do not require mimetic participation in any domain of experience. Although these do not require mimetic participation, the fact that mimetic motor imagery (MMI) is integral to music comprehension means that, for example, anticipation always has both nonmimetic and mimetic components. The nonmimetic (object-oriented) component involves the traditional sense of anticipating what will occur “out there” in the acoustic-auditory stimulus. The mimetic component involves anticipation of what we will vicariously do. The nonmimetic and mimetic components apply to the phenomenology of presence and memory as well and give us the following pairings: • Anticipation of what will happen and of what we will vicariously do • Presence of what is happening and of what we are vicariously doing • Memory of what happened and of what we vicariously did Although distinct in some respects, I take this view to be consistent with Hasty’s theory of the role of projection in comprehending rhythm and meter (Hasty 1997). Hasty’s theory differs from the theory of projection according to which one projects oneself into the music (Zuckerkandl 1956; Clifton 1983). The direction of projection in Hasty’s use is toward the future (akin to Husserl’s protention), where the occurrence of successfully anticipated events coincides with more or less automatic bodily movements, such as clapping in time.1 Such participatory motor actions, and their counterparts in motor imagery, can make the phenomenology of musical motion more similar to actual motion and thus seemingly less metaphoric. From the perspective we have been considering, overt and covert mimetic participation create a quasi-first-person experience of imaginary motion, but this experience is always combined with second-person listening and quasi-third-person reflection and conceptualization. According to the mimetic hypothesis, the resulting tripartite perspective is normally integral to musical experience. Tripartite Perspective in Music Listening Nonmimetic music comprehension always occurs in parallel with mimetic comprehension, and as a complement to the quasi-first-person motion it contributes the sense that we are observing the motion of some musical entity. This observed Perspectives on Musical Motion  135

motion is conceptualized from two perspectives, one of which is from a secondperson position within the stationary observer scenario, where music approaches our “location” in the present. The other is from a quasi-third-person perspective upon either the stationary or moving observer scenarios, although it is most directly consistent with the moving observer scenario. Because listeners are bodily in a second-person position, both the first- and third-person perspectives are from imaginary positions; hence, the terms quasifirst-person and quasi-third-person. Since this distinction is not crucial in this context, I leave it implicit from this point onward.2 The combination of mimetic and nonmimetic comprehension thus involves three available perspectives: (1) first-person moving observer (a consequence of mimetic participation), (2) second-person stationary observer (experiencing the approach of events from within the musical world), and (3) third-person exterior observer (primarily in observing motion through a musical landscape). Although most descriptions of music will reflect one of these perspectives, in general the three perspectives tend to blur together. For example, the description as the music approaches the recapitulation is third-person, but the imagined motion is informed by first-person vicarious motion, while the description as the recapitulation approaches is consistent with both the second- and third-person perspectives. The blurring together, and any lack of awareness of this blurring, are integral to normal musical experience. We can think of the blur of these three perspectives as a tripartite composite perspective.3 One of the implications of this is that when we conceptualize musical motion, what we are referring to, and the position from which we are referring, is more or less continually changing. This is reflected in the description above, “as the music approaches the recapitulation,” which, although straightforward enough on the surface, actually reflects a cognitive hash. Since the recapitulation in this description is a location within the musical landscape, what is the entity that is moving? It is “the music,” which is to say that “the music” is at once a moving entity and a location toward which this musical entity moves. “The music” here is a conglomeration born of our tripartite perspective and a switch between the stationary and moving observer scenarios. This becomes more plain in light of the explanations below. Kinds of Motion When we map motion onto music, one of the logical entailments is that the motion must be of a particular kind—that there must be some manner of movement. From this mapping we get the generic notion of fast and slow tempos (rate or speed of motion), as well as more specific manners such as the following: as if searching: ricercare as if fleeing: fugue as if running: corrente and courante 136  Spatial Conceptions

as if walking: andante as if moving at ease: adagio as if moving lightly: leggiero as if flowering: fioritura as if moving gracefully: grazioso as if moving heavily: pesante as if thrown: precipitato as if swinging: swing as if mating: rock-n-roll If there is a manner of movement, then it must be the movement of some entity, and while this entity is often simply “the music,” occasionally we anthropomorphize the music as some kind of agent that has a will, desires, and a capacity for satisfaction. This inference of a moving entity in musical contexts, whether an agent or not, involves both mimetic and nonmimetic aspects of music comprehension and metaphoric reasoning. For example, if music seems to be moving at a walking pace, it is partly because we as listeners vicariously exert in a pattern that is congruent with walking, and much the same applies to all manner of “movement.” Feeling the Beat and Hearing the Beat Based on Huron (2006) and the sources that he cites, we know that what we describe as downbeats and strong beats are those moments when most events occur (or begin, as note onsets). We also know that the distillation of the beat and its grouping into meter appears to result from nonconscious statistical analysis. As Jones (1992) puts it, “auditory attention is . . . choreographed to coincide with the most likely moments of stimulus onsets.” This choreography involves not only moments when we are most likely to hear a stimulus onset but also when there will most likely be an opportunity to mimetically engage—that is, to align one’s vicarious exertions with the music. Because this choreography involves anticipation (prediction; expectation) of when imitable events will occur, auditory attention is a coordination of auditory information, anticipation, and mimetic participation. From this perspective, to speak of “hearing the beat” is to speak metonymically (or synecdochically), where what is heard stands also for what is felt as a result of mimetic participation. To put it closer to Jones’s terms, what is choreographed is not only auditory attention but also mimetic motor imagery and action (MMI and MMA). Whether the beat is auditorially salient or subtle, I want to suggest that in all cases the beat is comprehended primarily as a regularly recurring pattern of mimetic exertions. Accordingly, we should expect to find that comprehension of meter, rhythm, and beat are impeded when mimetic participation is impeded. This conjecture is consistent with the following remarks from Huron (2006): “The way we move our bodies may influence the experience Perspectives on Musical Motion  137

# ˙˙ #˙ b 3 & b b4 Œ # ˙

272

{

n ˙˙ # ˙˙ œœ. # ˙ œ # ˙ œ Œ n˙˙

. ? b 3 ##n˙˙˙ ##n˙˙˙ œœœ n˙˙˙ b b 4 nœ n˙ n˙ œ œ ˙ n œ. œ. sf sf sf sf . ˙ œ 279 n˙˙˙˙ œœœœ b n Œ &b b n## œœœœ œœœœ n## œœœœ . ? b nn˙˙˙ œœœ Œ nœ œ nœ b b n˙ œ nœ œ nœ

{

f

f

n ˙˙ n˙˙

˙ œœ. œœ nn˙˙˙˙ Œ

n˙˙˙ ˙

œœœ nn˙˙˙ œ. nœ ˙ nœ

sf

sf

f

˙ n˙˙˙˙ n Œ n œœœ ˙ nœ n˙˙ n˙ f

˙ n˙˙˙˙ n Œ n œœœ ˙ nœ n˙˙ n˙ f

j œœœ œœœ n # œœœ n œœœ œœœ nn # œœœ œœœ œœœ nn œœœ œ œ #œ œ œ #œ œ œ j n œ œ œ nœ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ nœ œ œ nœ

descresc.

p

Example 6.1. Beethoven, Symphony no. 3, I, mm. 272–284.

of rhythm, and common rhythms may influence the way we move. For example, research has shown that paraplegics who are confined to wheelchairs have more difficulty with both rhythmic production and rhythmic perception tasks than do nonparaplegics. When movement is restricted it seems reasonable that rhythmic production would be impeded. But why would restricted movement interfere with perception? The research seems to imply that the ability to move one’s legs has an impact on rhythmic processing” (190; emphasis added). Huron’s interpretation of the research aligns with principle 16 of the mimetic hypothesis, which concerns the variability in the nature of mimetic participation among individuals: it is easier to comprehend what we can imagine doing, and it is easier to imagine doing what we do on a regular basis. Mimetic participation also plays out in cases where the beat is silent. In writing about meter and “loud rests,” London (1993) uses the climax of the development section of the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony (example 6.1) to introduce the argument that meter is something that is both heard and felt.4 The empty downbeat in m. 280, which is a local downbeat and a hypermetric downbeat, is a salient event because the interruption in sound is also an interruption in the pattern of mimetic participation. In my own experience, by this point in the movement I have been led to expect a relatively strong acoustic-auditory event to mimetically engage with, and at the downbeat of m. 280 I am prepared to continue the pattern but am suddenly forced to restrain myself. And yet I exert anyway, either in imagery alone or in overt action, because of the great force of the pattern of exertions established prior to this moment. The difference in my mimetic participation with this downbeat is that the pitch component is subtracted, but I find that my engagement nevertheless retains a mostly unpitched 138  Spatial Conceptions

subvocal element along with a combination of trunk, limb, and head exertions (again, in imagery or action). The “loudness” of this event is the strength of the phenomenon, and this phenomenon is a combination of the vacuum of unheard sounds and the strength of my mimetic exertions.5 Motion without Meter and Beats If we perceive change, we will be motivated to conceptualize this change as motion (following the logic of change is motion discussed in the previous chapter). Such change-related “motion” does not require the periodic patterns that give us meter and beats, and so we can feel a sense of motion in the unmetered preludes of the French baroque and in the relative discontinuity of Stockhausen’s Kontakte. If the patterns of events in music are relatively continuous or discontinuous, our mimetic exertions will be correspondingly continuous or discontinuous, and this will shape our conceptualization of the kind of musical motion. If a given musical work or performance does not seem to “flow,” for example, this judgment is based on an assumption of a particular kind, or range of kinds, of patterns of change.

Four Perspectives on Temporal and Musical Motion Given the two scenarios of musical motion (stationary and moving observer) and the tripartite perspective of musical listening, we can divide the available perspectives on musical motion into six, two, or four. The division into six is a straightforward combination of the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives (the tripartite perspective) and the two scenarios of musical motion. The division into two reflects the fact that the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives blur together into a more or less unified tripartite perspective, and this tripartite perspective then applies to the two scenarios of musical motion. The division into four is based on a reconception of the tripartite perspective as a continuum between “interior” and “exterior” perspectives, and the resulting four-part model is the most practical for understanding the available perspectives. The first-person and second-person perspectives are “interior,” as we imagine either moving along with the music or observing its movement toward and past us. The third-person perspective is “exterior,” as if one were observing the motion of some entity or agent through a musical landscape, or observing the flow of music toward and past a location at some distance from the observer. This gives us interior and exterior perspectives on the moving observer and stationary observer scenarios, all of which are represented in figures 6.1 and 6.2.6 Although I am focusing on listeners, an analogous set of four perspectives pertains to performers. These four perspectives are idealized, and the first qualification is that there is something like a continuum between the interior and exterior perspectives. This continuum reflects the “blur” of the original tripartite perspective. Perspectives on Musical Motion  139

Figure 6.1. Motion through time: “Time’s Landscape” (the Moving Observer scenario).

Figure 6.2. Motion of Time: “As Time Goes By” (the Stationary Observer scenario).

The interior perspective in the moving observer scenario corresponds to the first-person experience of the mimetically engaged listener. The exterior perspective in this scenario reflects a third-person perspective on the movements of an agent, or one’s avatar, through music’s “landscape.” This exterior perspective combines knowledge gained from the interior perspective with a conceptualization of larger “spans” of the music’s “form.” The interior perspective in the stationary observer scenario reflects a secondperson experience in which events approach us directly. It reflects nonmimetic perception and is restricted to the moment-to-moment experience of events (com­­pare Levinson 1997a). As in the moving observer scenario, the exterior per140  Spatial Conceptions

Table 6.1. Characteristics of the Four Perspectives Moving Observer: Interior Perspective

Stationary Observer: Interior Perspective

• Music is a landscape through which one • Music is one or more moving entities; moves; musical events are locations listener awaits their approach, arrival, and passage • Musical landscape is laid out, but single • Musical events pass by, but a single view view of entire structure is unavailable of entire structure is unavailable • Listener is “active” in imagining moving; • Listener is attentive but passive; experience is present and immediate experience is present and immediate Moving Observer: Exterior Perspective

Stationary Observer: Exterior Perspective

• Music is a landscape; listener observes • Listener observes motion of event interior agent’s (or avatar’s) motion objects toward and past the stationary through the musical landscape interior agent (or avatar) • Single view of entire musical landscape • Entire structure passes by as a is available moving entity • Listener is observer, surveyor, supervisor, • Listener is attentive, but the passing and more attentive than active; experience entity may be less easily seen as a whole is less present and immediate than when seen as a fixed landscape; experience is less present and immediate

spective in the stationary observer scenario combines knowledge gained from the interior perspective with a conceptualization of larger spans of the music’s form. I want to emphasize that all of these perspectives are imaginary. This is because the musical motion at issue is imaginary. I also want to emphasize that the exterior perspectives are, to a great extent, derived from the interior perspectives. For example, when we watch someone running and when we see somebody approached by someone else, our comprehension is informed by our own experience of moving and of being approached. In listening to music it is possible, if not also common, for one’s perspective to be almost entirely interior, but it is not normally possible for one to adopt an exterior perspective that is not derived from, or informed by, interior perspectives (regardless of one’s awareness of this derivation). With these qualifications in mind, table 6.1 shows some of the basic characteristics of the four perspectives in the context of music listening. As we considered with regard to the tripartite perspective, a linguistic expression may specify one of the perspectives in table 6.1, but the experience to which it refers will blend exterior and interior perspectives. With regard to the moving observer and stationary observer scenarios, I am not sure how often we Perspectives on Musical Motion  141

use ambiguous expressions analogous to “moving the meeting ahead one week,” but we do commonly switch between the two without announcement. “Observers” and “Perspectives” The interior moving observer in the moving observer scenario is actually an interior performer, in the form of a mimetically participating listener. However, since mimetic participation depends to some extent on an ability to predict what one will do next, a mimetic performer, like an actual performer, always also keeps one eye on the future. This “eye” conceptualizes what will be heard and done— heard nonmimetically as second-person, and done mimetically as first-person. The “farther ahead” one imagines, the farther this imagery moves one toward an exterior third-person position from which one can “see” farther ahead. This migration between interior and exterior perspectives is instantaneous, and at some level the two perspectives in effect occur simultaneously. The exterior perspective on the moving observer is perhaps the most common perspective adopted in music analysis, and analysts immediately want to assert that this perspective involves careful, critical listening. However, this perspective involves reflection upon and conceptualization of what is heard. The sense that one hears from a third-person perspective, as if overhearing a conversation, is a manifestation of the blended perspectives. It is as logical and illusory as the sense that we hear pitch height and that we hear musical motion. As the blend is meant to imply, at some level there is no distinction between perspectives—the exterior observer is also the mimetic participant and the receptive listener, each of which contributes different elements to the experience and to our making sense of the experience. The exterior perspective on the moving observer scenario fixes the relations among the musical events in the “musical landscape” and affords a God’s-eye view from which an observer oversees the motion, space, and proportions of the music. Peter Westergaard (1996) draws our attention to this in the following passage: Is it hubris that makes us want to place ourselves outside of time, out there with God? But any pitch-time map we draw in space does that. . . . (20)

David Lewin’s well-known remarks on this issue, in the context of transformational theory, are consistent with the point that we migrate between, or otherwise blend, exterior and interior perspectives: We tend to imagine ourselves in the position of observers when we theorize about musical space; the space is “out there,” away from our dancing bodies or singing voices. . . . In contrast, the transformational attitude is much less Cartesian. Given locations s and t in our space, this attitude does not ask for some observed measure of extension between reified “points”; rather it asks: “If I am at s and wish to get to t, what

142  Spatial Conceptions

characteristic gesture . . . should I perform in order to arrive there?” . . . This attitude is by and large the attitude of someone inside the music, as idealized dancer and/or singer. No external observer (analyst, listener) is needed. (1987, 158–159)

Although an external observer may seem unnecessary, we naturally tend to adopt such a perspective, at some greater or lesser distance from the events in question, whenever we conceptualize a spatial relationship between two event-locations. The more event-locations we bring into consideration (that is, the more of the whole of a musical work), the more necessary an external perspective becomes. But overall this “adoption” is always blended with interior perspectives.

Imagining Musical Agents We previously considered the logical implication that if there is motion, then it must be the motion of some kind of entity. Since this inference does not specify whether the musical entity is living or not, we get both animate and inanimate musical entities that move in various kinds of ways. The most abstract entity is “the music,” which is neither animate nor organic until we attribute such properties to it. When we attribute not only animacy but also volition to music, we have the familiar sense of musical agency: an entity that moves in various ways in the service of a will. My interest here is in the motivation of such attributions of agency.7 The tripartite perspective discussed above fosters a sense of first-person motion and second- and third-person observed motion. But the normally hidden nature of the first-person (mimetic) component subtracts the first-person component from conceptualization while nevertheless leaving its bodily residue “unmoored.” One’s overall awareness of one’s identity as a listener, separate from the sounds to which one is listening (second- and third-person perspectives), motivates the inference that the actions must be those of some other agent “in” the music. As a result, what would otherwise be one’s own mimetic exertions coalesce into those of an inferred musical agent, who moves through the music’s landscape, which is a special case of time’s landscape. As part of the same process, what were one’s own desires and satisfactions are attributed to the musical agent. We can refer to this as personification and anthropomorphism, understanding that these terms refer to this process, or to one like it, or to a larger process that subsumes this one. Although musical motion can be imagined from each of the four perspectives described above, the motion of agents is most germane to the moving observer scenario, as in the following example. “Striving” and “Determination” in Schubert Hatten (1999) brings the issue of agency to the fore in connection with the opening of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A Major, D. 959. The opening of the sonata is shown in example 6.2, which Hatten describes in terms of gesture theory: “Here, Perspectives on Musical Motion  143

### c Allegro w & w w

{

w w ww

˙˙ ˙˙

f fz fz ? ### c œ Œ ‰ œj œœ Œ ‰ œœj œœ œ œ ' œ ' ' œ ' 'œ ' ' '

œœœ nœœœ œ œ œœ. . nœœ. . œ œ

œœœ œœ œ œ œ œ ˙˙ ˙˙˙ w œ wœ œ ˙ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ ˙ ˙ œœ ‰ œœ ‰ œ œœ œ œœ ˙˙ ˙˙ œwwœ œ ˙ w J J œ œ w

Example 6.2. Schubert, Piano Sonata in A Major, D. 959, I, mm. 1–6.

the left hand has the . . . gestural motive one, and its ‘stoic heroism’ may be seen to ‘resonate’ the right hand’s sustained chords, which . . . strive in stepwise ascent until relaxing into the half cadence on the dominant in m. 6. The determined will of a persona is clearly implied and gesturally projected” (1999, lecture 4, p. 3; emphasis added). “Striving” and “determination” are apt descriptions, and the questions here are how and why they are apt.8 If “strive” is a sensible description, then there must be something shared in our experience of the source domains of actual striving and determination, and the target domain of musical experience. The first step is to consider the experience of actual striving and determination. With striving there is a desired statelocation (a goal), a salient physical effort in the face of some resistance, and motion forward. Determination adds a sense of commitment to achieving the goal. The next step is to look for corresponding features in the target domain. I have already identified the role of desire in creating a sense of motion toward desired state-locations. Mimetic participation then adds a sense of physical effort (easy or challenging) to musical motion generally. The sense of encountering resistance and of commitment to achieving the goal are then what specify the sense of striving and determination, and both of these are inferred via mimetic participation. Theoretically, the mimetically engaged listener comprehends the inverted pedal point in the top voice in the Schubert through a sustained exertion—in the same modality (piano playing) or in some other modality (e.g., subvocally or in terms of some non-piano-playing actions)—while simultaneously mimetically taking part in the ascent of the baritone (again, in some modality or combined modality). As the experience of pedal points commonly does, this example creates conflicting exertions in the mimetic motor imagery of listeners. In this case, comprehension of the top voice involves a sustained strong exertion (forte) in the service of maintaining the state-location of A, while the strong beats in the ascending voice involve a strong exertion in the service of ascending to some asyet-unspecified state-location. The energy expended here implies importance or some sort of significance, which is consistent with both striving and determination. The relatively slow rate of change at the start amplifies the sense of expended energy and, thus, the sense of importance. The staccato notes in the baritone 144  Spatial Conceptions

sound and feel like an interruption of motion, while the resumption of ascending motion is consistent with determined motion in the source domain. Finally, the ascending contour itself contributes to both striving and determination by way of greater is higher and the logic and general feeling of melodic “ascent.” There is more that one could say, but I hope that this is enough to offer reasonable support for the following claim: There is no persona here, striving or otherwise, until a listener implicitly applies the embodied reasoning that gives us pitch height, motion, and musical agents—that is, the cognitive process described in chapters 1–6. Hatten’s proposition that a persona is implied and gesturally projected is, to my mind, perfectly consistent with what I have just claimed; chapters 1–6 offer a way of specifying how such implications work. To conclude this brief exploration of musical agency, let me note that I am not claiming that “striving” or “determination” are the best or only ways to conceptualize this music. They are motivated by the experience, and they are shaped by embodied metaphoric reasoning and by personal and cultural habits of interpretation. An engaged listener who is familiar with this kind of music will feel something, and this will motivate a conceptualization that is consistent with this feeling, whether it involves musical agents or not.

The Third Dimension and Some Asymmetries of Musical Space If the physical world through which we move is the source domain for musical motion, then we should expect to find that the target domain reflects something of the three-dimensionality of the source domain. We have explored height and length (motion), but so far I have omitted the dimension of horizontal depth. This dimension has a psychoacoustic component and a metaphoric component. The psychoacoustic component is manifest in recordings, where one can create an illusion of proximity (depth) in any direction. Composers and performers can create a similar illusion of prominence and proximity among the various parts or voices of an ensemble, as in the case of melody and accompaniment. Psychoacoustic depth involves combinations of strength, timbre, and melodic and/ or rhythmic interest (e.g., “singability”), and it can also involve the literal horizontal depth in the disposition of performers and loudspeakers within the listening space. The metaphoric component of this dimension includes the Schenkerian conceptions of background, middleground, and foreground, which are special cases of states are locations (hierarchical states and relations).9 The influence of Schenkerian depth depends on explicit study, unlike the dimensions of height and length (motion) which depend on a broader cultural exposure, and unlike psychoacoustic depth which exploits general human perception. I am not sure exactly how horizontal depth actually integrates with height and length (motion). In the moving observer scenario horizontal depth would be lateral breadth as one moves through a musical landscape, and in the stationary observer scenario it would be the breadth of an approaching musical entity. Perspectives on Musical Motion  145

However, this dimension does not seem to be as strongly represented in how many scholars and other people talk and write about musical motion and space. The two-dimensional page of staff notation, in which pitch height and motion are more plainly represented than depth, would seem to be a likely influence. To the extent that psychoacoustic and metaphoric depth are unattended to, this is out of proportion with their influence on musical experience, where the resulting sense of being surrounded contributes to a sense of immersion within the music. Eitan, Granot, and Timmers We considered in chapter 4 that up is not the symmetric opposite of down, and in chapter 5 we considered that the moving observer and stationary observer scenarios are not simple opposites or complements of each other. Eitan and Granot (2006) and Eitan and Timmers (2010) identify many specific examples of asymmetries in our conceptualizations of musical space, to which we turn now. Following the correlations that we normally find in acoustic space, we should expect that, for example, crescendo (increase in volume) would be associated with approach and decrescendo (decrease in volume) should be associated with departure. While this is indeed what Eitan and Granot found, they also found that, at a stable fast tempo, crescendo was also associated with acceleration while decrescendo was associated with descending motion but not with deceleration. Although inconsistent at one level, each of these correlations is logical: greater volume is correlated with greater velocity, and lesser volume is correlated with lesser pitch height. The authors examined the effects of increase and decrease of various musical features, and they summarize their findings in this way: “In general, while musical abatements (pitch descents, diminuendo, ritardando) are strongly associated with spatial descents [lesser is lower], musical intensifications (crescendo, accelerando, even pitch rise itself) are not as strongly associated with spatial ascent [greater is not necessarily higher]. Similarly, while musical intensifications (rise in pitch, crescendo, accelerando, increasing motivic pace, sequential melodic progressions) are generally associated with increasing velocity [greater correlates with faster], musical abatements (pitch descents, diminuendo, decreasing motivic pace) are not generally associated with decreasing velocity [LESSER does not necessarily correlate with slower]” (238). Eitan and Timmers found similar asymmetries in their study of pitch height, where higher pitch correlated with greater intensity and brightness, while lower pitch correlated not with lesser intensity and brightness but with lesser mass, size, and quantity. The asymmetric findings in both studies are consistent with the principle that greater is higher does not imply that quantities and magnitudes are always conceptualized in terms of height, but only that there is a set of concepts whose logic is reflected in greater is higher. When this metaphor, or its complement lesser is lower, applies to only one metaphoric direction, we have an asymmetry and a paradox. The same applies to the asymmetry concerning velocity, except that the correlations are not embedded within a conceptual metaphor.10 146  Spatial Conceptions

The findings in these studies are also consistent with experience in the source domain of actual space, where ascending and descending a hill, for example, are opposite in some senses but not in others (e.g., the kinds of exertions involved). The extent of spatial asymmetries may be even greater in the case of music, where motion and space are mostly imaginary. Eitan and Timmers interpret their findings as reflecting the existence of latent conceptualizations of pitch that either complement or conflict with the concept of pitch height. The findings indicate that the predominance of the concept of pitch height does not preclude the existence of other logical conceptualizations that conflict with it. The fact that these involve correlations with variations in duration, timbre, strength, and articulation suggests the importance of attending to such correlations generally, as opposed to focusing on pitch and pitch height alone—that is, to the extent that music analysis prioritizes pitch structure, these asymmetries, which are otherwise part of how we experience and understand music, are less likely to be integrated into music explanations. Asymmetries such as those found by Eitan and Granot (2006) and Eitan and Timmers (2010), and more broadly those involving the three “dimensions” of musical space discussed above, have a counterpart in the paradoxes discussed in the next section.

The path Schema and Its Paradoxes One entailment of motion is that there are paths of motion. From our experience of moving along paths and observing motion along paths we abstract the schema of path, and when we map spatial relations onto musical relations we often implicitly apply the path schema. Among the first to investigate the role of this schema in music conceptualization, based on Johnson (1987), were Janna Saslaw (1996, 1997–98) and Candace Brower (1997–98, 2000). My goal here is to reveal some additional details and to point out a paradox that we have integrated into our basic understanding of musical motion. In the source domain of actual motion, the entity that moves along a path can be inanimate, like a river or a glacier, or it can be an animate agent. The paths themselves are comprised of concatenated locations that afford some kind of motion, and the motion of entities along a path introduces a direction of motion and more or less definite starting and ending points, all of which are integrated into the path schema. In the source domain these are locative states, which map onto musical states via states are locations along a path and change is motion along a path. This is reflected in descriptions of melodic lines and contours, in which we implicitly use the path schema. Motion along a path, literal or metaphoric, need not involve desire and a specific goal-state; however, first-person experience of actual motion involves motion along paths, in which the motion is motivated by desire (strong or mild) for something more or less specific. This experience of actual motion is then available when we map spatial relations onto music: the experience of change will Perspectives on Musical Motion  147

motivate a sense of motion, while a desire for a more or less specific state will motivate a sense of motion along a path toward a goal. Metaphoric paths that thus include goal-directed motion reflect a specific form of the path schema that is sometimes identified as the source-path-goal schema (where the “source” is the initial state). Because our experience of actual motion integrates our own agency with motion along paths, fictional musical agency and fictional musical motion along pathways mutually reinforce one another: descriptions in terms of agency commonly imply motion along a path, and vice versa. Composers can enhance the motivation to imagine the motion of agents along a path (deliberately or not). Alternatively, they can also create passages and works that in effect attenuate this motivation (e.g., Liszt’s Nuages gris, Debussy’s Nuages, or the third movement of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet). On the listener’s part, as we considered with respect to anticipation, exposure can enhance a sense of motion along a path by enhancing one’s ability both to predict and to desire specific events. Finally, fictional motion along musical paths can motivate a sense of more or less humanlike agents. This involves mimetic comprehension of the events and patterns of change whereby we answer the question What’s it like to do that? Near one end of the spectrum, for example, are the kinds of paths and the kinds of agents in Stravinsky’s “The Augurs of Spring” or Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War,” whose blunt and potent repetitiveness could be taken to imply the motion of agents who would move in these ways. Whether the music is humanlike, mechanical, or otherwise, a given listener may or may not conceptualize the music in terms of the motion of agents along paths, but if one does, we can understand the motivation and the logic of such fictions in terms of the cognitive processes we have considered up to this point. The Paradox of Music as the Moving Observer The conception of musical paths is germane to the moving observer scenario, wherein we imagine that music or some agent moves through music’s “landscape.” When we (or some other agent) move through a musical landscape, this motion is a basic metaphorical image: the musical landscape, or environment, includes all of the details of the acoustic-auditory stimulus, and some agent moves through this environment. However, when music is conceived as the moving entity, we have a paradox: the music is the entity that moves through the musical environment. In other words, the music moves through itself. There are at least two species of this paradox, one of which is relatively easily resolved, and the other of which is more problematic. When the music descends through the circle of fifths, we have two kinds of music: the metaphoric musical landscape (featuring harmonic locations at “intervals” of a “fifth”), and the musical entity that metaphorically moves through this musical landscape. The landscape here is a generic space that is derived from particular musical examples. We can think of it as a schematic space, or as the 148  Spatial Conceptions

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schema of descending fifths; however, this schema is unlike the other schemas in that it is derived from metaphoric musical motion. In this derivation, we start with metaphoric musical motion and then derive generic musical spaces, such as the various generic harmonic sequences, keys, and musical forms (e.g., sonata form). When particular musical passages “move through” a schematic space, the moving entity can either be an agent or not. When it is not an agent, we restrict the metaphoric reasoning to fictional motion. When we conceive of the moving entity as an agent, we introduce an additional layer of metaphor.11 The species of paradox of music moving through music is thus fairly easily resolved, while the other is of a different nature. This paradox hinges on the unannounced switch between conceptions of musical features (1) as moving entities and (2) as locations, which also involves a switch between change is motion and states are locations. It is manifest in apparently factual propositions such as, In the normal resolution of a C 7 chord, the B-flat goes to A (or the B-flat resolves to A), as represented in example 6.3. On the face of it, in such instances we are talking about voice leading involving two “notes,” but if the B-flat and the A are thus members of the same species, we might ask if the B-flat pushes the A out of the way, or if it overlays it, melds with it, or disappears as it transforms into A. Nonmetaphorically, the B-flat and the A are of the same species, as literal sound states, but in the exemplary expression they are conceptualized as two different species: the B-flat as a moving entity, and the A as a location. The central motivation for the metaphoric conceptualization and the resulting paradox is that we have two pitch states, which motivates the sense of pitch locations, but we also have change, which motivates the sense of motion. We attribute the motion to the B-flat and allow the A to stand as a location—a location that we could subsequently reconceptualize as a moving entity that “proceeded” to G, and so on. The fluidity with which we normally gloss over this paradox might seem to indicate that this is a matter of no great significance—everyone understands what is meant, and the norms of voice leading are what matters. However, this fluidity is precisely what obscures and distorts the role of embodied cognition. Perspectives on Musical Motion  149

It is not simply that the motion is metaphoric. It feels like some kind of motion, and this feeling is not simply a consequence of our metaphoric conceptualization of sounds. The illusion, or fiction, that the B-flat “goes to” A is not simply a manner of speaking. Our ability to conceptualize music in this way is at once a product of the processes we have considered in this and the preceding chapters, and the means whereby we hide these very processes. In addition to any philosophical and psychological interest that this practice may bear in its own right, the more meaningful implications emerge when we try to understand the bases of emotional responses to music. The feeling of some kind of motion in this and other examples is part of a broader range of affective responses that emerge in musical experience, as I consider in chapters 8 and 9. In the meantime, let me summarize the issues involved in this particular example. Nonmetaphorically there is a state (the B-flat in its harmonic context) and then a new state (the A in its harmonic context), but our access to these states involves mimetic participation, anticipation, and metaphoric conceptualization. Accordingly, the elements more properly include experience of the B-flat in its harmonic context, experience of the new state of the A in its harmonic context, and awareness of a change of state. For a listener familiar with such normative dynamics of tonal harmony and voice leading, this experience includes, among other things, the feelings of mimetic participation (including the kind of effort involved), anticipation, desire, and satisfaction, which motivate metaphoric conceptualization in terms of locations and motion. The following list includes what I take to be the key elements: • A general conceptualization of pitches in terms of height (vertical statelocations) • A general conceptualization of ordered events (nonsimultaneous events) in terms of different temporal locations (horizontal state-locations) • A general conceptualization of CHANGE as MOTION • A general conceptualization of yet-to-occur as ahead (future events conceptualized metaphorically as being located ahead) • Nonmimetic perception and metaphoric conceptualization of the events in this case (from a quasi-third-person perspective) • Mimetic participation (with the auditory event-states and changes of eventstates), producing a quasi-first-person experience • A recognition that we are not the ones doing the metaphoric moving, and a consequential inference that the motion must be that of some musical entity (in this case, the B-flat) • An ability to easily switch, unintentionally and nonconsciously, between conceptualizations of pitches as moving entities and as state-locations Each element in this list is logical, and the reasoning reflects the reality of ex­ perience, including our habit of conceptualizing the abstract in terms of the concrete. 150  Spatial Conceptions

More generally, if we ask whether pitches are locations or moving entities, the answer from one perspective must be that they are neither, but that we conceptualize them as either and as both, even to the point of creating a paradox. In the case of fictionally moving entities, if it also seems as though a B-flat wants to go to an A (or “resolve” to an A), this is more properly one’s own desire anthropomorphically projected onto the B-flat and subsequently taken to be a property of the B-flat. At this point one might well ask whether it is possible to experience and comprehend such a harmonic “resolution” without metaphor, without anticipation, and without mimetic participation. My answer is a qualified no, as I explain at the end of this chapter. The Paradox of Simultaneous Motion and Place If I perceive change, I will be motivated to conceptualize this change as motion, and if I perceive no-change (a continuing state), I will be motivated to conceptualize this state as a location. Let us refer to these as the dynamic and static properties of experience. Normally we experience both properties more or less simultaneously, which means that normally we are motivated to perceive motion and no-motion at the same time. In some cases this does not necessarily create a paradox, but in other cases, arguably the more interesting cases, it does. Pedal points are among the starker examples of this paradox, as the continuity of the pedal motivates a sense of stasis, while the dynamic elements above the pedal motivate a sense of motion. The stark distinction between the dynamic and static elements, however, arguably makes the paradox itself less interesting than in examples such as the passage from Debussy in example 6.4. The accom♯ panying octatonic chord ([02368] or G 7 11) is acoustically present throughout the excerpt, as a result of continuous arpeggiations under the same pedal (that is, the damper pedal). The continuity of this chord motivates a sense of a fixed location, which comprises the nonmetaphoric acoustic environment (the acoustic continuity of the chord) and the metaphoric state-location of this chord “within” the work as a whole. At a more local level, within the chord there is also continuous change from note to note in the arpeggiations, which combines with the overall sense of no-change to motivate a sense of continuous motion within a fixed location. This simultaneous change and no-change is analogous to the movement (locative change) of water droplets that comprise a mist (or une buée irisée, an iridescent mist).12 When we then include the melody, however, we have another layer of complication. The melody can be conceptualized in either the moving or stationary observer scenario. In the first scenario, we have the problem of the music moving through the music, with the pitches of the melody moving through the environment created by the overall unchanging pitches of the accompaniment. In the second scenario, the situation is more complex: the melody is approaching us, as any melody in this scenario does, but the accompaniment would be approachPerspectives on Musical Motion  151

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Example 6.4. Debussy “Cloches à travers les feuilles,” mm. 13–16.

ing as well, in which case the notion of the melody moving through an octatonic environment becomes problematic. I suspect that the added complications incline most listeners to imagine all elements within the simpler moving observer scenario. The motion involved in example 6.4 grows out of both nonmimetic perception (third-person perspective) and mimetic participation (first person perspective). The melody invites a familiar kind of mimetic participation (in its small intervals and range, and in its simple rhythms), which produces a first-person sense of movement along its path. By contrast, the accompaniment’s invitation is more strange: to move in place in some congruent oscillatory manner. Mimetic comprehension of both the melody and the accompaniment in effect simultaneously creates the usual “multi-channel” form of mimetic participation 152  Spatial Conceptions

(as in the case of fugues, melody and accompaniment, or the voices in nonimitative polyphony). But when the accompaniment is conceptualized as a location while the melody is conceptualized as motion through this location, mimetic participation with both of these results in an enactment of two levels of paradox. One is simply the general paradox of responding to two different mimetic invitations at once (in this case, that of the melody and the accompaniment). The other paradox involves the more specific case of metaphorically moving along with the melody “through time,” while simultaneously “moving in place” along with the accompaniment.13 The impossibility of doing so, while nevertheless seeming to do so, is one of the experiences afforded by such music. I say afforded, but in truth I think this word is not strong enough. If mimetic comprehension is a normal part of music comprehension, then part of the pleasure of music listening involves finding ways to mimetically participate, even when, or especially when, the ways conflict in some way or another. At the level of reflection and conceptualization, the mimetic and nonmimetic cognitive processes then produce conceptualizations that are at once logical and yet paradoxical, clear and yet mysterious.

The container Schema and Its Paradoxes What paths are to motion, containers are to locations. Janna Saslaw (1996) and Candace Brower (1997–98, 2000) have shown how the logic of the container schema, commonly in conjunction with that of the path schema, structures how we talk about music. In this section I describe three kinds of musical containers, how they relate to musical motion and space, and a couple of relevant paradoxes. For most intents and purposes, “containers” are the same as the “landscapes” to which I have been referring somewhat loosely. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) point out, metaphoric containers import the salient features of literal containers: they define a bounded space in at least two dimensions (like a garden) if not three (like a house), with a boundary of some degree of permeability (like an orange vs. a coconut) and definiteness (like the edge of a forest vs. the edge of a dresser). Containers are thus special kinds of locations, and they can be captured by the mnemonic states are containers. Since locations normally contain something, and containers define the location of what they contain, the difference is relatively small: “container” highlights the property of containment, whereas “location” highlights its position relative to other locations. Any two physical containers exist in three basic relations: they can be adjacent (like the second and third floors of a building), separated by some distance (like two different buildings), or nested (like Russian dolls, or like a building within a city, within a continent, etc.). Metaphoric containers share all of these basic properties via states are containers. All categories are containers, including all musical categories (chord types, scales, forms, etc.), and each musical work is a Perspectives on Musical Motion  153

container of events, states, relations, and other matters described below. Some kinds of containers can also overlap, or intersect, but this relationship amplifies the issue of boundary definitions and is more complex than what I want to explore in this context. Three Kinds of Musical Containers A symphony is a nested container: it contains movements, which contain themes, which in turn contain motives. But a musical work can also be said to contain meaning, and so we should distinguish different kinds of containment and different layers of metaphoric reasoning. It is helpful to distinguish at least three kinds. In one sense, a musical work “contains” the acoustic-auditory fact: the pitches, rhythms, and timbres, of various strengths (volume) and locations (acoustic and psychoacoustic). This is a metaphoric containing of literal features: literally speaking, music does not contain sounds; music is sounds (and silences). Music can of course be understood to be more than this, but I am making only this particular distinction in the present context. In a second, metaphoric sense, music “contains” conceptions of the acoustic-auditory fact, including metaphoric progressions, paths, directions, distances, and various locations, as well as steps, leaps, and contours. This is a metaphoric containing of conventional metaphoric features. This sense of containment also extends to less conventional metaphoric features, such as “crunchy” dissonances and, as in the Debussy example above, an “iridescent mist” (une buée irisée). This sense gives us facts and truths within fictional worlds: it is a fictional truth that Superman can fly, and it is a fictional truth that different pitches occupy different locations. In a third sense, music can “contain” favorite events and meaning. This kind of container subsumes the first two—for example, let us say that one of my favorite musical moments is the recapitulation during the first movement of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto. (I could say in the first movement and turn the first movement into a container.) This event involves specific acousticauditory events and my metaphoric conceptions of them, such as the “return” of the first theme (stationary observer scenario) or my “arrival at” the recapitulation (moving observer scenario). This event also “contains” a “resolution” of some form of “tension” that comprises the following particulars that distinguish it from other resolutions: the quietness, the sustained notes of the orchestra, the “oscillating” notes of the piano in the “upper” register, the slow “progression” of harmonies that do not suggest an obvious “direction,” the “gradual ascent” of the piano “line,” and the reoccurrence of the “opening” horn solo and the piano’s “descent” and “soft landing back in the tonic,” followed by an “easy, rebounding arpeggiation upward as an echo of the horn’s theme.” These are fictional contents that I “find in” the music. If I also find this experience to be sublime, it is then a small but significant step to imagine that this sublimity is an inherent property of the music itself: it can seem as though there is something sublime in the music. The sleight of mind here, so to speak, is in the step from having a sublime 154  Spatial Conceptions

experience to attributing sublimity to the music—a kind of misattribution, akin to the kind explained by Huron (2006, 136–139).14 The metaphoric container is filled with things that I find and imagine finding there. Whatever I may find, it is contingent on the literal acoustic-auditory features and on my affective-conceptual response to them, under the influence of innate and acquired affective-cognitive proclivities. Landscapes, Vessels, and the Paradoxical Composite of Musical Motion One kind of musical container is a landscape, which is in fact the same landscape as in the moving observer scenario. I can move through this landscape as an interior observer, and I can observe the motion of entities and agents from an exterior perspective, with the caveat that in practice these two perspectives might never be unblended. Via states are locations I can also make a fixed representation of this container, in memory or in a musical score, and I can set aside diachronic motion and simply observe the contents of the landscape in whichever order I like. The result is a specific kind of container: an object, which in this case is a container-object that I can investigate and break apart (analysis: ana + lysis, a loosening of parts of a whole), to better understand the object that is created diachronically.15 The stationary observer scenario gives us a moving container: the musical vessel, which metaphorically approaches the present from the future. This is the whole of the work, which presents itself to us one bit at a time, and which we can conceptualize as a concatenation of local events and as a series of nested events. It is filled with the same kinds of events as a musical landscape, but they are all moving through the unspecified medium of the stationary observer scenario. Musical motion in this scenario reflects properties that we attribute to the vessel: dimension, speed, weight, and various manners of movement, such as those listed near the beginning of this chapter. As we have already considered, the sense of kinds of motion motivates the sense of music as an animate entity, including agents. We considered all of this in the moving observer scenario, and this fact leads us to the paradoxical composite of musical motion. The moving observer scenario reflects the sense that I move, or my representative moves, through the whole of a musical work. Paradoxically, the stationary observer scenario reflects the sense that musical events and the whole of the work approach and pass us by. But my own experience of music often conflates parts of both scenarios along with elements that do not seem to be part of either scenario. Consider the following: I think of Strauss’s Four Last Songs and I put on a recording: what is the nature of this object, before I begin listening? It is a metaphoric container, filled with literal and fictional properties and with some of my favorite moments. As the recording begins, I begin moving through the landscape of this music. No— the vessel moves through me, or its contents wash over me, in parts and wholes. Or I am playing and singing along with the Gewandhaus Orchestra and Jessye Perspectives on Musical Motion  155

Norman. And/or I am merely immersed in each moment, with only a vague sense of motion. Or I feel a strong sense of motion but in no particular direction, and I don’t know whether it is I or the music that is moving. Or I find myself observing, from a third-person perspective, the apparent motion of some musical agent through the music’s landscape—or the “agent” is actually the whole of the work, which is somehow moving through the landscape of the whole of the work. Or I think momentarily of a lake in the Swiss Alps (for some reason), or of dinner (for some other reason), and then return—return to what? The whole experience is all of these and none of these. It is a chimera, and each experience of the “same” work or any work is its own combination of bits and pieces of these scenarios and perspectives. Nonmetaphorically, I experience states, and changes of state, and differences of state. These include the states of desire and satisfaction, tension and relaxation, various degrees of anticipation, presence, and memory (a state of remembering), and all of these inform and are informed by various modes of mimetic engagement. I am motivated to conceptualize the experience(s) in accordance with habitualized metaphoric reasoning; however, since no particular conceptualization is specified, I am free, or doomed, to cobble together something that is most often logically inconsistent, even if each part and the processes as a whole are perfectly logical, and even if, or especially if, I am unaware of any paradox.16 I believe that the foregoing reasonably exemplifies the nature of musical motion: that any sense of motion is a blend of some combination of these mostly implicit conceptualizations—paradoxes and all. Integral to the nature of our general understanding of musical motion is the capacity and inclination to imagine that some subset of these is the true nature of musical motion, whether generally for everyone or personally. That said, personal and cultural proclivities certainly favor awareness of particular elements (as in a tendency to implicitly adopt the perspective of an external observer). Whether this bias in awareness makes the other elements entirely irrelevant, or only seemingly irrelevant at the level of awareness, is another matter.

Concluding Remarks If we combine the moving observer and stationary observer scenarios (including the interior and exterior perspectives) with the state-locations metaphors (including the path and container schemas), we capture the basic structure of metaphoric temporality and musical motion and space. However, this does not account for the motivation for such reasoning, nor does it account for the role of mimetic participation in musical experience. Let us consider these in turn. The Motivation and Grounding How we understand the motivation, whatever we take it to be, is crucial to how we account for the feel, or quale, of temporal experience. The motivation, as I take it to be, is of two general kinds: top-down and bottom-up. 156  Spatial Conceptions

The top-down portion is relatively straightforward in principle: Our habits of metaphoric conceptualization are reflected in language, and each of us learns to conceptualize temporality in terms of spatiality as we acquire the cognitive-linguistic habits of our community. This part of the story is well suited to a mostly objective (object-oriented) explanation of temporal and musical motion, but it is arguably less helpful for explaining the feel of temporal experience. One way to embrace this affective dimension is to point to the principle from conceptual metaphor theory: our metaphoric reasoning is motivated by and grounded in basic embodied experience. Accordingly, when we speak of music in terms of motion, we import into the musical domain our experiences in the spatial domain of moving, being moved (being literally translocated by some other agent or force), and observing movement, as Johnson and Larson (2003) describe. While this is certainly part of the story, I find that it misses something crucial, and this is where the “bottom-up” part of the story comes in.17 As we considered in chapter 5, the bottom-up part of the story includes the evolutionarily and developmentally ancient correlation between anticipation, desire, location-ahead, exertion in moving-toward, and so forth. This set of correlations was in place for our species long before the conception of nonspatial temporal relations (e.g., tomorrow and next year), and it is part of our experience in childhood before we begin to extend this correlation via metaphor (at around the age of four). When we experience the affective elements (such as anticipation and desire) in nonspatial contexts like music, we implicitly compare this experience to prior experience, and we find a match in the corresponding elements within the spatial domain of actual movement. Accordingly, part of what we conceptualize when we conceptualize music in terms of motion is the feeling of these elements: this feeling does not originate in a mapping from the spatial domain; it is already part of musical experience prior to the metaphoric conceptualization that it motivates. The cross-domain mapping reinforces the feeling because of the analogous affective elements in the spatial domain. In practice, the balance of the top-down and bottom-up processes likely varies among individuals and for a given individual in different musical and educational contexts. The assertion that matters most is that the metaphoric conceptualization of musical motion is a conceptualization of a feeling, in response to a specific acoustic-auditory stimulus, and this feeling is arguably what motivates and grounds our spatial musical concepts. From Temporal Motion to Musical Motion: Mimetic Participation Temporal motion and musical motion share a basic logical structure and a motivation, but mimetic participation adds something to the phenomenology of musical motion that is not an essential element of metaphoric temporal motion generally. For example, anticipation in music listening is not only the objective anticipation of what will occur out there, “in the music,” it is also anticipation of what one will vicariously do (in some form or another). Mimetic participation Perspectives on Musical Motion  157

adds a viscerality to the phenomenology and, thus, to spatial musical concepts. The sense of musical agency can be understood in part as a logical entailment of the combination of mimetic participation and spatial concepts. Being Moved by Music Johnson and Larson (2003) note that the source domain of actual motion includes not only first-person motion and third-person observation of motion, but also the second-person experience of being moved (translocated) by other agents and forces (as mentioned above).18 Since this is part of the source domain, we should expect to find it reflected in how we talk about music, and their example indicates that there are at least two ways in which this plays out. One is the more generic sense of being emotionally moved, which involves a change in emotional state-location and which applies to emotionally moving experiences in the arts and in practical life; the experiences of ecstasy, of being transported, and of emotion all reflect the logic of states are locations.19 The logic and experience of musical motion that we have considered in chapters 5–6 is integral to this sense of being moved, but it is only a part of the sources of musical emotions, as chapter 8 clarifies. More specific to musical motion is the sense of being moved, or carried along, or pulled, through music’s “landscape,” and we can understand this sense in terms of tripartite subjectivity. According to the account that I have offered (based on Lakoff and Johnson 1999), the feeling and logic of musical motion primarily involves the interior and exterior perspectives on the moving and stationary observer scenarios. However, these do not directly include the sense of being carried along by the music, because the moving observer is a mimetically participating actor or agent, whereas the sense of being moved involves giving up a sense of agency (willingly or not) and being transported by the music. The tripartite perspective discussed above accommodates this in the following way. Quasi-first-person mimetic participation creates, or enhances, a sense of moving through some kind of landscape: I am the moving agent. However, the fact that I am not actually moving in a locomotive manner motivates two scenarios, one of which we have already considered: a quasi-third-person exterior perspective on the actions of an imaginary agent. In the other scenario, I remain immersed in a quasi-first-person perspective, but instead of being the primary moving agent I “move with the music.” The extent to which this seems to involve any locomotive actions on the listener’s part is variable, but the more “distanced” one might be from one’s own mimetic participation, the more it can seem as though one is moving without effort and thus being “carried by” the music. The nature of this experience, how it might be described, and the extent and manner in which it becomes blended with other perspectives are all variable, but two keys are mimetic participation and the degree of the sense of agency that one has in this participation. 158  Spatial Conceptions

Summary of Chapters 1–6 Chapters 4–6 offer an account of the metaphoric logic of our basic spatial concepts, along with some of the paradoxes that they entail. With the help of chapters 1–3, this account is an application of conceptual metaphor theory, and it specifies the role of embodiment and the phenomenological component of experience in a way that I hope others will find informative.20 While this account has a value on its own, it is also meant to serve a larger purpose. As the preceding analyses are meant to demonstrate, our spatial concepts are conceptualizations of experience, including the affective components of experience. This perspective then raises a question about the role of hearing. Hearing and Feeling On the face of things it can seem plain that we hear pitch height, motion, and their related features; but from the perspective I have described, this is an illusion, and the illusion is integral in varying degrees to our general epistemology. Because the spatial conceptualization is automatic and nonconscious, at the level of consciousness it is as if we hear, or perceive, these features, and at one level there is value in simply understanding this fact. At another level, an explicit understanding of the underlying cognitive processes offers additional value in its own right; but the greater potential value is in the implications for understanding our relationship with music, particularly in connection with musical affect, as we will consider in subsequent chapters. In the meantime, let me offer the following thought. To speak of motion-related musical features as if they were audible is to honor the acoustic-auditory component of musical experience; but to do so exclusively is to tacitly deny or marginalize the fundamental role of what we feel, preconceptually, in response to what we hear, along with the role of these feelings in shaping what we think. A similar problem attends the term perceiving. Hearing, perceiving, feeling, mimetically acting, and metaphorically conceptualizing are all integral to what emerges in consciousness. Accordingly, the exclusive use of hearing arguably risks disguising both this fact and its implications for understanding the sources of musical affect. Using Spatial Metaphors Recalling the example of the B-flat goes to A (example 6.3), one might ask if it is not possible to experience and comprehend such a harmonic-melodic “resolution” without metaphor. It is indeed possible, but the result would be a nonnormative understanding. Without metaphor there would be no “going”; one would speak instead of nonspatial change. One could still experience anticipation, desire, and satisfaction, mimetically and nonmimetically; they would simply not be attached to a sense of motion. Without the metaphoric spatial dimensions, and the visualPerspectives on Musical Motion  159

spatial representations they afford, we would have a more abstract understanding but one that is “truer” to the nonspatial elements of musical experience. Such an understanding would of course not be better or worse, but different and perhaps even preferable in certain contexts. For example, in some posttonal contexts it might well be deemed more appropriate in connection with the conceptual advantages it offers (see Adlington 2003). It is of course not inherently problematic to use spatial metaphors to talk about music—they are convenient, logical, and helpful; they are a way of understanding experience. Problems arise only when we are unaware that we are speaking metaphorically, or when our understanding of metaphoric reasoning (1) does not distinguish between what is perceptible and what is a metaphoric conceptualization masquerading as something perceptible, and/or (2) does not account for the affective and motor-related experience that motivates and grounds such metaphors. I say “problems” only because of the problems, or challenges, that this creates for musical explanation of various sorts at various levels. The following chapters explore such considerations.

160  Spatial Conceptions

Part three Beyond Musical Space

7 Music and the External Senses Music is the perfect art: you can’t see it, you can’t touch it. Martin Scorsese

Beyond the spatial metaphors examined in chapters 4–6 are those that draw upon the various senses to conceptualize properties of pitch, timbre, and strength, such as color (chromaticism; timbre as color), clarity, brightness/darkness, softness (piano), strength (forte), warmth, sharpness, sweetness (dolce), and so forth. But as useful as such particular concepts may be, and as interesting as the reasoning processes that produce them may be, in this chapter I focus on the broader topic of how the external senses shape our relationship with the world, including our relationship with music. The five external senses of smell, taste, touch, vision, and hearing are ways of acquiring knowledge about the external world, and each of these establishes a particular epistemology: visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and auditory ways of knowing the world. While these are avenues of knowledge, the experience of knowing—the domain of knowing—is itself relatively abstract. If we ask what it is to know something, each of these modes offers an answer: knowing is seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, and/or hearing. Each of these is reflected in language, but because of asymmetries in the availability of each kind of sensory information from entities in the world, and because of the kinds of power that they thus afford us in relation to the environment, they vary in their relative epistemological value for us. This difference is manifest in the extent to which we rely upon each of these five domains as source domains in conceptualizing the domains of knowledge and understanding. At the heart of this chapter is the issue of the relative power of the eye, the hand, and the ear, and the implications for what it means to know and understand music. The Scorsese epigraph reflects our general reliance upon the powers of the eye and the hand, and it reflects the fact that music achieves its effects upon us in part by eluding the eye and the hand. To understand this proposition we will need to analyze our conceptualizations of knowledge and understanding.1

The External Senses and Epistemology The five conceptual metaphors related to the five modes of knowing that are under consideration here (knowing is seeing, etc.) are five specific versions of knowing is perceiving. To contextualize the eventual focus on the eye, the hand, and the ear, I first want to offer a concise characterization of all five modes in the following order: smelling, tasting, touching, seeing, and hearing.2 Knowing is smelling is reflected in descriptions of uncertain knowledge, as found in Hamlet when Marcellus remarks about something being rotten in the state of Denmark, or in expressions such as a whiff of impropriety, or in the term redolent. The relative rarity of such expressions and terms theoretically is consistent with the relative extent to which we reply upon the power of scent. By contrast, a basic form of knowing is smelling presumably is more significant for dogs and various other animals that rely proportionally more upon scent-based knowledge. knowing is tasting is more significant than smelling. Tasting involves physical contact between the tongue and the concrete source, and normally we have more volition in tasting something versus smelling something. The following terms all reflect knowing is tasting: savoir-faire, savvy, Homo sapiens, sapient, and sage (wise). Each of these refers to knowledge or wisdom, and each traces back to Latin sapientem, the present participle of sapre, “to have a taste or a savor.”3 In addition to the reasoning and motivations described by Kövecses (2002), we can note the greater significance of taste in infancy, where we gain knowledge about objects in our environment by tasting them proportionally more often than we do in adulthood. Because such tasting correlates with touching objects with the tongue, we can also think of taste as a composite of taste and touch (below). This form of knowledge then extends to the more generic sense of having taste, or to know exceptional from ordinary in a given cultural context. Because tasting most often correlates with ingesting and digesting (chewing, swallowing, and so forth), this mode of knowledge also extends to ideas are food (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Kövecses 2002) where thinking is cooking (as in stewing about something), considering is chewing, accepting is swallowing, understanding is digesting, and mental well-being corresponds to nourishment. Good ideas are good foods that can have good smells, and bad ideas are bad food that can have bad smells. For example, to find this explanation to be baloney, garbage, or merde is to perform the very kind of metaphoric reasoning under consideration.4 Note that the experiences of eating and of accepting ideas both involve incorporating something from the environment and experiencing a consequential change in one’s state. The value of both foods and ideas lie in how they change our physical-affective-cognitive state. From this perspective, the basic logic of ideas are food and its various particular expressions is fairly plain. Knowing is touching. Despite the importance of touch, knowing is touching does not appear to be well-represented in English. Touching has come to connote a “superficial” kind of knowing, as in touching on some topic, or touchy-feely descriptions or analyses. We can understand the motivation of this connotation 164  Beyond Musical Space

partly in terms of the sensitivity, vulnerability, and erogenous nature of the skin. However, much as tasting tends to correlate with eating, touching often correlates with grasping. Accordingly, we might expect the related metaphor to be knowing is grasping, but instead it turns out to be understanding is grasping, which is reflected in terms like perceive, conceive, and comprehend. This is where the power of the hand shapes our understanding of what it is to understand, and I address the significance of this metaphor in the section below on the eye and the hand. knowing is seeing. This conceptual metaphor (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980) dominates epistemology in English and other languages. This dominance is consistent with the relative power of the eye, in that most external objects reflect human-visible light, we can normally choose where to look and for how long, and we can employ vision both at a distance and up close. This power is reflected in the conceptualization of vision as directed out upon the world—as in making eye contact, keeping one’s eye “on” something, and casting a withering glare. The predominance of this metaphor bears crucially upon the nature of musical knowledge, particularly given the invisibility of music’s acoustic-auditory elements, and I return to this metaphor in the next section. knowing is hearing is proportionally much less pervasive in English than knowing is seeing. This difference in proportion is consistent with the fact that the ear depends upon entities in the environment to make sounds whereas many inanimate entities of interest are mute, and many animate entities can choose to be silent. By contrast, as Evans and Wilkins (2000) explain, knowing is hearing is pervasive in Australian languages, while knowing is seeing is relatively rare. Among the possible and likely motivations for this difference from IndoEuropean languages, the authors discuss differences in the relative importance of written and spoken language, along with other environmental and cultural factors. Nevertheless, the issue at hand is that our proportionally limited reliance upon knowing is hearing in English bears upon music epistemology. If the expression I hear what you’re saying comes to mind as an exception to what I have just reported, there are three points to bear in mind. First, as will become clear below, the extent of the vocabulary of auditory metaphors for knowing (in English) does not approach the extent of visual metaphors. Second, even as an apparent exception this expression is more a matter of understanding (whether sincere and accurate or not). Third, this expression highlights the aspect of making oneself aurally receptive to an external influence, the phenomenology of which is notably distinct from visual receptivity.5 I return to the matter of receptivity and objectivity below.6

The Eye, the Hand, and knowing and understanding Conceptual domains are abstractions based on experience, and in the present context it is helpful to distinguish three kinds of domains along a continuum from concrete to abstract. One involves the conceptualization of tangible, visible Music and the External Senses  165

entities such as concrete objects and animals. A second involves conceptualization of physical actions such as playing an instrument (acting upon objects), walking (traversing a physical space), and breathing (in which one’s body is the central concrete object). The first two kinds thus involve motor actions and tangible and visible objects, from which we conceptualize general domains such as dogs, stairs, and climbing. Such conceptualizations are literal, but we also reconceptualize them metaphorically (e.g., those stairs are hell on my knees), and we use them as source domains in metaphoric conceptualizations of other domains (as in musical and other metaphoric kinds of steps). In the third kind of domain, however, the experience conceptualized is already abstracted from such concrete actions, interactions, and observations. This includes the domains such as time, knowing, understanding, and conceptualizing. As we saw with TIME in chapters 5 and 6, the experience of these domains is not metaphoric, but when it comes to conceptualizing and talking about them, their abstract nature motivates and all but requires the use of concrete analogies—that is, metaphor, but metaphors in which the source domain is most often of the first two kinds of domains. What is time like? It is like moving and observing motion through space. And understanding? It is like grasping. And what is it like to conceptualize objects, animals, actions, and time—how shall we understand and conceptualize what it is to conceptualize? It, too, is like grasping. As is the norm with conceptual metaphors, we rely upon the more ancient, basic, concrete domains to understand the evolutionarily more recent abstract domains. knowing is seeing Our general reliance upon the eye is sometimes known as ocularcentrism (e.g., Jay 1988), and McLuhan (1962) is among those who have explored its history in the West since the early modern era. This ocular bias in our general epistemology creates a problem for musical knowledge in connection with the invisible features of musical sounds and silences. My main interest here is in making explicit the extent of this ocular bias in connection with metaphoric reasoning and embodied cognition. Eve Sweetser (1990) demonstrates the various extents to which we rely upon each of the exterior senses as source domains in our metaphoric conceptualizations of knowledge and understanding. The predominance of vision as a source domain is reflected in the following words: wisdom, witness, evidence, advice, guide, history, hades, and idea. In addition to referring to knowledge about the world, they all share the PIE (Proto-Indo-European) root *weid-, to see, and each of these words is a manifestation of the conceptual metaphor knowing is seeing. Because seeing depends upon exposure to light, this metaphor includes terms such as discover and elucidate, while the act of sharing knowledge becomes the act of showing, as in reveal and theorize. Based on Sweetser’s list, here are some fundamental examples of our vision-based vocabulary for knowing: 166  Beyond Musical Space

wisdom, wise: videre, to see witness, wit: videre advice: a(d)- + videre evidence: visual information theory: a viewing (hence, theater) idea: eidon, to see; oida to know

observe: to watch, to protect explicate: to unfold explain: to make plain elucidate: to make bright, visible discover, uncover: to make visible inveigle: to blind (aveugler; ab-oculus)

knowing is seeing is fleshed out with the help of the hand and in two secondary metaphors: teaching is showing and learning is following. With regard to the hand, literal applications of vision commonly involve application of the hands, as in explicate (to unfold and thus make the interior visible). The combined actions of the eye and the hand then become metaphoric when we extend the concrete experience of unfolding to experiences that are like unfolding and thereby seeing things that are otherwise invisible. The metaphor teaching is showing reflects an extension of the fact that sharing knowledge commonly involves literally showing objects and their features (teach is from PIE *deik, to show, to point out).7 learning is following presumably is motivated in part by the metaphoric temporal motion in the “series” of “steps” involved in sharing knowledge. Since such a series of steps commonly results in understanding, we also have understanding is following, as reflected in the expression if you follow me, and in the concepts of straightforward and convoluted explanations, the latter having many metaphoric turns and thus being hard to “follow.” It is important to recognize that concepts such as seeing, showing, following, and convoluted are not metaphoric substitutes for, or paraphrases of, literal concepts. Although we have a handful of literal terms for knowing and coming-toknow—such as know, learn, and recognize—there are aspects of knowing and coming-to-know that are like seeing and following even when there is no literal seeing or following.8 The use of visual terms reflects this and, as in the case of metaphoric pitch height and musical motion, our epistemology is shaped by the extent of our awareness of the logic and role of knowing is seeing and its related metaphors. In addition to the list above, the following list helps demonstrate the pervasiveness of vision-based concepts: exposition: made visible plain: flat (ergo, easy to see or follow) see hidden, underlying notice: to look at salient: jumping out and thus visible perspective prominent: sticking out and thus visible inspect obscure: dark reveal, revelatory: related to velum, veil opaque/transparent show, point out foggy, vague review, overview murky, muddy overlook (not notice) fuzzy clarify, clear supervise, oversee obvious: ob + via, path (following) insightful intuition: in + tueri, to watch perspicacity: per-spicere, to look through Music and the External Senses  167

Although this visual bias is not universal, as we saw via Evans and Wilkins (2000), it is strongly motivated by the relative perceptual power of the eye. The resulting cognitive-linguistic habit is then perpetuated from the bottom up by our daily physical interaction with, and cognitive processing of, literally visible objects. When it then comes to studying things that cannot be seen, we nevertheless apply our vision-based epistemology. With this in mind, it will help to identify three kinds of seeing, or cognitive representations in the brain: (1) those involving literally visible objects, (2) those involving literally visible graphic representations (as in picturing staff notation), and (3) those involving metaphoric “seeing.” These three kinds of cognitive representations involve intentional objects, or objects of the mind, and the first two relate to concrete objects in the world around us.9 The first kind is straightforward in this respect. The second kind includes drawings of real or imaginary entities, such as the steps of the Lincoln Memorial or the sets of stairways in Escher’s Relativity. The second kind also includes staff notation, which is a graphic representation of a metaphoric conception; accordingly, the act of visualizing staff notation is not in itself metaphoric. The third kind is exemplified in common uses of the expression If you see what I mean. When a teacher demonstrates a way of fingering a particular passage and asks, “Do you see what I mean?” this refers to something literally visible, but when a teacher describes a desired sound quality and asks, “Do you see what I mean?” this is metaphoric seeing, the third kind of seeing, because this sound quality is invisible. (Similarly, if you find that what I have just tried to elucidate is still opaque or cloudy, this is metaphoric nonseeing.) If the features of interest in musical descriptions and analyses are, in many or most instances, not visible, one might nevertheless see no harm in using the visual vocabulary listed above; it is understood, after all, that most often we are referring to sounds, not sights. The problem, however, is not so much a matter of these terms creating fictional visibility of invisible musical features. The problem is that the practice provides knowledge and a kind of certainty that disguises the role of the listener’s and conceptualizer’s embodiment. When I see what you mean, what does “see” actually refer to? In music, if an analysis reveals something, what is “revealed”? If it is a relationship among musical events (rhythm, form, pitch structure, etc.), or a relationship between sonic events and “extra-musical” events (associations and significations), it is easy to “see” this from a objective, third-person “perspective.” But if our access to musical sounds includes mimetic participation, and if this participation is integral to our fundamental concepts (chaps. 4–6), then what is “observed” includes our own motor imagery, which is primarily an invisible feeling. understanding is grasping As potent as the eye may be, knowledge and understanding also come from our physical investigation of objects, and this involves the power of the hand. The conceptualization processes and the implications are analogous to those involving 168  Beyond Musical Space

the power of the eye, and in this case we have the conceptual metaphor understanding is grasping (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The most immediate manifestation is in the vocabulary for grasping, as in perceive, conceive, and deceive (as well as accept, concept, deception, exception, etc.), all of which are from Latin capere, to grasp or take, in turn from PIE *kap-, to grasp (whence, Proto-Germanic *haben- and English have). When acquiring understanding via physical manipulation of objects, the hand commonly works in coordination with the eye, and this is reflected in the following basic terms: analyze: to loosen and separate into pieces or parts explicate: to unfold, from plica discern, distinguish, disentangle: to separate opinion: Latin stem opinari, think, judge; from PIE *op-, to choose intelligence: inter (between) + legere, to tie together (compare legato) observe: to keep (also to watch) scrutinize: PIE root *skreu-, to cut (Sweetser: to dig through the trash) behold: plainly grasping, but has become a seeing term determine: to bound (to set limits or a terminus) neglect: negation of legere, to pick up (but already also visual in Late Latin) The basic motivation for the conceptual metaphor understanding is grasping is the experience of control in grasping, which implicitly brings under our control the knowledge and understanding gained through grasping. We own (possess) what we grasp, to varying extents and however temporarily, and when we acquire and own understanding, it is like grasping or holding this intangible knowledge. This metaphoric sense of grasping is reflected in expressions such as I didn’t catch your meaning, it went right over my head, and I think I’ve got a handle on it now. As with seeing, we can distinguish three kinds of grasping: literal grasping, imagined literal grasping (motor imagery), and metaphoric grasping. The literal act of grasping an object also makes it more immediately available to all of our ways of knowing: we can feel it, look at it, smell it, taste it, and hear any sound that it might make; and if we ingest it we can learn the gustatory implications for maintaining homeostasis. Because actual grasping commonly involves manipulation of objects, metaphoric grasping likewise extends to manipulation of metaphoric objects, as in the notion of cutting, or untying, the Gordian knot, and in the concept of analysis. A penetrating analysis is one in which the imaginary object is pulled apart and visually and manually penetrated, which thus metaphorically combines the power of the hand and the eye. Terms such as explicate and reveal, listed under knowing is seeing, implicitly involve manipulation as well. When the object under analysis is in fact intangible, any explication or revelation is ultimately metaphoric. The same question applies here as with visual terms: the understanding that comes when I “get it” is like grasping, but what is the nature of this “getting”? The answer here is the nature of one’s composite representation Music and the External Senses  169

of the phenomenon or idea in question. In music, the composite representation includes auditory, visual, and mimetic and nonmimetic motor imagery.10

Seeing, Grasping, and Music Epistemology It is important to question the extent to which our metaphoric use of visual and manual terms might matter for musical knowledge and understanding. Such questioning is part of the larger question of how linguistic habits shape knowledge and understanding, and we considered some evidence on this matter in relation to conceptualizations of time in chapter 5.11 In the remainder of this chapter I describe some ways in which our reliance upon visual-manual terms shapes musical knowledge and understanding in ways that tacitly marginalize the kind of visceral embodiment we have been exploring in this book. What does it mean to know? It is like seeing or picturing. What does it mean to understand? It is like grasping, or holding, or having-in-hand. Of the five external sensory modes, these two dominate our general epistemology. When the subject matter in question involves visible and tangible objects, this ocular-manual bias is not necessarily problematic (for most purposes), but when the subject matter involves musical sounds and silences, it creates a problem for music epistemology. When we abstract sounds from their particular physical sources, in the interest of gaining general knowledge and understanding of music, the object of study is an acoustic-auditory “material” that is immaterial, or at least invisible and intangible, and these properties put it beyond the reach of our general epistemology.12 This fact proves to have both agreeable and “problematic” aesthetic implications. Here I describe three responses to this situation. One response is to embrace the problem as an advantage of the art of music, in line with the Martin Scorsese epigraph and with Walter Pater’s remark, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” This solution is also reflected in the following remarks from a 1918 book review: Strictly considered, writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics. All the other arts can be talked about in the terms of ordinary life and experience. A poem, a statue, a painting or a play is a representation of somebody or something, and can be measurably described (the purely aesthetic values aside) by describing what it represents. But music is not a mirroring of the things of this earth; it is an arrangement of tones. It is an unseen world, formed of materials which cannot be tasted, touched or seen. To describe it you must describe tones and their arrangements, a task for which there is no adequate vocabulary in ordinary language, and only clumsy jargon in the speech of musicians. Properly speaking, I think, you can’t write about music . . . you can’t convey the thing itself except in terms of itself.13

A second response is to transform music into something visible, and even quasi-tangible, via visual representations (various forms of notation) and other objectifications (e.g., the concept of musical “pieces”), both of which help to align musical knowledge and understanding with our ocular-manual epistemology. This is an ancient Western response, and it is reflected in our music-lit170  Beyond Musical Space

eral vocabulary, which is how we use our visual and manual vocabulary when we talk about music. Because this response provides so much knowing and understanding, it can be difficult to see a problem with the practice. To a great extent, the present chapter and this entire book are meant to increase awareness of what this practice overlooks, and of the disadvantages it offers us. From this examination emerges a third response, which is to acknowledge the utility of visual representations and metaphoric conceptualizations—that is, to embrace the second response—but to then also seek explicit understanding of the logic that structures these ways of understanding and knowing music. This response also embraces the first response, and in the next chapter I explore this connection more directly (in “The Invisibility, Intangibility, and Ephemerality of Musical Sounds”). In the meantime time, I next consider two ways in which nonmetaphoric vision informs musical knowledge and understanding: in the sight of performing bodies and in the visuality of staff notation. Visible Elements of Musical Performance It might seem somewhat strange that I have given so little attention in this chapter to the visible elements of performing bodies.14 In one sense it seems obvious that the sight of performing bodies is relevant to embodied cognition, and in fact the mimetic hypothesis (chaps. 1 and 2) embraces the influence of such visualcorporeal stimuli. For example, the facial expressions and movements of performers (or the personas they present) often correlate with descriptions of the music as adagio or intense and so forth, and this can be a crucial part of musical meaning.15 But these correlations do not require a theory of metaphor, insofar as the appearance and sound of ease or intensity are literal, and, from one perspective, they do not require a hypothesis about mimetic comprehension because, although theoretically they are in fact normally comprehended mimetically, one can tacitly ignore this and instead understand their relevance in objective terms: the face of a performer can literally look like an expression of ease or intensity, and perception of this has a nonmimetic (objective) component. Additionally, from the perspective of the conceptualizing listener the facial expressions and other movements of performers are sometimes highly congruent, and sometimes incongruent, with the sense of expression or movement in the musical sounds. For example, the steps and leaps in sung melodies are, to a great extent, congruent only at the level of the largely invisible exertions. With such incongruencies or noncongruencies in mind, we can say that the sight of performers often contributes to what listeners feel and think, but precisely what it contributes is nonuniform; different performance and listening practices shape the ways in which the sight of performers becomes relevant. Visual Representations of Music: Staff Notation Staff notation is part of the second response to the “problem” of music’s invisibility, intangibility, and ephemerality. Its benefits are obvious enough, as are some Music and the External Senses  171

of its potential costs, but here I want to emphasize a couple of points that emerge from the foregoing discussion. There is a notion that pictures never lie, which is consistent with the objective aspects of visual information. To the contrary, however, filmmaker Albert Maysles once remarked that pictures do nothing but lie.16 Apart from freezing an otherwise ephemeral moment, pictures always come from some perspective, capture only some of the visual information, and, except when accompanied by captured sounds, offer us only indirect information related to the other senses: the smells, textures, and temperatures that are integral to real-life experience. It is easy to overestimate the value of visual information and to otherwise allow ourselves to be deceived by it, and this is one of the available lessons of René Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images, 1928–29)—a painting that can be seen as a painting of a tobacco pipe, with the seemingly paradoxical caption Ceci n’est pas une pipe. We could say something similar about music notation and other visual and visualizable representations of music:

&

w

Çeci n’est pas un Sol

The written symbol G (Sol) and its counterpart in staff notation represent the pitch of a sound, and the different vertical positions on the staff provide a precise visual analog of the various categories of pitch height. Similarly, staff notation generally represents relative duration within a bar, with a quarter note in common time ideally occupying a quarter of the bar, while more broadly staff notation represents motion (from left to right). By contrast, timbre, strength, and location of origin are less easily represented by such spatial-visual analogs, and their invisibility in the score arguably contributes to their often marginal status in music analysis. While there may be other reasons for privileging pitch and duration over the other acoustic-auditory features, the extent to which these are more directly represented in staff notation shapes what is implicitly taken to be most relevant to analytical musical knowledge. I imagine that many music scholars would agree that literacy in staff notation involves hearing (in auditory imagery) not only the pitches and rhythms but also the timbre, strength, and sound-source location, and that the eye in this context merely serves the ear. I also imagine that many would agree that comprehension of the page also involves imagined first-person performance—that the score is a set of instructions in what to do with one’s body, or with many ones’ bodies, to make more or less specific sounds. From this perspective, the score is simply and even powerfully beneficial in facilitating performance, reflection, and analysis— it benefits musical understanding and knowledge, without necessarily distorting or disguising any relevant musical feature—so that the concerns related to Maysles and Magritte do not apply, or perhaps they stand as reminders to practice 172  Beyond Musical Space

such a holistic understanding. This perspective, I think, represents the best version of the second response to music’s invisible features. If we then go further, by exploring the embodied reasoning that structures the logic of staff notation, we have the third response. But even in its most holistic use, a reliance upon staff notation can nevertheless direct attention away from one of music’s most potent sources of power: the invisibility and intangibility of sounds, to which I turn next. A Unique Aspect of Music among the Arts When Scorsese says, “Music is the perfect art: you can’t see it, you can’t touch it,” he points to music’s capacity to elude the power of the eye and the hand.17 Compare the media of architecture, sculpture, and painting, which are visible and, in principle at least, tangible. Much the same applies to dancers and to characters portrayed by actors. Literature and poetry are closer to music in that the entities and relationships to which the printed words refer are not physically present, and thus they are not immediately visible or tangible. However, Tom Sawyer’s paintbrush and Emily Dickinson’s tankards scooped in pearl are not only visualizable; to not attempt to picture them and to feel them in the hand is arguably to miss part of the point, or at least to miss an opportunity. But with music, although we might picture various kinds of imagery, the central medium remains invisible and intangible sound.18 A proper consideration of the relations among the arts would identify similarities and other details that I am passing over, but in the present context I only want to encourage consideration of how our general reliance upon the eye and the hand in comprehending and understanding experience makes musical experience special. From this perspective, visual representations of musical stimuli are thus a double-edged sword: we gain a particular kind of knowledge and understanding by sacrificing, or by temporarily bracketing, music’s power of invisibility. In ordinary life, for those with statistically normal vision, to set aside the power of the eye (to blindfold oneself) is to increase one’s vulnerability. In the aesthetic context of listening to music, this is an aestheticized vulnerability, which some might prefer to think of as making oneself receptive to music’s influence. How one feels about experiencing such vulnerability and/or receptivity is another matter, as is the question of how one feels about the idea that music listening involves vulnerability and/or receptivity in any meaningful way. These issues are part of the next topic.19

Control versus Receptivity The five external senses are modes of interacting with the environment and in this sense they are modes of enacting power. For each mode this power is bidirectional: the power to act upon the environment, and the power to absorb its influences. The senses differ, however, with respect to volition, the availability Music and the External Senses  173

Table 7.1. The Exterior Senses and Proximity, Volition, and Availability Proximity

Volition

Availability

Smell Taste Touch Vision Hearing

somewhat volitional most often volitional most often volitional most often volitional often not volitional

often available often available normally available normally available often unavailable

both distal and proximate proximate (contact) proximate (contact) both distal and proximate both distal and proximate

of stimuli, and the proximity required in order to apply them, and these variables create differences in relative power among the sense modalities. For example, if I do not wish to see, touch, or taste something, I can usually avoid doing so, but with smells and sounds I often have less volition—I often smell and hear things whether I want to or not. In the opposite direction, if I do indeed wish to see, touch, smell, or taste something, most often I can, but, as I mentioned previously, many entities are mute and require manipulation before I can hear what they sound like, while some entities can choose to be silent and thereby elude my power of hearing. In terms of volition and availability, then, hearing can be understood to be the least powerful sense, even if it is of course especially and uniquely potent in contexts such as music listening. Table 7.1 offers a rough comparison of the five external sense in terms volition, availability, and proximity. These characteristics vary according to the specific physical situation, the particular perceiver, and the influence of cultural habits, but the general differences represented in table 7.1 distinguish the external senses from one another as avenues of acquiring knowledge about the world and, therefore, as potential source domains for KNOWING. Because vision applies both near and far, is most often volitional, and is often relevant, it is from this perspective the most powerful sense overall. By the same criteria, hearing appears to be the least powerful overall. I have found that students and scholars commonly have an aversive response to this perspective, but the point of noting this difference is not to deny or underestimate the specific value of hearing. The point is to understand how these differences shape experience and meaning. As Sweetser (1990) points out, vision is generally conceptualized as being directed outward, and the power of vision is reflected in the experiences and concepts of supervision and oversight, including the complementary experiences of being the supervisor or overseer vs. being the supervisee or the overseen. By contrast, hearing is commonly conceptualized as receptive and is tied to heeding and obeying.20 While we can “listen in on” someone else’s conversation, when we listen in general we also have to make ourselves relatively quiet and withhold the power of our own voice. In acquiring knowledge and understanding of music, the relevant processes involve some combination of performance, perception, and various forms of conceptualization. In turn, as I noted in the discussion of understanding is grasp174  Beyond Musical Space

ing, music conceptualization depends on some combination of mental representations of actions, sounds, and sights (or motor, auditory, and visual imagery). Music-related actions are empowering insofar as they are actions upon the environment. Visual observations and representations (concrete or in imagery) are empowering by way of the general power of the eye. And when the concept of hearing is extended to include conceptualization, this kind of hearing is empowering; but the more basic experience of taking in auditory information is another matter. Auditory receptivity involves giving up a measure of power, and in the case of music performed by other persons, this involves allowing others to have an effect upon us via the receptive ear. Adopting a receptive attitude is arguably essential to an immersive musical experience for listeners. If this also combines with mimetic participation, and if it lays the foundation for conceptualization, the starting point for both is receptivity. If conceptualization (in real time or afterward) can also increase immersion in subsequent listening experiences, the beginning is still receptivity. The implications of acknowledging the differences between the powers of the eye, the hand, and the ear manifest most crucially in how they contribute to affective responses to music, as I describe in the next chapter.

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8 Musical Affect Ali: A man can do whatever he wants—you said! Lawrence: He can—but he cannot want what he wants. [Pinching his flesh:] This is the stuff that decides what he wants. Lawrence of Arabia

The analyses in chapters 4–7 help to show how our musical concepts are conceptualizations of experiences that are seldom if ever simply a matter of what is heard. Musical experience in general also includes what we see, do, and feel, whether we are actually performing or whether we are listening to, recalling, or otherwise thinking about music. In what we have considered so far, the feeling component includes the following: the feelings of overt and covert exertions (actual and imagined actions), in both mimetic and nonmimetic forms; the feelings of the anticipation-presence-memory dynamic; the feelings of exerting (actually and in imagination) in the service of the desire-achievement-satisfaction dynamic; and the feeling of making oneself receptive to an invisible and intangible stimulus. All of these feelings are part of the larger topic of musical affect, which is the subject of this chapter, and the first of two main purposes here is to offer an account of how the feelings that motivate and ground our spatial conceptualizations of music are already part of our affective responses to music.1 In what follows, I describe eight overlapping avenues of musical affect, each of which has already been broached in one way or another in the previous chapters. These are listed in table 8.1, which I have placed at the end of the chapter as a summary. Some of these avenues are very familiar, if known by other labels, but each (except the first) has been explored primarily from a nonmimetic perspective. As the table indicates, each avenue has both a mimetic and a nonmimetic aspect, and in some cases the discussion here simply adds a mimetic perspective.2 The second main purpose in offering this eight-part view is to provide nonspecialists with a systematic and synoptic approach to understanding and theorizing musical affect. This synoptic view is meant to be comprehensive in overall scope, but it is fleshed out here only far enough to establish the basic perspective.

Nevertheless, it is malleable enough to facilitate integration of the relevant studies and ideas that are necessarily omitted in this brief presentation.3 It is my sense that, like myself, many music scholars and other scholars interested in music receive relatively limited exposure to approaches to musical affect that are at once systematic and synoptic.4 This situation is quite different from the systematic training in understanding music’s structural features, and one result is the somewhat paradoxical situation that some scholars and teachers might give less analytical attention to the very thing that presumably drew many of us to the study of music in the first place. The eight-part view described below and in the next chapter offers an analytical-explanatory method that can be made as systematic and thorough as a given context requires, from college and earlier studies to graduate and professional inquiries. With these reasons and qualifications in mind, there remains only one more preliminary question that I want to consider: precisely what “musical affect” is meant to refer to.

Affect and Experience: Some Premises I am taking affect to include everything that might be described in terms of feeling, including emotions, moods, desires, and urges, as well as the feelings of exertions, balance, alertness, warmth, and other sensory experiences that, by themselves, do not constitute any particular emotion and yet are integral to the feeling of various experiences.5 Musical affect includes what one feels in performing music and in response to musical stimuli. Musical affect is a special case of affective life generally: every experience has an affective dimension, which is simply what an experience feels like, or “the feeling of what happens” (Damasio 1999). Since experience is continuous overall, even if it comprises concatenated and/or overlapping particular experiences, we experience a continuous and continuously changing affective state, including “neutral” states that do not draw attention to themselves as affective states per se.6 Musical experience then shapes one’s ongoing affective state, whether a little or a lot and whether agreeably or not. In a manner akin to the processes described in previous chapters, musical experience extends more ancient and ordinary processes into aesthetic contexts. For example, in chapters 5 and 6 we considered the extension of practical motion-related anticipation in conceptualizing metaphoric temporal motion and space, and this same feeling of anticipation is further extended to musical contexts. Affective responses to music commonly involve feeling something without knowing the precise cause, and without having a name for the feeling. The capacity to be moved without knowing the cause is itself a significant source of affect, and it is integrated into the eight-part approach (via Avenues 5, 7, and 8). The eight avenues are not equally significant for different listeners, or for a given listener in different contexts; however, the significance of a given avenue may be hidden by its unfamiliarity or by its subtle nature. The avenues are also mutually Musical Affect  177

influential, to varying extents, and this particular division into eight avenues is an analytical convenience that highlights useful distinctions that other divisions might disguise. The particular ordering here reflects the context of embodied cognition as presented in the preceding chapters, so that the last two avenues are not the least significant but they are in some ways the most subtle. From these eight emerge more complex aspects of musical affect that arguably cannot be reduced to these eight avenues: although all eight are always relevant, the whole of a given experience can be, or perhaps normally is, more than the sum of these parts.

Eight Avenues of Musical Affect 1. Mimetic Participation Since I have already described mimetic participation in detail in the foregoing chapters, all that remains in the present context is to connect it more explicitly to affect. Among the variables described in chapter 2, the often covert, unintentional, and nonconscious forms of mimetic motor imagery are the most important to keep in mind. The overt forms are obvious, even if their affective consequences are not always as obvious, but the covert and nonconscious forms have their effects in ways that are more subtle. Exertions always serve some function or purpose, whether trivial or momentous, and they always have an affective dimension, in what it feels like to exert in some way for some function or purpose. This feeling includes, among other things, (1) a sense of effort/ease in the exertion of force, (2) the duration of the exertion, and (3) the complexity of an action or series of actions. (4) Evaluation of the success or failure with respect to the purpose of the exertion(s) is then an additional source of affect. Communal actions, as in ensemble playing, can then add (5) the feeling of mimetically participating with others, whether via the same exertions (as among members of a section) or via exertions that share a more abstract pattern (such as a shared beat or meter). All of this becomes part of musical experience for mimetically engaged listeners, who feel something of the same aspects of performative exertions (see chaps. 1 and 2). To get a sense of the possible subtleties, consider the role of respiration. For most of us, respiration is usually easy enough that we can pay little or no attention to it, but nevertheless it is positively valenced (it feels good) even if this evaluation does not emerge in full consciousness. When normal respiration is interrupted or impaired this changes one’s affective state and motivates action to restore normal respiration, whether simply clearing one’s throat, or reaching for one’s medicinal inhaler, or other more urgent actions. Andy Mead describes an experience of listening to an oboe performance during which at one point he found himself in physical pain until he found himself “taking a deep, gasping breath” (Mead 1999, 1). It turned out that the performer had been using circular breathing—in effect, “sneaking” breaths while maintaining a continuous airflow through the instrument—which Mead did not realize, and as a result of his mimetic engagement he “had quite literally run out of breath.” Consistent with 178  Beyond Musical Space

the mimetic hypothesis (principle 16), this is a result of implicitly asking What’s it like to do that? and miscomprehending the endless sound as an uninterrupted exhalation: we can be wrong about what performers are doing, and such miscomprehensions shape the nature of one’s mimetic participation. This story is an extraordinary example of an ordinary part of music listening: physically empathizing with what performers do, automatically and without awareness—until, in this case, aesthetic-mimetic immersion conflicted with practical needs. The range of exertions and effort involved in different performance media and musical genres is part of what distinguishes each of them, and the feeling that comes from mimetic comprehension of these exertions is part of what determines the appeal of different kinds of music for different listeners. This includes the sense of mental effort involved in, for example, playing fugues from memory, or performing any music that requires a notably greater feeling of concentration. This also includes the effort of finessed exertions, as in stereotypical virtuosic music, which blends fine motor skills, great speed, and often great concentration, and subtler forms of virtuosity such as embellishments in baroque music. Because a greater sense of effort tends to motivate a greater sense of purpose and of what is at stake, musical experiences that involve a greater sense of effort are more fraught, and the affective rewards for listeners can be correspondingly more intense. By the same token, easier exertions (whether actually easier or only seemingly so) afford an affective state of ease via mimetic com­prehension. Of particular note is the relationship between mimetic participation and various aspects of repetition as explored by Margulis (2014). In one part of this relationship, repetition fosters mimetic participation in connection with Anticipation, as I consider below. In terms of affect, while each exertion has an affective dimension in its own right, the repetition of individual exertions and patterns of exertions generates an emergent feeling that integrates successful anticipation with repetitive exertions. This applies to immediate repetitions, as in many forms of dance music, minimalism, and ostinatos, and it applies to disparate recurrences, whether within a given work (e.g., recurring motives and themes), or across multiple listenings to the same work, or across different works (works that share some other salient feature, e.g., lament basses). As with all musical features, repetition has its effect upon listeners both nonmimetically and mimetically, and while the role of mimetic participation may be more obvious in contexts involving overt participation, it plays a role in any music that features patterns that recur at a rate that listeners can mimetically engage with.7 Just as significant, however, is the relative lack of repetition in some other music. As I consider in chapter 9, the lack of an opportunity to perform repeated mimetic exertions has affective consequences that can be valued positively or negatively. Three Kinds of Partners: Performers, The Music, and Other Listeners Some forms of imitation are direct imitation of the specific actions of perform­ers, as in singing along, playing air guitar, and so forth, but some forms are less direct. For example, when I am tapping my foot or dancing to music, I am usually Musical Affect  179

not imitating the specific actions of the performers, but instead I am imitating, in a different modality, the patterns of the performers’ exertions. This motivates the sense that I am imitating “the beat,” which is abstracted from the specific actions of the performers and becomes a property of “the music.” Bearing in mind the social contexts in which we practice mimetic engagement with others, beginning in infancy and throughout our lives, the sense that one imitates “the music” bears potentially significant implications with regard to the nature of the subjectivities of mimetic engagement with music, which I can only point toward in the present context.8 The sense of mimetically participating in performances offers one set of affective rewards, in the admiration of and/or affection for a given performer, while the sense of mimetically participating with an abstract entity known as “the music” can seem to elevate the experience beyond the plane of interpersonal engagement. Theoretically, the extent to which one is unaware of these mimetic processes also shapes the affective consequences. Because of the extent to which humans rely upon mimetic processes, successful imitation is positively valenced and failed imitation is negatively valenced. Because of the connection between mimetic processes and the value of social belonging, a noncooperative partner will tend to motivate an unenthusiastic or aversive response. From the performer’s side, this can apply when audience participation is welcome or encouraged but the audience is not enthusiastically joining in. From the listener’s side this includes music and/or a particular performance that invites one to do things that one finds unappealing. What counts as unappealing depends on the music, the performer, and the listener, but enjoying the experience normally includes enjoying the experience of making particular sounds (overtly or only in imagery) and/or of performing analogous actions or modally ambiguous exertions (the amodal abdominal exertions of principle 10). To the extent that mimetic processes are normal and yet one is unaware of them, this basis of aesthetic evaluation and preference will still have its effect but the effect will tend to be misattributed to some other process (including the other seven avenues below). In addition to the performers and the music, we have a third mimetic partner: other listeners. When an audience sings along or dances along, imitation is both between the performers and audience, and laterally among audience members. The affective reward for this shared mimetic behavior is tied to the value of socialization, as many others have noted (e.g., Small 1998). Finally, although mimetic processes stand on their own as an avenue of musical affect, they also inform each of the seven other avenues. While this could be said of some or perhaps all of the other avenues, the mimetic dimension is what I want to emphasize. 2. Anticipation Research and scholarship on music and expectation, prediction, and anticipation, such as that of Meyer (1956) and Huron (2006), is most often from a pri180  Beyond Musical Space

marily nonmimetic perspective: from a second-person position as listeners we predict what will happen next in the external music stimulus, and the degree and nature of one’s successes and failures shapes one’s affective response to the music. This part of the story has a mimetic complement: mimetic participation produces a quasi-first-person perspective, with the consequence that our predictions are of what we will vicariously do. Most or all of the principles are the same as in a nonmimetic perspective, with the added feature that listeners’ mimetic exertions (enacted or confined to imagery) become part of the predictive mechanisms, which adds a viscerality to the rewards and costs of successful and failed prediction. I want to focus here on the mimetic component, but first let me distill four general principles based on Huron’s work.9 The first involves Huron’s explanation of the importance of nonconscious and marginally conscious anticipation: to understand the role of anticipation in music, we have to acknowledge that explicit anticipation of events, such as looking forward to holidays and favorite musical moments, is proportionally rare compared to the stream of implicit anticipation in routine events, such as the anticipation of each step in walking or each beat in metered music. The second is closely related: anticipation is automatic and more or less continuous. While we can and do deliberately apply our anticipatory abilities, this is a special case of a more basic ability that we (our nonconscious and marginally conscious selves) apply throughout each day. The third is that successful prediction is positively valenced (it feels good) and failed prediction is negatively valenced. As Huron explains, a negative response can be immediately reinterpreted as positive, as in the case of yelling “Surprise!” at a surprise party, but in such a case the initial moment of fear is crucial to the positive effect that follows. One can also aestheticize failure to predict more generally, as in listening to jazz and other forms of improvisation, while too much successful prediction can lead to boredom. These cases relate to the fourth principle. Repeated exposure to particular musical works, genres, and the idiosyncrasies of individual performers increases one’s ability to predict what will happen next in a given context. Although this occurs as a result of mere exposure, Huron explains this in terms of the “prediction effect” (2006, 131–141). He does so because the mere exposure effect (or exposure effect) focuses on the matter of frequency of occurrence, whereas frequency of occurrence matters in musical contexts “because it increases the listener’s ability to predict the future” (138). This distinction is significant, particularly in the context of Huron’s book on anticipation, but because exposure also shapes nonanticipatory musical knowledge, I am using mere exposure effect.10 Anticipation, Mimetic Participation, and Tripartite Subjectivity To the extent that a given music-listening experience involves mimetic engagement, anticipation includes anticipation of what one will mimetically do as a listener. The resulting quasi-first-person, participatory experience is thus entwined with the second- and quasi-third-person observatory experiences related Musical Affect  181

to nonmimetic anticipation.11 The first-person component raises the stakes because it involves an interest in one’s participatory actions: the reward is not only for successfully predicting what will happen in the external stimulus (and how it will affect us nonmimetically), but also for our ability to successfully take part. This reward is perhaps strongest in “teleological” music, such as Mozart’s “Ach, ich fühl’s,” or each movement in Barber’s Piano Concerto. Much as we attribute the property of motion to music based on our metaphoric conceptualization of our own nonlocative temporal experience (chaps. 5 and 6), the sense of motion toward a goal is grounded in performers’ and listeners’ experience of working to achieve a goal. Since this is a nonlocative goal, there must be something in the phenomenology of musical experience that is nevertheless somehow like motion toward a goal. A goal is not only something anticipated or expected but something desired. In musical goals, what is desired is a more or less particular state, which becomes a state-location. For performers this state is achieved through genuine first-person exertions, and for listeners it is vicariously achieved through quasi-first-person mimetic exertions. From this perspective, if I find the Höhepunkte in Berg’s Violin Concerto to be particularly thrilling, it is partly because I take part in reaching and performing these events. The fact that I do not play the violin does not diminish the intensity of my mimetic immersion in these moments, even if it does shape the nature of the experience (chap. 2). The same applies to the quietest cadence and the lowest-level musical goals: in addition to second- and third-person anticipation, my experience is shaped by quasi-firstperson desire and exertions to fulfill that desire (exertions which are congruent with or analogous to those that might produce the musical sounds). Any resulting satisfaction is likewise a satisfaction of tripartite engagement. The appeal of music that does not motivate a strong sense of motion toward a goal is another matter. When music attenuates a sense of teleology it also attenuates the corresponding goal-oriented exertions, which some listeners may find to be agreeable. For example, the feeling of listening to and/or watching a performance of Morton Feldman’s The King of Denmark includes the feeling of what it would be like to perform such subtle actions in playing percussion instruments with the hands alone. The relative lack of a sense of teleology in this work is a product of a relatively attenuated ability to predict what will happen next (schematic prediction), which in turn motivates a sense of concatenated local gestures. One might find the choreography of the performer’s gestures to be at least as compelling as the sounds that they produce, and the sense of movement without an obvious pitch-related sense of teleology can be particularly attractive. In such cases, it is not that anticipation becomes less relevant or irrelevant, but rather its relative attenuation or apparent absence becomes crucial to the feeling of the musical experience. 3. Expression In everyday life we comprehend the expression of emotions in other persons both objectively, via nonmimetic visual and auditory perception, and empathetically, 182  Beyond Musical Space

via mimetic comprehension of what we see and hear. Nonmimetic processes are sufficient for classifying (recognizing) the observed expression, which may or may not reflect what the other person is actually feeling, but the mimetic processes are integral to full comprehension. Much the same plays out in the aesthetic context of music listening. If one is interested only in classifying actual and apparent expressions of emotion in music, then mimetic comprehension could be deemed superfluous. But if we are interested in how such expressions shape the affective responses of listeners, then a mimetic perspective offers a relatively direct explanation of at least part of the process: (1) we simulate the observed behavior, or apparent behavior, to some degree of fidelity, and (2) we thereby experience an affective state that, based on our own prior experience, normally correlates with this behavior.12 The potential value of looking at the situation in this way begins to emerges when we start to explore the underlying complexities of musical expression. The challenges of understanding expression as an avenue of musical affect come to the fore when we ask who is doing the expressing, what is being expressed, and how it is being expressed. My interest here is primarily in the who and the how.13 Among the candidates for the expressing agent (the who) are the composer (Cone 1974), the performer(s), personas portrayed in opera (and in oratorios, film, television, and so forth), and personas represented either implicitly or explicitly in song (such as the protagonist in Schubert’s Die Schöne Mullerin). To this list we can add the mimetically engaged listener. The second question, of how music might express emotions, or seem to do so, involves mimetic comprehension of specific sounds, but it is complicated by the question of who is understood to be performing the expression. To establish a framework, let us say that listening to music can be somehow like listening to some agent’s expression. When there is an explicit agent, such as a persona in an opera, the likeness is relatively straightforward, initially: we are observing the expressions of Eurydice, Desdemona, or Tosca. When there is not a portrayed agent, we might understand the music to be the expression of the performer and/or the composer. However, if and when it seems as though the expression is not reducible to the actions of the performer or composer, we are motivated to create a fictional agent. The feeling that one is comprehending an expression implies an expressive agent commonly known as “The Music.” Perceiving Expressions Let me put the matter in an odd way: We treat other humans as if they express emotions. Since our perceptions of apparent expressions are normally correct, the “as if” is normally unnecessary, but this perspective leads to an explanation of problematic examples of agential expression in music. Consider Daniel Stern’s observation that we attribute selfhood to infants beyond what is arguably warranted from a disinterested point of view: Parents act, from the beginning, as though the infant had a sense of self. Parents immediately attribute their infants with intentions (“Oh, you want to see that”),

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motives (“You’re doing that so Mommy will hurry up with the bottle”), and authorship of action (“You threw that one away on purpose, huh?”). It is almost impossible to conduct social interaction with infants without attributing these human qualities to them. These qualities make human behavior understandable, and parents invariably treat their infants as understandable beings, that is, as the people they are about to become. (Stern 1985, 50–51)

Of course, one could say that a disinterested point of view is not normally possible for parents, and something similar could be said of many pet owners and music lovers. It can seem as if music expresses something, and when in fact I cannot point to the specific expressing agent, this makes the experience extraordinary. Kivy (1989) offers a related approach in characterizing, for example, a St. Bernard’s face as being expressive of sadness. Whether or not the dog is or might be sad, its face “looks sad,” and Kivy argues that music can be expressive of certain emotions without the need for there to be an expressive agent; music can “sound sad” more or less as a dog’s face can “look sad.” However, it is another matter when it comes to explaining how this attribution of expressiveness relates to a listener’s affective response to music.14 Mimetic comprehension of infant behavior, dog faces, and musical sounds involves simulating the observed actions and sounds, and this arguably underlies various forms of personification or anthropomorphization. As I argued in chapter 3, when music seems to express some emotion, we never simply hear this apparent expression. Mimetic engagement involves feeling what it would be like to make the same or similar sounds, and/or to perform the same or analogous exertions, and these necessarily have an affective component as exertions and in their correlation with their real-life contexts (desire, satisfaction, etc.). To the extent that these sounds and exertions feel like my own expression of a particular emotion (or affective state), it will feel, in part, as though I am expressing this emotion—but since I am not, and I am instead listening to sounds produced exterior to me, this creates a problem. This is where tripartite subjectivity comes in. From a corporeal second-person listening position, mimetic engagement results in simultaneously adopting a quasi-first-person position in which one takes part in the production of the sounds to which one is otherwise listening. At the same time, real-time reflection upon the experience involves adopting a quasithird-person position, and both apparent and actual perception of musical expression emerges within the mélange of these three positions. Theoretically the same process plays out in the perception of human expressions of emotions, with the difference that normally there is an actual agent expressing a genuine emotion, whereas in music it is not always plain who the expressing agent might be. When it is not plainly the performer, the persona portrayed by the performer, or the composer, and yet it feels as though we have perceived the expression of an emotion, we understand the aesthetic context in terms of the practical whenever we then infer the expressive agent known as The Music. In such cases we understand music as if it were a kind of expressive agent, and the underlying process includes mimetic participation and its generally hidden nature within tripartite engagement. 184  Beyond Musical Space

This perspective offers a way of accounting for multiple perspectives on the issue of emotional expression in music, including the belief that music does express emotions, that music is expressive of emotions, and that music does not express anything at all.15 Each of these is logical; and if the fictional agent known as The Music is illusory, it is perhaps no more so than fictional musical motion and space, where the skeletal version of The Music moves here and there without being understood to express any emotion. 4. Acoustic Impact From the perspective of chapter 7, we make ourselves receptive to musical sounds, and at the interface between ourselves and the external world is the more or less immediate impact that musical sounds have upon us. While impact is literal at the level of ear drum and other mechanical portions of the auditory system, the impact that I have in mind extends beyond this. It can be gentle or harsh, with a gradual or sudden onset, along with multiple other variables, and one’s response to this impact is part of one’s affective response to musical sounds. Many of our common descriptions of sounds are in part conceptualizations of their acousticauditory impact upon us: piano (soft), warm, sharp, and so forth. The acoustic impact concerns the ways that sounds “come at us,” or seem to come at us, and enter us. This impact is shaped by the five components of the acoustic-auditory fact: the features of sounds related to pitch, duration, timbre, strength, and location of origin (actual or apparent). It plays out in the loudest sounds of rock bands and orchestras, and in the quietest sounds of recorder ensembles, but all five sonic features are integral. Whether the impact of a sound is blunt or subtle, the mechanisms whereby it achieves its effect can be complex, and the effect itself can elude full consciousness or, even if it emerges in consciousness, the effect can be ineffable. For example, a drum hit or a subito forte can be salient, but while its effect involves an element of surprise, it also involves the effect of the particular timbre and the finer details of the sound’s onset or attack. In the case of more subtle impacts, we might not notice a detail of intonation, rubato, or timbral change, and this very inattention can enhance its effect—or we might in fact notice a subtle detail, and this awareness can enhance its effect. In what follows I describe some of the ways in which each of the five components shapes the acoustic impact. These five are largely mutually dependent, which is to say that a change in one can or will shape the effect of each of the others, but for analytical purposes I am considering them separately. Also, note that the acoustic impact is distinct from the broader sense of music’s aesthetic or emotional impact, which involves a blend of all eight avenues of musical affect. Finally, unlike the first three avenues, mimetic participation is not immediately relevant to music’s acoustic impact. This impact is experienced primarily from a second-person perspective within tripartite subjectivity, and in this way it relates to the issue of receptivity and vulnerability (chap. 7).16 Musical Affect  185

Pitch Height The effect of pitch height is exemplified in the difference between the largest and smallest (lowest and highest pitched) pipes of organs, where the lowest sounds can shake the floor and the highest sounds can seem to pierce one’s head. Such effects are integrated with timbre and strength, but on a given acoustic instrument these are correlates of pitch height. Because of the correlation between an instrument’s size and its typical pitch range—as with the double bass and the piccolo— pitch height can imply the actual or apparent size of the source, and this correlation can contribute a psychological impact. When the floor shakes or when I feel a sympathetic vibration in my chest, the impact is implicitly associated with the sounds of an entity large enough and powerful enough to have such an acoustic impact. This kind of association applies to all five components of the acoustic-auditory fact, but as significant as it is for musical affect, it is distinct from the feeling of the impact itself. Duration In describing the experience of listening to Subotnik’s Silver Apples of the Moon, one of my students said that it felt like it was poking her. While this sensation involves pitch height, strength, and timbre, the durations of the sounds are essential to the analogy. Patterns of duration—rhythm and meter—always shape the impact of sounds. If a single sound has a particular impact, then any repetitions of that sound repeat this impact, as in the trumpet and drum parts in the “Gun Battle” of Copland’s Billy the Kid, or the repeated Gs in the second movement of Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata (featured in Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut), or the repeated Gs in Schubert’s setting of Die Erlkönig. At another level, the re­ currence of a motive that features repeated notes can contribute to the feel of an entire movement, as in the first and third movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.17 Timbre The effect of timbre can be understood in terms of the degree of focus. A quiet diffuse sound can be “soft,” but a quiet focused sound can have a more intense impact, like an urgent whisper. Personal and functional preferences for particular timbres can be understood in part as preferences for the timbres typically produced on a given instrument and the acoustic impact that these timbres have. Lullabies, for example, are not only quiet and relatively slow, but they are also commonly sung with a gentle timbre. Diffusion of timbre, because it changes the impact, can also cloud the difference between timbre and strength. For example, bowing over the fingerboard (flautando) makes a softer impact that can be interpreted as a softer (più piano) dynamic level, while bowing nearer the bridge brightens or sharpens the timbre and creates a more penetrating effect that might seem to be louder as a result of the more salient impact. 186  Beyond Musical Space

Strength Strength (amplitude, volume, and/or loudness in both the strict and loose senses) is perhaps the most obvious factor in the impact of sounds, and it applies to a sound’s entire envelope: its attack (onset) sustain (including any variation during the sustain), and decay. The analogy with touch helps to explain the impact of strength: the attack can be gentle or it can startle listeners; the sustain can be light or heavy, and continuous or varying; and the decay is how the impact ceases, and the subtlety or abruptness of this cessation shapes the effect of the sound as a whole. Loud sounds can seem to “come at us” and demand attention in an assertive manner, while quiet sounds can in effect make us “come to them,” whether we must actually lean in or simply hold ourselves still. The extreme case of silence has its effect in part because of its acoustic nonimpact. Strength is also closely tied to actual and apparent proximity, as I discuss next. Location Sounds originate in actual locations, and they can seem to originate in illusory locations, as in stereophonic recordings. Within both actual and illusory three-dimensional spaces, location and change of location (motion) shape the overall musical effect of sounds, but in terms of the acoustic impact specifically, the most important factor is proximity. In the case of actual space, greater distance diffuses the timbre and attenuates the strength, and change in distance can also affect the pitch (via the Doppler effect). In the reverse of the correlation, modification of the timbre, strength, and/or pitch can create the illusion of distance and motion, as in darkening the timbre and playing more quietly to create the effect of lontano (distant). While sound design, electronic music composition, and film score recording commonly rely upon creating illusory space to a much greater extent than traditional acoustic music, actual and illusory space are nevertheless integral to sound in general. The fuller effect of proximity, like that of the pitch, duration, timbre, and strength, includes the inferences that we make based on the acoustic impact—in this case, what it is like to be close to or far from a sound source, and especially for a sound source to approach us. I return to this under Associations. 5. Implicit and Explicit Analysis Analysis in general is a set of ways of responding to basic operating questions, including What is that? What’s going to happen next? and How does that/this work? These questions originate in the service of maintaining homeostasis, in which context they are necessarily tied to affect: the feeling of wanting to know and/or understand (curiosity), and the evaluative feelings related to one’s progress and degree of success in answering these questions (i.e., struggle, success, frustration, etc.). We ask these questions in musical contexts both implicitly and explicitly, Musical Affect  187

and their affective dimension is a part of musical experience whether or not one engages in explicit music analysis.18 We can understand the contribution of music analysis more specifically in relation to innocence versus knowledge, and confusion versus understanding. In practical contexts outside of music, successful analysis results in understanding and knowledge, which are positively valenced because of their value for survival, while incomplete or failed analysis is negatively valenced, whether in the mild form of curiosity-not-yet-satisfied or in the stronger forms of confusion, frustration, and/or panic. In aesthetic contexts, however, we create contexts in which we can “survive” and even enjoy innocence and confusion without harm. One result is that the affective valence of knowledge and understanding becomes ambivalent in musical experience and meaning, while innocence and confusion can become positively valenced. The perspective from which we ask and answer our operating questions is tripartite, even when the third-person element dominates consciousness. What is that? is a matter of categorization and involves all of the processes we have considered in previous chapters, including the role of mimetic motor imagery as well as many other processes that I have not addressed. What’s going to happen next? is primarily about memory and prediction. How does that/this work? concerns temporal relations among categorized phenomena and to a great extent subsumes the first two questions. Each of these questions, whether asked implicitly or explicitly, is by definition asked from a quasi-third-person position. In connection with the temporality of music, musical objects (such as chords, particular works, and genres) are objectified sounds and actions, and the generic answer to What is that? is “It is the thing that sounds and feels like this,” answered from all three components of tripartite experience. For What’s going to happen next? it is both “We’re/I’m going to do this” (quasi-first-person) and “This is going to happen to me” (second/third-person). For How does that/this work? the generic answer most directly related to affect is “It is the thing that makes me feel this” as a result of both mimetic and nonmimetic processes. To contextualize this perspective on the role of analysis, I should note that there is a way to answer these three questions in a genuine third-person (objective) manner, which would be in terms of acoustics, but this is not what most of us do. As we have seen in previous chapters, many or most of our basic categories of musical objects, properties, and processes are conceptualizations that are mutually contingent on the external stimulus (the acoustic-auditory fact) and our affective-cognitive response. By contrast, from a genuine third-person perspective we would observe not pitch height or motion but rather frequencies and changes of sonic state. When instead we speak analytically about musical motion and space in an object-oriented manner, we speak from the quasi-third-person position within the tripartite reasoning that creates such concepts. The extent of our understanding of this tripartite situation, and its role in metaphoric reasoning, arguably shapes our understanding of the relationship between explicit analysis and musical affect.19 188  Beyond Musical Space

Levels of Analysis, Levels of Affect Implicit analysis tacitly answers questions that are not asked by a conscious self, and the resulting successes and failures contribute to positive and negative feelings about the stimulus or situation under implicit analysis. The results of such analysis include implicit and explicit recognition of people, inanimate objects, processes, and so on. In musical contexts it includes the auditory system’s analysis of acoustic pressure waves, and the automatic prediction processes explored by Huron (2006). When we ask analytical questions explicitly, implicit analysis has already laid a portion of the foundation and it continues to contribute throughout an analytical endeavor.20 For example, in explicitly identifying cadences (as object and process), explicit study shapes what could be known otherwise intuitively from repeated exposure, and this explicit understanding adds a layer of knowledge along with the affective dimension of such explicit knowledge. However, explicit knowledge is not requisite for potent affective responses to music, and in fact it can be a threat to the rewards of listening with minimal explicit understanding: to expose oneself to a stimulus without concern for explicit understanding is, from a biologically oriented perspective, a kind of taboo; but the opportunity to do so without concern for negative consequences is cherished by many music lovers. If some listeners find that successful explicit analysis offers positive affective rewards, some other listeners find that explicit analysis distracts from what is in effect a reliance upon intuitive or implicit understanding. One way to understand this ambivalent situation is in terms of tripartite engagement with music. Explicit analysis shapes the balance of the three components of tripartite subjectivity to the extent that it emphasizes the quasi-third-person position. For many listeners, this involves being pulled out of a valued immersion in secondand quasi-first-person engagement, and the rewards of explicit analysis do not equal the cost. However, this cost is most salient when explicit analysis is new, and with practice the quasi-third-person component can become more fully integrated into tripartite experience: instead of being pulled out of immersion, explicit analysis can inform and even enhance the experience.21 To some extent this integration can occur without drawing explicit attention to either tripartite subjectivity or the avenues of affect under consideration in this chapter, but attention to these as normal parts of musical experience facilitate this integration. 6. Associations By associations I mean to include cultural associations, such as the association of Pachelbel’s Canon with weddings, and personal associations, such as those reflecting the our song effect (e.g., That’s the song we first danced to). In these kinds of associations the music is a trigger activating an affective state that is part of the associated experience, but in which the music was only one source of the overall affective state. In other words, the combined eight avenues of musical affect constitute one of the various sources of affect in, say, one’s wedding. The Musical Affect  189

larger context of a wedding would infuse any music with an affective dimension, by way of simply being part of the wedding, which makes this kind of association extrinsic or extra-musical. But people do not choose just any music for such occasions. People want to set a mood, and the music selected does so by all eight avenues of musical affect, even if the associated contexts (other weddings and/or nonmatrimonial contexts) happen to be the most salient. Because music is always experienced in a context, any reexperiencing will bring to bear something of the context(s) in which it was previously experienced, and the affective dimension of those prior experiences will infuse subsequent experiences of the music. Whether they involve full or marginal consciousness or no awareness at all, these associations then become associated with subsequent experiences and thereby contribute to the affective dimension of such further experience. From this perspective, a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic musical features becomes artificial. By the same token, it is easy to focus on the associated contexts and to leave implicit the other avenues of affect. Associations become part of an infinite web of meaning, but the full meaning of such associations is ultimately grounded in the interface of the acoustic-auditory fact and embodied listeners.22 We can see how this plays out in two specific kinds of associations: intertextuality, and the associated meanings of particular musical elements. Intertextuality as a Source of Affect Let me restrict musical intertextuality here to quotations and allusions between two or more musical works. When Shostakovich quotes, or alludes to, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata in the third movement of his Viola Sonata, he motivates the multitude of associations connected to the Beethoven sonata. But these associations in their original context, prior to the importation into the Shostakovich, are arguably contingent on listeners’ affective responses, so that what Shostakovich imports is the “feel” of the Beethoven. This means that in order to understand the affective consequences of this allusion, we first have to understand how the eight avenues shape one’s experience of the Beethoven, and then explore the composite, or blend, that results when the Beethoven is infused into the Shostakovich. In lieu of a full version of such an analysis, I want to give an indication of some of the variables involved. A bottom-up approach would begin with identification of the most relevant features of the Beethoven on its own—the features that create whatever feeling one finds in listening to the Beethoven. The list includes the piano timbre and the timbre of the specific register used, the fixed-pitch nature of the piano, the quiet dynamic level, the slow tempo, the meter and rhythms, the minor mode, and so on. Each of these, along with any others included for consideration, has its effect via each of the eight avenues, and the analysis involves exploring these processes to the point of satisfaction. The next step would be to do the same with the Shostakovich in connection with the analysis of the Beethoven: the similarities of timbre, dynamic level, and tempo, the effect of the modification of the original pitch organization and rhythm, and so on. This process of modification in par190  Beyond Musical Space

ticular could be compared to metaphor, in which the meaning of a term (the Beethoven) is placed in a context in which its customary meaning is made strange, and this strangeness itself becomes a source of meaning. The pertinent element of meaning here is the affective result: the feel of the Beethoven is made strange, as is the overall feel of the Shostakovich, which at the point of this allusion creates a hybrid world of works that are otherwise separated by two centuries. This strangeness resists conceptualization, where even “strange” and “hybrid” might seem to miss the mark, but we can specify the processes that produce the effect even if we cannot name the result. In attempting such an analysis, however, one immediately encounters the challenge of specifying the effects of particular musical elements. For example, the timbre of the Beethoven is crucial, but what is its effect precisely and how is it produced? I consider some of the relevant general processes next. Particular Musical Elements: Cues and Correlations I am going to focus on details related to expression and thereby make a connection to the previous discussion of the affective avenue of Expression. Let me start with the broad example of musical “sadness.” When Huron, Anderson, and Shanahan (2014) asked participants to rate how well various instruments are able to convey sadness, these researchers found a correlation involving low pitch, narrow melodic contour, dark timbre, and less distinct articulation (mumbling), and they note that these are also the features of how we commonly speak when sad: in speech, these sounds are cues to the low-energy, negative affective state of the speaker. A nonmimetic interpretation of this finding is that we hear these correlations and recognize, from a second- and/or third-person perspective, what sounds like sadness in the music. But if these features also motivate a feeling of something like sadness in listeners, then a mimetic interpretation offers a more direct explanation of this sympathetic response: in mimetically subvocalizing these sounds, we enact a vocal expression of sadness and thereby feel a portion of the state of sadness, even if we are not actually sad about anything.23 If most affective responses to music are more subtle than sadness, the sonic expression of any affective state nevertheless involves the specific details involving pitch, duration, timbre, and strength. In everyday contexts, these features are cues to genuine expressions of emotion (even if cues can be misinterpreted). In aesthetic contexts, these features can be taken as cues of a genuine expression of emotion on the part of the performer and/or on the part of the composer via the performer. In cases where performers are not actually feeling the emotion seemingly cued, a listener can be mistaken in one sense while nevertheless accurately interpreting the cues: they become cues for an emotion that was not expressed. This is common in the case of opera, musical theater, and film music, where members of the orchestra may be feeling something quite different than the sonic emotional cues they are generating. The sounds are associated with more or less specific, even if ineffable, emotional expressions, and the correlations can be strong enough to motivate the sense that it is not an association but is Musical Affect  191

in fact an expression of emotion. As we considered above, this is part of the motivation to imagine the expressing agent known as The Music. On the surface it can seem as though we simply associate the musical sounds with the sonic expression of emotion, and then by some top-down or outside-in process this association motivates a related emotional response in listeners. Beneath the surface, however, engaged listeners feel what it would be like to make the sounds and to perform congruent actions, and this mimetic component is part of the basis for both the association and any corresponding emotional response in mimetically engaged listeners. What is associated is not only the sounds, and in many cases the sights, but also the corresponding actions and the feeling of what it is like to perform these sounds and actions. Higher-level interpretive associations, whether explicitly connected to emotional responses or not, are arguably motivated and grounded in part by these low-level processes. 7. Exploring Taboos Taboo refers to a range of actions that members of a given culture categorize as forbidden or abhorrent. A broader meaning of the term includes experiences that we normally avoid for one reason or another, such as fear of bodily harm and aversion to pain. Such natural and constructed restrictions are empowering in that they promote well-being, but they are simultaneously disempowering in that they restrict certain behaviors. A by-product of such restrictions is the possibility of violating a given restriction for aesthetic purposes, and the arts offer ways of exploring various taboos in a normally safe environment. These include opportunities to enjoy being surprised or frightened, to enjoy being made sad, or the chance to explore the subjectivity of a villain. Not everyone is able to aestheticize these experiences—not everyone enjoys roller coasters, sad songs, or scary movies—but for those who can, we can understand the process in part as involving a sense of empowerment that results from “surviving” these artificially negative experiences.24 Examples of artificially or fictionally negative affect include the game of hideand-seek (aestheticized fear), and the practice of eating chili peppers (aestheticized pain): the capsaicin in chili peppers induces pain, in being processed by pain receptors in the mouth, which for many people can be “survived” and aestheticized as a welcome ingredient in foods. Much the same applies to negative emotions in music, but since these have already received a good deal of scholarly attention, here I only want to contribute a few thoughts in connection with some specific taboo sounds, and the experience of chills (frisson, shivers, gooseflesh, chicken skin, thrills). But first I must qualify this topic. Exploration of taboos is unlike the other avenues of affect in that it is entirely dependent upon a person treating certain kinds of experiences as taboo and enjoying such experiences as transgressing a taboo boundary. The sense of transgressing a boundary, however, need not be fully conscious. While the seven other avenues normally apply to every musical experience in some form or another, the exploration of taboos depends on the creation and/or acceptance of, and viola192  Beyond Musical Space

tion of, taboo boundaries. It is an avenue of affect that might not be a part of everyone’s experience, whether in general or in particular musical contexts. Taboo Pitches, Rhythms, Timbres, Strengths, and Locations No musical feature is a natural taboo, except perhaps those that cause pain and/ or hearing loss. But whenever music is treated as a taboo, the relevant musical features involve the specific features related to pitch, rhythm, timbre, strength, and location. Here I mention a few of the countless possibilities. In general, taboos have a mimetic and a nonmimetic side. Mimetically, the question of What’s it like to do/be that? applies here to ways of acting and being that one finds to be taboo. Pitch taboos, for example, can include chromatic pitches and portamenti: exploring the “taboo” spaces between diatonic pitches, as in Carmen’s “Habañera” or in scooped notes in blues singing and playing. Exploration of rhythm taboos perhaps most commonly involves moving, or allowing oneself to be moved, in ways that one might not permit oneself in everyday life. Exploration of taboo timbres can include mimetic participation with, for example, guitar feedback distortion or vocal “screaming,” but it can also include mimetic performance of gentle or “seductive” timbres. The case of guitar distortion exemplifies particularly well the half-life that taboos can have both personally and culturally: what may have originated as a taboo can become normalized and thereby lose much or even all of its sense of taboo. If the music nevertheless remains appealing, the pleasure then comes from the seven remaining avenues. Performing very loud sounds is a fairly straightforward avenue of taboo exploration, but nonmimetically, making oneself receptive to very quiet sounds can also be experienced as taboo. The combination of strength and timbre generally correlates with actual and illusory location, and one of the more potent kinds of experiences in practical life involves granting others close proximity to one’s ear. João Gilberto’s voice in the full-length version of “The Girl from Ipanema” (from the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto) sounds as though it was recorded with the microphone especially close to his mouth, and correspondingly it can sound and feel as though he is singing right in one’s ears. This apparent proximity contributes to a very intimate experience, which might be enjoyed in part as an exploration of a taboo of permitting someone else to be so close.25 Chills as a Fear Response Chills, for those who experience them, are one of the more intense and special responses experienced by music listeners. From the studies by Grewe et al. (2007), Huron (2006), Panksepp (1998), Sloboda (1991), and others we can infer that aesthetic chills are an adaptation of the freeze response, as in the repertoire of flight, fight, or freeze responses to potential and actual threats.26 The conditions under which music-related chills are most likely to occur are those involving sudden changes in one or more components of the acoustic-auditory fact, particularly in strength (e.g., subito forte and subito piano). In addition, chill-inducing sudden Musical Affect  193

changes must be rare within a given work (they must be special events) and they require immersion in the musical experience. Both of these factors depend on acculturation and familiarity with musical norms, as emphasized by Sloboda and Huron. Thanks to these researchers, we know a good deal about the musical contexts in which people are likely to experience chills, and the explanation of musical chills as an aestheticization of a fear response is apt; however, there is an aspect of fear that I believe deserves additional attention. The experience of chills in mammals is a protective response that crucially involves contraction of the skin. Contraction is a common defensive response among animals—it is at least as ancient as the behavior of the sea anemone, and it is broadly akin to the defensive behavior of the sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica) which contracts when touched. In humans, skin contraction can occur in response to cold temperatures, fever, fear, and intimate skin contact (where it is a low-level fear response that is commonly aestheticized). In effect, skin contraction is contraction of the organism as a whole, and in humans it can co-occur with withdrawal or retraction of the limbs and the head.27 The crucial feature that these different contexts have in common is that they are all responses to vulnerability, which is arguably what connects them more directly to musical experience. If vulnerability seems too blunt a term to describe musical experience, bear in mind that skin contraction in aesthetic contexts is an extension, or adaptation, of its functional role of protecting the organism; it is aestheticized vulnerability. The thing to be explained is how musical experience can ever involve a kind of vulnerability. Biologically, to seek out chances to make oneself unnecessarily vulnerable to actual harm is taboo, but humans create opportunities to make ourselves vulnerable without fear of actual harm—a pseudo-vulnerability that exploits more ancient responses that do not distinguish between practical and aesthetic contexts. This includes, for example, forms of sexual intimacy that involve intimate skin contact, mutual gaze (normally a threat among carnivores), noninjurious biting, and soft vocalizations (Dissanayake 2008, 184). One of the mechanisms of vulnerability, in both practical and aesthetic contexts, is an attitude of receptivity: a willingness to allow an external stimulus, in some cases involving an external agent (person or otherwise), to have an effect upon on one’s physical-affective-mental state. In musical contexts this involves making oneself receptive to sounds and their effects via the seven other avenues of musical affect. The general vulnerability of the ear, relative to the other external senses (chap. 7), contributes to the transformation of musical receptivity into musical vulner­ability.28 If chill-inducing moments are favorite moments, it is not simply because they produce chills; rather, chills are a symptom of having made oneself receptively vulnerable. This perspective takes the musical situation to be a specific manifestation of the principle that being moved by art involves adopting an attitude, an aesthetic attitude, in which one can be moved. This perspective also applies to aesthetic sadness, in music or any other aesthetic context, and its physiological 194  Beyond Musical Space

correlates of tears, a lump in the throat, irregular breathing, and so on.29 The chance to make oneself receptively vulnerable to one’s environment and to explore and aestheticize the normally taboo experiences of fear and sadness is one of the avenues of musical affect. 8. The Invisibility, Intangibility, and Ephemerality of Musical Sounds I broached the topic of the invisibility, intangibility, and ephemerality of musi­cal sounds in the previous chapter, and here I focus on the affective implications of these features. This avenue is akin to Acoustic Impact in involving primarily nonmimetic experience of sounds, and in being a property of the acoustic-auditory fact that impacts listeners. At the same time, because of the relationship with knowing and understanding, this avenue also overlaps with Analysis, and because this avenue involves a kind of vulnerability, it also overlaps with Taboos. Despite this overlap, these sonic features also form a particular avenue of musical affect. The central element of affect here is aestheticized fear in relation to our visually and manually biased epistemology (chap. 7): a fear of something that we cannot see or touch, and that affects us via the vulnerable ear in ways that are largely mysterious, which can manifest as a feeling of wonder, curiosity, and/or an agreeable measure of confusion. To understand this perspective we have to understand the affective dimension of the power of the eye and the hand in ordinary life, along with the element of disempowerment that comes when we confront stimuli and entities that elude the normative power of eye and the hand.30 The visible features of performance actions, the visualization of intentional musical objects, the visible representations on monitors and on paper, along with other images that might occur to one while listening to music, all shape each of the seven other avenues of musical affect. In parallel with these, however, are invisible, intangible, and ephemeral features of musical sounds, whose effects are amplified to the extent that they are not attended to in our general music epistemology.31 In this regard it is helpful to distinguish at least six contexts in which these features play out: (1a) live performances by human performers (visible performance of invisible, intangible, ephemeral sounds); (1b) audio-only recordings of human performance; (2a) live performance with previously recorded sounds (live + “tape”) and (2b) recordings of these; (2c) works composed for fixed media (music composed as recordings) that feature a mixture of human-performed sounds and electronically produced sounds (e.g., Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge and Berio’s Visage); and (3) fixed-media recordings in which human exertions are not directly evident in any of the sounds. Each of these shapes the role of this avenue of affect.32 Our Reliance upon the Eye and the Hand As we considered in comparing music and the other arts in chapter 7, most external entities of interest are visible, tangible, and semipermanent. Likewise, much Musical Affect  195

if not most mental imagery for external entities is visual imagery of things that we could grasp, regardless of whether or not motor imagery for grasping is necessarily included in the mental representation of the object.33 The ability to see, potentially touch, and form visual mental representations of tangible semipermanent things is empowering in that it contributes to real-time and planned interactions with these objects.34 The ability to hear such objects, when in fact they make a sound, is also empowering in that it can direct us toward or away from their location, even if the object is invisible (in not reflecting light, or in the perceiver’s inability to see) and intangible. But musical objects have only imaginary locations, they cannot be grasped, and normally they cannot be seen—until we make visible, concrete representations of them via the metaphoric reasoning explored in earlier chapters. Musical sounds, when not explicitly tethered to their physical sources, are like the sounds of ghosts, spirits, God. As with any source of musical affect, it is not possible to specify how receptivity to this kind of influence will play out in a given context involving a particular stimulus and a particular audience. For example, as a result of training I might automatically picture staff notation when listening to certain music, so that in these cases, in a practical sense, to some extent I no longer have access to music’s invisible features; or I might automatically conceptualize the music’s temporal relationships in terms of a visual form, and I might endorse either or both of these kinds of experience in the interest of a more sophisticated relationship with music. By the same token, I might especially prize music listening precisely because, as Scorsese put it, “you can’t see it, you can’t touch it,” which is valuable in part because of this particular form of receptive vulnerability. When Wagner hid his orchestra, when listeners at a concert close or avert their eyes, and when we listen to audio-only recordings, the potential “intrusion” of the sight of performers is attenuated (in some measure), allowing us to immerse ourselves more fully in the presence and influence of musical sounds. In many contexts this immersion involves making ourselves quiet, which I want to consider separately. Being Quiet In contexts where we remain silent while listening, we amplify the element of receptivity: we agree to adopt the role of a quiet, attentive listener, and this act of giving up a measure of power offers a particular kind of affective reward. I say particular kind, but I do not know how to conceptualize it. (My mental image of this is an invisible feeling; it is affective imagery, and its nature changes according to specific contexts.) Being quiet involves restraining oneself from acoustic expression, which in practical communicative contexts can involve the effort required to remain quiet while otherwise wanting to interject or interrupt. In listening to music, remaining quiet is a way of minimizing the chance of missing something ephemeral, which matters in inverse proportion to the amount of repetition in the music, and which matters especially when the music is relatively quiet and the chance of missing something is thus greater. In the case of musical silences the ex196  Beyond Musical Space

perience can become infused with expectancy, but the feeling of not wanting to disturb the silence can be equally or more integral. The end of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture. Pärt’s setting of “Et inclinato capite tradidit spiritum” in his Passio. Music and Ephemerality The temporality of music creates the possibility of favorite moments that are imbued with a kind of poignancy, in knowing before and during an experience that each such moment will be fleeting. This can then motivate a desire for repeated listenings and one’s own performances, with repeated rewards.35 At another level are favorite works, so that the “moment” might be an entire opera or symphony, and here music’s temporality stretches one’s ability to conceive of the whole. Schenkerian analysis is one response to this situation: it can satisfy a desire to understand how the series of events in a work cohere, and it can offer an understanding of multiple levels of coherence. The satisfaction that comes from such analysis is shaped by the combined ephemerality, invisibility, and intangibility of the thing that motivates the analysis: while any process has a temporal dimension, the sonic elements of music can create a particular challenge for understanding musical coherence. A permanent, visible representation responds to this challenge. Any conceptualization of music, however, objectifies the experience. Reification or nominalization of experience is integral to conceptualization of actions, and the pertinent issue is one’s understanding of the relationship between the object—whether a single sound or an entire work—and one’s experience of that object in relation to affect. To the extent that the ephemeral is objectified and represented visually, we shape the power relationship: we move from a receptive second-person position, being affected by an invisible and intangible stimulus, to a supervisorial quasi-third-person position, overseeing the events that affect us in our receptive position. The balance that any particular analyst prefers is the one in which one finds the most satisfaction. For some, whether professional or amateur (including those who would not call themselves analysts), the reification results in a concept of musical works as eternal entities that transcend not only any and all performances but also temporal limitations generally. The conceptualization of timelessness can be understood as a response to the ephemerality of existence, which in turn can be traced back to the practical value of permanence, whether in tangible objects and stone tools or in concepts.36

Concluding Remarks This fleeting exploration of these various avenues of musical affect is meant in part to embrace the complexity and ineffability of musical experience. The analyses in the next chapter demonstrate ways of applying this framework, but here I want to point to a few general issues. This framework is not meant to identify what one should feel in response to music. In attending to music one will feel something, and each of the eight avenues Musical Affect  197

I can’t tell if you want “non-mimetic” deleted or not

Table 8.1. Mimetic and Nonmimetic Aspects of the 8 Avenues of Musical Affect Nonmimetic (Objective) Aspects

Mimetic (Subjective) Aspects

1. Mimetic Participation attenuated 1. Mimetic Participation • the feeling of attenuated mimetic • the feeling of vicarious exertions and participation or otherwise effort; joining in, overtly or covertly nonmimetic engagement 2. Anticipation of what will happen 2. Anticipation of what we will objectively vicariously do • desire (and dread) as negative • all nonmimetic (objective) features – but can be aesthetically positive of anticipation are amplified as what • successful prediction as positive listeners will vicariously do – but possibly disappointing 3. Expression as heard 3. Expression as vicariously performed • the sound of various emotional states • the feeling of expressing oneself 4. Acoustic Impact as received • how sounds come at us and affect us

4. Acoustic Impact (as vicariously performed) • (vicarious impact upon others)

5. Analysis 5. Analysis • reward for success • always includes analysis of what we – but possible boredom vicariously do; the mere exposure effect • price of confusion and success/failure go hand-in-hand – but aesthetic pleasure of survival with mimetic engagement 6. Associations 6. Associations • objective cultural and personal • associations are always grounded in, associations and in many cases begin with, mimetic engagement 7. Exploring Taboos 7. Exploring Taboos • enjoying taboo sounds • enjoying taboo embodiments that result • enjoying allowing oneself to be from mimetic participation (doing/being invaded by musical “spirit” something taboo) 8. Music’s Invisibility and Intangibility 8. Music’s Invisibility and Intangibility • experiencing the disempowerment • (the feeling of being an invisible and of the eye and the hand and the intangible entity, moving as music resulting vulnerability “moves”)

will be relevant to varying extents. Likewise, this framework does not assume that any work necessarily bears an “emotional content,” although it could be used to explain the reasoning that produces such a view of things. None of the eight avenues is more relevant, a priori, than any of the others, but for any given context neither are they all equally significant. This is in addition to the fact that the eight overlap in various ways. The only practical caveat in this regard is that a given avenue might be more or less significant than it seems at first, and this can be determined only by exploring the potential relevance of each. 198  Beyond Musical Space

The visual elements of musical experience are integrated in the mimetic hypothesis, and I have included them incidentally throughout this chapter, but they could rightly be distinguished as a ninth avenue of musical affect. Another candidate is the set of concepts and habits of conceptualization that we bring to an experience, but these are perhaps better understood as products of implicit and explicit Analysis and/or as operating via Association. A continuously changing affective state is a normal part of human existence. If we have extended the practical function of affect to aesthetic contexts, this practice nevertheless involves an aestheticization of processes that otherwise still serve their ancient purposes. Among the most important things for Homo sapiens are our ways of responding to external stimuli, which includes asking and answering the basic analytical questions of What is that? What’s going to happen next? and What’s it like to do that? The state of asking these questions has an affective dimension, as do the processes whereby we answer them, and in its rough way the eight-part framework is an attempt to capture how these play out in musical experience.

Musical Affect  199

9 Applications All know that the drop merges into the ocean but few know that the ocean merges into the drop. Kabir

In this chapter I offer three demonstrations of how the ideas in the preceding chapters, particularly chapter 8, might be applied. For this purpose I have chosen the opening of the fourth of Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet (1909) to represent posttonal music performed directly by human exertions, Stockhausen’s electronic work Studie II (1954) to represent postcorporeal music, and the topic of dissonance treatment in Western tonal music. I have chosen the Webern and the Stockhausen because the role of affect might seem less obviously relevant here than in some other kinds of music, and because the approach described in this chapter offers what I think can be helpful ways of understanding how this music “works.” The third discussion, of dissonance treatment in tonal music, concerns music that is more commonly thought of in connection with music and emotion, explored here in connection with the role of mimetic participation.

The Analytical Framework and Some Modes of Application Each of the eight avenues described in chapter 8 is relevant in one way or another to any given musical experience. Because these avenues are between the external stimulus and a listener, the manner of their relevance depends on the musical stimulus, the listener, and the particular context otherwise, and in each case the stimulus will involve each of the five components of the acoustic-auditory fact: pitch, duration, timbre, strength, and location. This implies that, apart from context, there are forty general factors in the creation of musical affect: the five components of the acoustic-auditory fact and the eight avenues of musical affect. While a given affective response cannot be reduced to a listing of factors, individually and as a whole they are nevertheless integral. The question then is how this 5 × 8 framework might be applied.

One way is to explore particular events within a given work, which is what I do in the analysis of what I take to be the opening event in the Webern. Another way is to explore particular features within and across a complete work, as I demonstrate in the case of the Stockhausen. A third way of applying the framework involves analyzing recurring types of events, such as dissonant types, topics (as in topic theory), forms, and genres, as I do in the third demonstration. Each of these three approaches can also be combined with a more traditional structural analysis of an entire work or movement. There is also a fourth kind of application in which one explores the relationship between an explicit narrative and the musical sounds, as in music with lyrics and in film music. I broach this in the third demonstration, but I leave a proper exploration for another occasion. There are some basic questions, however, that this approach is not meant to address directly, such as the question of “the emotional content” or “the meaning” of a musical work. To paraphrase Kofi Agawu (1995), I am more interested in the processes, in how music makes me feel whatever it makes me feel, than I am in naming the product, or what the music makes me feel. At another level, an understanding of these processes can then help explain the inclination to think of music as containing or expressing emotions and meaning. Starting Points: Two Directions of Inference In applying this framework one can start with the acoustic-auditory fact and infer likely responses, or one can start with a particular response (provided by one or more listeners) and infer likely sources (motivations) of this response. The first kind of inference encounters the difficulty of accommodating the range of possible affective responses, even given cultural habits of response. The second kind of inference can start from either a culturally shared response or a more personal and idiosyncratic response, which gives it the advantage of accommodating any particular response or kind of response. My own preference is for the second approach, but in the present context it seems best to take the first approach. A different kind of starting point concerns the role of music notation. To a great extent the approach demonstrated here does not require a score, which is beneficial when a score or transcription is either nonexistent or otherwise unavailable. It is also particularly beneficial for those who do not happen to be fluent in reading music notation and yet are interested in exploring musical affect. By the same token, for those fluent in music notation, the score of course offers an additional means of specification.

Beyond Tonal Norms: Webern and Stockhausen In principle 12 of the mimetic hypothesis I suggested that different kinds of music invite different kinds of mimetic engagement, and I suggested that the majority of Western music offers us a straightforwardly singable melody and/or danceable pattern of events. The appeal of these generic features, whether in the most Applications  201

sublime utterance or the most inane offering, centrally involves the rewards of relatively easy mimetic participation. In the twentieth century, however, there emerged a greater proportion of musical works in which the features of singability and danceability are relatively attenuated, as in the Webern and Stockhausen examples below. This attenuation has shaped and continues to shape attractive and aversive responses to such music, and understanding how this music works arguably includes understanding the processes that generate these and other kinds of responses. I am particularly interested in offering listeners, especially students, ways of understanding aversive responses to such music, along with ways of appreciating the kinds of experiences afforded by this music, and this pair of interests is reflected in the demonstrations below. In the bigger picture we can identify two large categories of the kind of posttonal music in which the Webern and Stockhausen take part: that in which the sounds are nevertheless produced more or less directly by human exertions, and that in which the sounds are not produced directly by human exertions. These categories exist along a continuum, but we can say that the Webern (op. 5, no. 4) and Stockhausen (Studie II) represent opposite ends. Within each category, however, the music can feature more and/or less humanlike sounds. For example, Ligeti’s Atmosphères is performed by relatively ordinary human exertions, but the composite sound belies this ordinariness; although imitable, it is near the far end of the continuum of imitable sounds (principle 13 of the mimetic hypothesis). The Stockhausen is similar to the Ligeti in this regard, whereas other electronic works, such as Davidovsky’s Electronic Study no. 1 (see McCreless 2006), Subotnik’s Silver Apples of the Moon, and Varèse’s Poème Electronique, include sounds that more closely resemble ordinary human actions. The location of works along these continua is unimportant for the present point; what matters is the kind of mimetic invitation offered and how one feels about what one is invited to do. This mimetic aspect then runs in parallel with the nonmimetic contributors to musical affect.

Webern, Op. 5, No. 4 (1909) I recall being fascinated by this and the other pieces in Webern’s op. 5, along with the op. 9 Bagatelles, the first time I heard them in a music history class. I also recall that my eventual analysis of the pitch organization and form, as explanatory and rewarding as I found it to be, did not satiate my curiosity about how this music works. The following observations demonstrate some ways of further pursuing this desire. Just as importantly, these observations can also help explain how this music works for those who, in their initial exposure, do not happen to find this music fascinating. If one begins with a structural analysis of the pitch organization and form, this in itself can have affective consequences via the avenue of Explicit Analysis, which in turn can open some of the other avenues: analysis increases successful anticipation, and it can increase intertextual associations, and mere exposure can 202  Beyond Musical Space

Table 9.1. The 5 and the 8 The 5 Components The 8 Avenues 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Pitch: intervals, chords, scales, keys, definiteness of pitch Duration: rhythm, meter, tempo, form Timbre: both distinct from and combined with the other components Strength: how loud a sound is or seems to be Location: apparent and actual locations of sound sources

foster stronger mimetic engagement. From one perspective, then, explicit attention to the five components and the eight avenues simply amplifies the rewards available via structural analysis. The grid in table 9.1 represents the palette of factors in the 5 × 8 framework. To be honest, I find this grid to be incongruous with my affective response to the Webern or to any other music. It suggests boundaries that are normally blurred in musical experience, and it can be taken to suggest the idea that affective responses can be reduced to a catalog of factors. This particular presentation might also seem to suggest an equivalence among the factors that is not reflected in actual experience. However, it is useful as a rough way of visualizing the many variables that shape musical experience; it is simply a tool for organizing interpretation.1 While table 9.1 offers a generic picture of the factors that contribute to the complexity of musical affect, any attempt to fill it in will be shaped by the subjectivity of the person making the attempt, even if one’s response overlaps with that of other listeners/analysts. In addition, the possible content of a given cell in the grid may be nearly or entirely ineffable. The fuller picture of the complexity of the situation includes two factors that are not directly represented in the table: the dynamics of continuity and discontinuity (change and no-change) that apply to each of the five components, and the number of subcategories subsumed by Pitch and Duration, which increase the number of variables beyond forty. With this complexity in mind, it is useful to focus on a subset of the five and the eight when first trying out the framework. Even after acquiring familiarity with all of the variables, it remains impractical to include all forty variables in a given analysis of a complete work. For the purpose of this demonstration I focus on the three-chord opening, shown in example 9.1, and on the subset of factors that I find to be most relevant to my experience. Applications  203

Sehr langsam ( e = ca 58)

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Violoncello

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Example 9.1. Webern, Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5, no. 4, mm. 1–2.

Among the most salient features of this opening is the timbre that results from the pianississimo dynamic level, bowing at the bridge (am Steg), use of mutes (Dämpfer), the register (relative pitch height), and the tremolo action itself. In addition to the timbral component is the pattern of durations: for mm. 1–2 as a whole, also salient is the ambiguous meter and rhythm, which remain somewhat ambiguous even when one knows that it begins on beat 2 in triple meter. As for the pitch component, prior to explicit analysis all that the majority of listeners are likely to know is that the sonority is “not normal”—that is, it is unlike the tertian chords with which most Western listeners are most familiar—even if this sonority, (0156), is of course perfectly normal within Webern’s practice. But even after we discover the intervallic structure of the chord, the particular instrumentation in this context makes the identity of the chord much more vague than if it were presented without the tremolo, mutes, and so forth. The overall structure of the violins’ sonorities in mm. 1–2 is analogous to a tonic expansion: instead of I–V–I, it is (0156)–(0167)–(0156), connected by efficient voice leading, and with the whole event articulated by the concluding pizzicato. The “nonchord tones” in the viola and cello can be understood as a foil that highlights the special quality of the tremolos by way of their different register and timbre, and temporally by drawing one’s attention to and fro between the pairs of voices. Now note that in making these observations I have already begun a broader interpretation, in referring to ambiguity, vagueness, and efficiency, and in speaking of my attention being drawn to and fro. These descriptions reflect conceptualizations not simply of the sounds but of an affect-infused experience of the sounds. For example, to describe something as vague reflects having given one’s attention to it and found it to be vague, which implies either a failure 204  Beyond Musical Space

of analysis (in the larger sense described in the previous chapter), or otherwise a limitation upon analysis, and which in turn matters according to the nature of one’s interest in understanding the thing in question. In practical (nonaesthetic) contexts this can produce frustration and/or fear which, as suggested in the previous chapter, can be aestheticized: one can enjoy vagueness, whether as a challenge or as an agreeably cloudy element of experience. By the same token, one might dislike such a challenge or such cloudiness; but whether the experience is found to be agreeable or disagreeable, this is an affective-cognitive response. In following the first direction of inference, any such description can be the affective-cognitive response to be explored. For this purpose, let me use strange; given the nonnormative and otherwise special features of the sounds in question, it is appropriate enough for this purpose. The two pertinent questions then concern why anyone might find this music strange, as opposed to simply nonnormative, and what it’s like to experience this strangeness. One answer to the first question is relatively straightforward: the more or less objective features of the five components must be found to be outside the norm of one’s experience— which is likely enough for those who have not listened to much posttonal music. However, with the exception of the particular pitches and perhaps the bowing at the bridge, the strangeness cannot come from the features in kind, because twonote tremolos, pianississimo playing, the use of mutes, and the use of this register are all relatively common in music for strings.2 Instead, it is the particular combination of these at a given moment and in the dynamics of their temporal organization. Answers to the first question in this case are thus mostly a matter of identification of facts in connection with one’s broader experience. Answers to the second question, of what the strangeness is like, involve exploring how these facts matter in connection with one’s affective response, and the 5 × 8 framework offers a means of doing so. In this case, a description like strange is a heuristic: it may be too blunt to capture anyone’s response, but it guides interpretive analysis. How far one takes such analysis depends on curiosity and purpose. In my remaining remarks on the Webern I attend to what I find to be the most significant avenues of affect in my own experience, followed by some thoughts on the use of counterfactual reasoning and on some of the implications for performance interpretation. Mimetic Participation and Expression The kinds of mimetic vocalizations and other exertions invited by this music are nonnormative (that is, relatively idiosyncratic). This is so at the level of the particular sounds and in the relative discontinuity of the invited mimetic vocalizations and movements. The attenuated normative singability and danceability might be taken to motivate a “disembodied” form of listening, insofar as mimetic participation is found to be attenuated; however, this music is of course highly gestural, in the straightforward sense that it is performed by more or less ordinary gestures at any given moment: each action is relatively familiar, even Applications  205

if the discontinuity in the sequence of these actions is not. Since this music is also still singable, I want to say instead that it invites a less familiar form of vocal mimetic participation—one that is more gestural and more subtle than that of music with a straightforward tune and beat. How one feels about this invitation is another matter, but it is important to bear in mind that, according to the mimetic hypothesis and the related theories identified in chapters 1 and 2, one result of repeated exposure to the music, combined or not with explicit analysis, is that one finds a way of mimetically participating, even if this is only in imagery and whether or not one is conscious of this element of engagement. From this perspective, part of what occurs in repeated exposure is that one, or a part of oneself, implicitly seeks ways to mimetically comprehend the performance: representations of the sounds+actions in the form of mimetic motor imagery normally will occur automatically, with or without intention, awareness, or overt imitation. Deliberate attempts to mimetically engage can facilitate the process, which in effect is part of what instructors do whenever we have students sing and/or play tonal examples, and the same benefit applies to the Webern. Deliberate mimetic comprehension is a way of enriching the connection between the details of structural analysis and the lived experience of the music. This includes the feeling of vicariously making the sounds of this music and thereby expressing oneself in this manner. In the sense of performing gestures and making sounds, the feeling of expression in this case is in principle the same as with expression in tonal music; only the particular form of expression differs. The same applies to nonmimetic comprehension of the music as an expression, whether conceived as that of the composer, the performers, and/or some musical persona. The quasi-first-person feeling of expressing oneself in this way and the second- and quasi-third-person feeling of being in the presence of such an expression are sources of affect, whether agreeable or otherwise. Similarly, if one finds that the experience of this music does not involve expression, this is also a source of agreeable, disagreeable, or indifferent affect. For myself, I enjoy the experience of listening to these sounds, and of making these sounds vocally and performing congruent exertions (in imagery and overtly), but I do not recall ever thinking of the experience in terms of expression. I do not think of the music as nonexpressive, but in general the notion of musical expression leads me to ask what is being expressed, and I do not happen to have much interest in categorizing my experience in this way. For those who do have such an interest, however, mimetic participation is part of how the expression is experienced and comprehended, and it is thus part of how a given expression becomes meaningful. The Fleeting and the Quiet Three features of this work that warrant special attention are its overall duration (roughly one and a half minutes), the relative discontinuity of its series of events, and its overall quiet dynamic level. Brevity in general has the potential to heighten attention and to thereby make each moment somewhat more fraught, 206  Beyond Musical Space

or at least special. The discontinuity heightens attention throughout, in that each novel stimulus attracts attention; the music as a whole is a concatenation of brief, distinct events. The attention-related effect of this nested brevity is then amplified by the overall quiet dynamic level of the music. Consider one’s nonmimetic relationship with sounds that are either (1) at a comfortable volume, (2) uncomfortably loud, or (3) very quiet. Sounds at comfor­ table volumes come to us and require no particular effort on our part to simply hear them. Loud sounds “come at us” and in some cases “push us away”; they require no effort on our part to hear them, but they can motivate protective or otherwise aversive responses. But very quiet sounds, when we are interested in them, force us to be quiet, to be still, and to attend with care. Because of this, and because one’s experience of them is particularly susceptible to interruption, attention to very quiet sounds creates a state of heightened arousal. At the same time, this quietness has another effect. The acoustic impact here is more of a nonimpact, making listeners come to the sounds. This unusual effort (effort is too strong a word) is, I find, integral to devoted engagement with this music, as it is in attending to significant portions of, say, Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, or listening to quiet musical moments and silences generally. Of course, some listeners might be frustrated by the effort in such cases (here, I think effort is not too strong a word). The quietness makes a demand, and engaged listeners will feel something about this demand. Counterfactual Reasoning It can be challenging to determine just how particular features matter, and for this purpose counterfactuals can be especially helpful. For example, how does it matter that this particular transposition-level of (0156) is voiced as it is, in this register, played pianissimo, tremolando, and sul ponticello (am Steg), and that the music begins on beat 2 in triple meter? Imagining, listening to, and/or performing counterfactuals can help in pursuing such questions. If a live demonstration on string instruments is not possible, students can sing the chord progression (with as much help from the piano as needed) while altering each of the features in turn or in combination (including the pitches and intervals that constitute the chords). Although such activities by themselves may not guarantee increased preference for this music, they do change one’s relationship with it: one comes to understand how its details matter, even if one’s preferences continue to lie elsewhere. Performing the Webern and Other Music Every detail of sound production shapes listeners’ experiences via the eight avenues of musical affect. It is not necessary that performers be aware of this in the particular terms of this framework, and even in being aware of this it is not necessary that it be made a priority in interpretive decisions, but it is available as a Applications  207

consideration in making such decisions. For example, the choice of how close to the bridge to bow in a sul ponticello will not only shape the timbre, but in turn will shape the mimetic invitation, the sense of expression, the acoustic impact, associations, and perhaps the sense of taboo. Preferences for the Arditti, Emerson, or other recordings of the Webern reflect affective-cognitive responses to the sounds that the performers decided to realize in a particular way. To focus on the kinds of sounds one wants to make is to adopt a second-person and quasithird-person perspective in relation to one’s own performance, which in effect is to imagine being one’s own audience. To reflect on one’s own response and on the likely response of others is to adopt a tripartite perspective in which one experiences the five components via the eight avenues as a listener to one’s own performance (actual or imagined).

Stockhausen, Studie II (1954) As with the Webern, I recall being fascinated by Stockhausen’s electronic work Studie II the first time I heard it, and the same desire to more fully understand the sounds and my relationship with them is part of what motivated the development of what eventually became the analytical framework under consideration here. Much of the following analysis focuses on how this music differs from earlier tonal and posttonal music in terms of its sonic details and how these details shape experience. The sounds in Stockhausen’s Studie II are synthesized from sine waves: each sound is comprised of five partials, and each partial is a sine wave. The resulting timbres are audibly distinct from those produced more directly by human vocal and instrumental exertions, and this one component of the acoustic-auditory fact affects each of the eight avenues. A score of this work is available, as are analytical remarks from various sources, including those by the composer, all of which facilitate explicit analysis of the music from an object-oriented position. Contributing to the motivation to approach this music objectively is its relatively attenuated lyrical and terpsichorean qualities; and in light of the absence of bodies in the production of the sounds, and the attenuated mimetic invitation in the organization of the sounds, we might refer to this as an example of postcorporeal music—except that our access to the sounds, as with musical sounds generally, is nevertheless through the flesh, and this electromechanical-corporeal relationship is itself part of how the music works. The score and knowledge of the precise compositional techniques may be essential to a thorough understanding of the acoustic-auditory fact, but as with all music we can go a long way toward understanding how this music works without reference to these resources. In what follows, I attempt to demonstrate what can be observed by ear in connection with the 5 × 8 framework. (Several versions of the Stockhausen are currently available on YouTube.) I consider the role of each of the eight avenues in turn, restricting the scope, with one exception, to one paragraph per avenue. This demonstration is thus not a complete consideration 208  Beyond Musical Space

of the role of any of the avenues, and, a fortiori, it is not offered as a comprehensive analysis of the work. I will also note that the processes as a whole play out more subtly here than they do in a good deal of other music. Mimetic Participation. Imagine that you find no mimetic invitation in this music and/or that you believe that a mimetic response to this music is inappropriate. And imagine further that there is in fact no measurable activation of MMI when you listen to or recall this music. The avenue of mimetic participation nevertheless would still play a role by way of its absence, in terms of what it is like to give one’s attention to sounds, sounds that are organized and presented for the purpose of aesthetic experience, without comprehending them mimetically. For most of us this would be an unusual experience—a special experience, which for some might have particular appeal, in the opportunity to listen to sounds without feeling moved to sing or dance along. In such a case, nonmimetic listening would be positively valenced, regardless of one’s awareness of this as a factor. However, the evidence for the mimetic hypothesis gives reason to doubt that one can attend to this music without activation of MMI, especially if one is familiar with this work and/or its kin. The hypothesis embraces the fact that we can be unaware of MMI, and that, phenomenologically, it can seem as if we are listening without mimetically participating. But to the extent that MMI is nevertheless activated, we are responding to an invitation to go beyond ordinary mimetic participation and to enact a subjectivity unlike that available in most other musical experience. Dislike for this invitation can then motivate dislike for the music, while enjoyment of this invitation, and/or of a sense that the music does not invite normative singing and dancing, can motivate a liking for the music. Anticipation. The discontinuous and otherwise idiosyncratic temporal organization of events in this music attenuates anticipation and the affective rewards that come with successful anticipation.3 If we imagine a complete inability to predict any aspect of the music, then we would have nothing but failure in this regard. This failure would then motivate an aversive response in some listeners, but also an attractive response among those who are able to aestheticize such failure. But there is in fact a great deal of continuity in this work: the timbre overall is at least as continuous as that of a typical string quartet and more so than much instrumental ensemble music. Rhythmically, the brevity of sounds, articulated by silences, soon becomes quite predictable: one comes to know that there will be a fleeting silence more or less every couple of seconds. At another level, even the discontinuities of strength and location become predictable: there will be more or less constant change, articulated by moments of silence. These silences offer an opportunity to reflect and/or to try to predict what might happen next. Expression. Nonmimetically, listening to this music can feel like listening to the acoustic expression of an inanimate and inorganic entity, or of a human expression via inorganic instruments, either of which can motivate an aversive or an attractive response. I imagine that many listeners would not feel this to be an expression of any kind of entity.4 For some, an attenuated sense of expression might be especially valued, while for others this feature would have its effect by Applications  209

way of its felt absence and a corresponding feeling of disappointment, frustration, or disinterest. Mimetically, the feeling of what it would be like to express oneself in this manner likewise can be either positively or negatively valued. Acoustic Impact. The acoustic impact of this music is distinguished mostly by the components of timbre and strength. The reduced number of partials, relative to more ordinary musical sounds, means that at any given moment less of the cochlea is involved in transforming the pressure waves into auditory information. I suspect that this marks the sounds not only as different from organic sounds but perhaps also as seemingly missing something, not only in its sound but also in its acoustic impact. This is more plainly noticeable in the lower frequency sounds, where the effect of the greater number of upper partials in organic sounds would be more salient. The experience involves the feeling of being impacted by something artificial (in a nonpejorative sense), which broaches the topic of taboo (below). In terms of strength, the rapid, instantaneous, great, and continuously irregular pattern of change, including the zero strength of the silences, means that the acoustic impact is continuously changing and thereby demanding attention: the impact is continuously interrupted and then renewed, but in an irregular pattern, so that the acoustic impact becomes particularly salient. Note that, while this involves durations and rhythm, the effect is not subsumed under rhythm, for the same rhythms with different timbres and different strengths (including attack and decay), would create a different feeling. Even different electroacoustic realizations of the score can feel quite different. The effect of a multitude of salient acoustic impacts in the Stockhausen is akin, from a broad perspective, to the impacts of the repeated notes in Schubert’s setting of Die Erlkönig. Each impact demands attention, to some extent or another, and the feeling of each impact is shaped by all five components of the acoustic-auditory fact. Implicit and Explicit Analysis. The great degree of discontinuity in this music presents a challenge for both implicit and explicit analysis. As with the materials and procedures of other music, a given listener’s familiarity with electroacoustic music in general will also shape the effects of this avenue. Paradoxically, the great degree of continuity, noted above, affords a sense of easy comprehension: the complexities are all of a kind, to some extent, and the whole can be understood loosely as variations on a theme. In terms of explicit analysis, the score and the composer’s remarks facilitate a precise and thorough understanding of the details of the acoustic-auditory fact. Combined with the effect of exposure upon implicit analysis, this music affords a sense of satisfaction and empowerment via comprehension of its various features and processes. But for those listening to this music for the first time, especially if this happens to be the first example of classical electronic music that one has ever heard, this music also is likely to motivate a feeling of bewilderment. While this feeling can be aestheticized into something like fascination, for some listeners it may remain a disagreeable sense of confusion. For this latter group explicit analysis can help, but for some, implicit analysis via repeated listenings to this and other electronic music is likely to have a greater effect, whether combined with explicit analysis or not. But even if 210  Beyond Musical Space

one never comes to enjoy such music, and even if one has no interest in even attempting to come to enjoy such music, there is a value in understanding the bases for not liking the experience afforded by the Stockhausen. I return to this issue in the next chapter. Associations. The role of associations can be divided into two large factors: personal experience with classical electronic music, and access to cultural associations. It is up to each individual to explore the role of personal associations, and much the same applies to cultural associations, for however rich the cultural associations with elektronische Musik may be, they shape one’s affective response to the extent that one is acquainted with them and according to how one feels about these associations. Low-level associations and correlations, however, such as the sounds signifying inorganic sources, require somewhat less specialized knowledge, and in the case of the Stockhausen they can be theorized under Exploring Taboos. Exploring Taboos. Any sense of taboo in listening to this music is most likely to involve a combination of the timbres and the discontinuity of duration, strength, and apparent location. Although these shape each of the eight avenues of affect, we can capture most of the effect in terms of “taboo” forms of expression. In cases of more singable and danceable music, nonmimetically it can be like being in the presence of an entity that makes sounds and that “moves” in ways that are like our own, whereas the Stockhausen, roughly as did the midcentury sci-fi films that employed the sound of the Theremin, presents us with alien sounds and apparent movements. These kinds of sounds may be more familiar today, but they remain specialized and, I imagine, unlike the sounds that most of us make or hear in both practical and aesthetic contexts, specifically in their timbre. The relative discontinuity in the patterns of the sounds—the rhythm and the contour—likewise are patterns of change and of metaphoric movement that are unlike daily first- and second-person experience of sound production and human movement.5 Prior to and otherwise apart from their cinematic associations, these sounds imply an entity capable of making such sounds that (or who) is both unfamiliar and unlike us in the specific sense of producing electronic timbres. With or without the cinematic associations, the taboo element involves nonmimetic and mimetic engagement with these sounds and their implicit source. In the world of organic sounds that are deliberately composed by humans for singing together, playing together, or listening to, most of the sounds are products of familiar human actions. This correlation, even if recognized only implicitly, is integral to how we comprehend and engage with these sounds. To attend to such organic sounds and allow them to affect us is to incorporate organic energy into ourselves, and it is generally a safe and rewarding way of taking part in the construction of human culture (concerns over the psychological effects of some music notwithstanding). When direct human actions are subtracted, as in the Stockhausen, the organic correlation is weakened or removed entirely. To allow such music to enter and affect us is to take a step, however modest, beyond ordinary human subjectivity and in the direction of the subjectivity of cybernetic organisms.6 Applications  211

This act of exploring an extra-human subjectivity is made visceral via MMI, and this raises the stakes for both attractive and aversive responses to such an exploration. For most listeners the effect is more subtle than my description may make it seem, but we might compare the reaction that many fans had when Bob Dylan began performing on electric guitar. While the aversive responses had a number of sources, at the center was the integration of the electric guitar into the music’s sound, which put listeners in a position of having to decide whether to consent to allow this sound to penetrate and affect them nonmimetically, and to mimetically take part in a performance that integrates electronic sounds. If one enjoys listening to the Stockhausen, theoretically one source of this enjoyment is the feeling of making such sounds (as far as MMI allows). In my own experience, the sense of exploring a taboo in listening to the Stockhausen today now seems to be negligible; I simply enjoy the tripartite subjectivity that this music affords. But in my initial exposure to electroacoustic music, the experience of making myself receptive to these sounds (second-person) and then of vicariously performing these sounds (quasi-first-person) may very well have involved a sense of exploring a taboo, even if that sense was masked by a sense of fascination. It may be that the residue of “surviving” such experiences motivates an enduring preference, informed by a pinch of nostalgia, for any such music. By contrast, a sense of taboo may be more salient in the case of aversive responses to such music. Manifesting simply as not liking, the basis for this affective-cognitive response plausibly includes a disinclination or an inability to engage with music that lies beyond the bounds of the subjectivities that one wants to experience—in effect, something of a genuine taboo that one may have little or no control over. If I identify as someone who does not care for, or who actively dislikes, this or any other kind of music, then engaging with such music becomes a genuine kind of taboo, and my affective response of aversion is important not only to how I conceptualize the music but to how I define myself. Invisibility, Intangibility, and Ephemerality. The Stockhausen amplifies the significance of this three-part avenue. In listening to music performed directly by human exertions, the visibility of the performers normally informs the experience even when we are not watching a live or recorded performance. This involves mimetic and nonmimetic knowledge of the performers’ actions (to some degree of specificity), with the pertinent result that, even though the sounds remain invisible and intangible, they correspond to visible and corporeal actions. With the Stockhausen, there are no performers and the sounds do not correspond directly to corporeal actions. This dissociation between sound and source can be especially enjoyable for some listeners, and disconcerting and unenjoyable for other listeners. This is a kind of taboo, in that we normally rely upon recognition of sound sources, but this experience is also valued, positively or negatively, in its own right, in the opportunity to listen to music with the visible medium of human actions attenuated: not only are the timbres and apparent movement unusual, they are unusual in that the actions that produce them are invisible. 212  Beyond Musical Space

Summary. As with all music, the eight avenues are not all equally relevant here, neither generally nor for a given listener, but all of them are relevant in some measure or another. I chose the Stockhausen because I imagine that some people would assume that affective responses to this music are either unimaginable, superfluous, or an inappropriate imposition upon the music. Such assumptions might be sensible if we were considering a traditional sense of emotional responses to music, or if we were embracing the notion of the emotional content of musical works. But the perspective we have been exploring begins instead with the principle that, in normal human function, there is no nonaffective state and that, therefore, there is no nonaffective response to music. For those who find that they feel nothing in response to this music, neither positive nor negative, this apparent null response is nevertheless an affective response, just as zero is a value, and we can use the 5 × 8 framework to account for such a response just as we can in the cases of attractive and aversive responses.

Dissonance in Western Tonal Music Like many people, I find that some of my favorite musical moments involve melodically salient dissonances, such as the conclusion of the Andante con moto of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto or the conclusion of Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung. The question here is what the 5 × 8 framework has to offer in exploring how such moments work. In the case of any particular musical moment one could take an approach very much like that in the Webern analysis above, but in order to make generalized observations about dissonances I will need to omit timbre and strength from the present discussion, which in turn limits the relevance of some of the eight avenues (particularly Expression and Acoustic Impact). Accordingly, I am going to focus primarily on tripartite subjectivity (chap. 6), which in turn means focusing primarily on Mimetic Participation, the mimetic dimension of Anticipation, and Analysis. Even more specifically I am also going to focus on the metrically accented dissonances of suspensions and appoggiaturas because of their particular salience. I think it would be fair to characterize traditional understandings of dissonances as involving the nonmimetic dimension of anticipation (or expectation) and a culturally specific aestheticization of acoustic-auditory dissonance (the classification of harmonic intervals as consonant and dissonant), the combination of which produce the more or less objective phenomena of musical tension and resolution, or instability and stability. A tripartite perspective simply puts these factors in a different context. In the 7–6 suspension in example 9.2, the pattern of consonance-dissonanceconsonance is manifest in the harmonic intervals 6–7–6, where the E in the upper voice is sustained, or suspended, over the F in the lower voice, creating the dissonant 7th. But in musical contexts, engaged acculturated listeners arguably do not simply anticipate the resolution, we desire it, as in the cadences in the recitative of “Dido’s Lament” (example 9.3, below). In my own experience of suspensions like Applications  213

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those in example 9.2, I have conflicting desires: I want the resolution, but I also don’t want the instability to end. If such moments of dissonance create a feeling of instability or tension, the questions here concern precisely where such instability is located and how it is created. Instability related to dissonance is dually contingent on properties of the acoustic-auditory stimulus and one’s response to it. Instability and stability refer to an affective-cognitive response to harmonic intervals—to a feeling that can occur when listening to harmonic intervals—which we might then attribute, or misattribute, to the external stimulus. The basic implicit reasoning is that one feels a measure of instability as a result of what is heard, which is taken to imply that the instability must be a property of the external stimulus. However, the more proximate causes of this feeling of instability include (1) the relative difficulty of processing dissonant intervals and (2) the expectation of and desire for what will happen next (nonmimetic) and what one will mimetically do next. The neurological processing of dissonant intervals (see for example Tramo et al. 2003) is a matter of implicit analysis, in which the relative difficulty in processing such intervals contributes what is strictly speaking a small but relevant measure of negative affect, analogous to what can occur in processing the opening chords in the Webern (example 9.1 above). Any resulting expectation and desire may be a cultural construction, but the result is nevertheless a desire for a different state—a different state in the external stimulus, and a correspondingly different affective state in the perceiver. Mimetic participation shapes the contribution of both of the analytical processing and the fulfillment of one’s desires. When two singers sing a harmonic interval (with no other particular context), it is more challenging to sing a semitone in tune than it is to sing most other intervals, as in the 2–3 suspension in example 9.2. Mimetically engaged listeners take part in this challenge by virtually performing (in mimetic subvocalization and/or in instrument-based participation) both notes of a harmonic interval in effect simultaneously (chap. 2, principle 14). In a two-part passage in Renaissance polyphony, or in a suspension chain in a Corelli trio sonata, the engagement might be with both parts more or less equally, while in contexts of melody and accompaniment the engagement is more likely to be focused on the melody and its harmonic conflict with the accompaniment. Mimetically engaged listeners experience such dissonances as quasi-first-person performers, and at the same time they process these dissonances as second-person listeners, often com214  Beyond Musical Space

bined with some measure of quasi-third-person analysis.7 In other words, we experience the performative-analytical challenge within tripartite subjectivity. Similarly, satisfaction of desire involves waiting both in a receptive, secondand quasi-third-person manner (waiting for what the performers will do) and in a performative, quasi-first-person manner: sustaining the mimetic exertion until the metrically specified time for resolution, and thereby taking part in the satisfaction of one’s own desire. As I described in the previous chapter, the participatory element can make an experience more fraught because it involves activation of motor imagery, which brings to bear two sources of affect: the feeling of exerting in particular ways, regardless of context, and the feeling of exerting to fulfill some particular desire—to achieve some particular musical state that emerges in the encounter between the sonic stimulus and embodied listeners. The effect of these dissonances is shaped by all five components and all eight avenues, but the generic pattern of consonance-dissonance-consonance in the stimulus generates corresponding patterns in listeners: (satisfaction)-desire-sat­ isfaction, (relaxation)-tension-relaxation, and (stability)-instability-stability. Now notice that, among all of these features, only consonance and dissonance are audible. In particular, any tension, resolution, instability, and stability related directly to consonance and dissonance are properties of our response, which are products of the processes described above. Without intending to, and most often without awareness, we attribute our own response to the external stimulus and then imagine that we have heard what we have felt. I return to this matter in the next chapter. Dissonance and Meter In chapter 6 (under Feeling the Beat and Hearing the Beat, based on Huron 2006 and Jones 1992), I pointed out that downbeats are moments when we are most likely to have a new event with which to mimetically participate. The experience of these recurring metric events combines successful nonmimetic and mimetic prediction to motivate a physically informed feeling of relative stability. When dissonances occur on downbeats, the result is then two levels of conflict: that between the dissonant note and the underlying harmony, and that between this pitch-related instability and the meter-related stability. With a suspension or an appoggiatura, we have an unstable event in an otherwise stable metric location. The felt instability (or tension) results in part from the quasi-first-person experience described above, combined with reconciling this pitch conflict with what otherwise would have been a moment of relative stability and ease (the downbeat). In the context of melody and accompaniment, mimetic engagement with the melody turns the accompaniment into the harmonic environment so that the conflict is more a matter of performing a pitch that does not align with the other pitches in the environment.8 I suspect that this musical conflict is informed by one’s experience of being an individual in actual social contexts, and that it thus also relates to the use of harmony and accord in reference to such practical Applications  215

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Example 9.3. Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, “Dido’s Lament,” recitative.

contexts. With this in mind, in the present discussion I want to focus on the more personal expression of anguish as portrayed in the recitative of “Dido’s Lament,” shown in example 9.3.9 The pertinent dissonances are marked with asterisks above the vocal part. Three of these dissonances are not on downbeats, but because they coincide with changes in harmony they are nevertheless accented in the manner described above. From one perspective the persona of Dido is expressing a feeling of anguish, and we hear the sounds, categorize them as such an expression, and then somehow feel some form of sympathy for her. From another perspective, immersion in the fictional world of this opera involves feeling something of what it would be like to do, feel, and be what Dido is doing, apparently feeling, and thus being. Mimetic subvocalization is one mechanism for this imagination, and at 216  Beyond Musical Space

the points of dissonance one experiences the physical-affective conflict of making sounds that, in this context, do not harmonize with one’s environment. In less fraught contexts this feeling of difference might be conceptualized more prosaically as a pushing or a leaning against something (appoggiatura), but here the thing that is pushed against is the metric-harmonic environment—a statelocation in which we, as we enact the dissonant note, do not fit in. In the case of the suspensions (all of the marked dissonances except “Death” in m. 7), the conflict can be understood as resulting from a sorrow-induced lethargy: we are late in changing with the harmonies, struggling to align, or perhaps struggling to resist, before finally succeeding or relenting. My experience of this recitative is more subtle than this description, but the underlying experience in both is the same in this way: as a mimetic participant I feel quasi-first-person exertions, conflict, desire, struggle, and then a moment of relative relaxation but without contentment. Quasi-first-person experience always combines with second-person listening and quasi-third-person reflection, which is to say that the preceding description is only part of the story, but it is a part that I believe is integral in the experience of being moved by this recitative. In both mimetic and nonmimetic ways, the timbre and strength shape the experience: in an ensemble of voice, theorbo, and lute, for example, the conflicts are more subtle than they might be in other contexts; and even with the same ensemble, the details of specific performance decisions shape the effects of duration (both the overall tempo and the effects of rubato in the dissonant notes), timbre, and strength. And all of this occurs within the overall two-tetrachord melodic descent of the recitative, the effect of which involves the feeling of “descent” described in chapter 4. Lastly, the chromaticism of the recitative as a whole, even if mostly germane to the minor mode, contributes an overall element of complexity (relative to the major mode), which increases the workload for low-level implicit analytical processes and thereby contributes to the overall sense of struggle (or whatever other description a given listener finds most apt). Whether this chromatic background softens the effects of the melodic dissonances, or whether it instead primes the perceiver, I am not sure; but one could explore this via comparison with, for example, the diatonic downbeat dissonances in Strauss’s “Morgen!” which I imagine most listeners find to be less disturbing than those in the Purcell. My final remarks on meter and dissonance concern the difference in the feeling of rhythmic patterns in simple versus compound meter. If downbeats are felt to be stable for the reasons given above, then events on any beat are analogously more stable than events between beats. In simple meters such as 42 this extends 2 but in comto the moments midway between beats (e.g., the eighth notes in 4), pound meters such as 68 the situation is different. In example 9.4 (Mozart, Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 488, ii Adagio) I find that the eighth notes between beats are not as stable as the half-beats in example 9.5 (Simple-meter counterfactual of the Mozart). It may be that this difference is related to the binary nature of our tetrapod physiology, in which case the mimetic hypothesis makes this proposed Applications  217

Adagio ### 6 œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ ‰ œ & 8

{

? ### 68 œœ

œœ œœ J

œ œœ.. œ J

œœ

œ œ

œ œ j ‰ #œJ œ #œ

œ œ œ #œ œ œ œ œj ‰ ‰ œj œ. j œœj ‰ ‰ œ œ. œœ œ. J

œ œ œ #œ # # œ. œ œ œ œ œ. œ œ #œ. œ œ œ œ # œjnœj ‰ ‰ ‰ œ œ #œ œ œ œ &# J œ œ œœ #œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ ? ### œœ œœ œœ œœ œ œJ œœ œœ #œœ J J J J J J

5

{

## & # nœ . œ œ œ

9

{

? ### nœœ œ

œœ œœ œJ œ

. . œ. j . œ. œ. nœ œ j œ nœ œ. œ œ œœ #œœ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ nœœ ‰ Œ. œ œ œ œ œJ œ J J

‰ œœ J

‰ Œ

‰

‰ Œ

‰

Example 9.4. Mozart, Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 488, ii Adagio, mm. 1–12.

Adagio œ œ œ ### 2 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ. œ ‰ œ œœ & 4 œ œ #œ œ œ œ œj ‰ J œ œ œ. œ œ œj ‰ ? ### 42 œœ.. œœ œœ.. œœ œ j ≈#œR œ. œœ œœ. œ œ J #œ

{

##œ œœ &#

5

{

? ### œœ..

œœ

œœ

œ œ œœ œ ‰ œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ#œ œ œ œ. #œ nœj ‰ #œ J . œ œ œœ.. œœ œ. œ œœ.. œœ œ. œ #œœ.. œœ œœ.. œœ œœ.. œœ #œ. œ

## & # nœ œ œ œ.

9

{

? ### nœœœ...

œœ œœ.. œ œ.

. . œ. œ .œ œ. nœ œ nœ œœ nœœ œ œ

Œ

œ œ œ œœ.. #œœ œ œ. œ œ. œ œœ œ. œ œ. œ

Example 9.5. Simple-meter counterfactual of the Mozart.

218  Beyond Musical Space

Œ Œ

bodily basis more directly relevant for music listeners; however, the actual point of interest here concerns the consequences for the degree of instability of the dissonances.10 When I perform or imagine both examples at the same tempo, it feels to me as though the beats in example 9.4 are farther apart than those in example 9.5. The fact that there are three divisions of the beat in the original (example 9.4) and only two in the counterexample (example 9.5) by itself might contribute to this feeling, but I think that the more proximate cause is the resulting relative lack of stable moments between beats in compound meter (example 9.4). In compound meter we must wait until the next beat for a comparably stable moment, while in simple meter (example 9.5) we are offered a comparable moment of relative stability every half-beat. To the extent that one experiences a measure of desire for each successive beat in general, this feeling of desire is thus amplified in compound meter by the feeling of extended time between moments of satisfaction, and the satisfaction and sense of stability that come with the achievement of the desired beat are likewise amplified. But when this moment of metric stability coincides with a harmonic-melodic instability, as it does in mm. 6 and 8, the usual conflict created by downbeat dissonances is arguably stronger than it would be in simple meter. The other sonic features of the Mozart shape the effect in this particular case, but the difference illustrated in examples 9.4 and 9.5 plays out in the difference between downbeat dissonances in compound and simple meters generally.11

Concluding Remarks If the purpose of this chapter had been to explore “music and emotion” I probably would not have included the Webern and Stockhausen examples, and I might have focused solely on complete works or movements. But the central purpose of this chapter has been to draw attention to some of the processes that contribute to the feeling of musical experience generally—a feeling that may or may not include what are commonly understood to be particular emotions. The choice of the Webern and Stockhausen examples in particular reflects my desire to illustrate that affective responses normally occur regardless of the particular music in question, and that we can specify, to whatever extent one may wish, the sources of a given response. More broadly, the examples in this chapter are meant to demonstrate how the 5 × 8 framework can be applied to both tonal and posttonal music. While analysis of different kinds of music benefits from approaches designed specifically for the idiosyncrasies of a given work or practice (e.g., the familiar analytical approaches to the music of Mozart and Webern, and the somewhat less widely familiar approaches to electronic music), the framework I have described is adaptable enough to accommodate music as varied as the examples we have considered and to be used in conjunction with more familiar analytical approaches.12

Applications  219

Complexities and Three Difficulties I want to close this chapter by noting three general difficulties that attend the study of musical affect. One difficulty has to do with what one takes to be the nature of affect in general. The emotions that we can name, such as joy or sorrow, are only a portion of affective life generally and of the affective components of musical experience, much of which cannot be captured by such blunt categories. Another difficulty involves a general belief that affective responses (feeling) and conceptual responses (thinking) are independent. From the perspective that I have described in this and the preceding chapters, any musical concept is a conceptualization of experience, and since every experience necessarily has an affective dimension, every musical concept is in part a conceptualization of what is felt in musical experience. I return to this point in the next chapter. A third difficulty in understanding musical affect has to do with understand­ ing the various processes whereby music affects one’s affective-cognitive state. The eight interrelated avenues described in chapter 8 offer an overview of the terrain, while leaving room for additional and even essential considerations from psychological, musicological, and philosophical research. As I said at the start of chapter 8, the division into eight avenues is only one way of viewing the relevant issues, but however the terrain is viewed, the complexity of the topic as a whole, along with the necessarily specialized nature of most scholarly inquiries, present a challenge to students and scholars whose specialties lie elsewhere and yet who are interested in the basic and broad question of how music makes us feel anything, whatever that feeling might be. The 5 × 8 framework offers a point of entry from which one can then pursue curiosity in whichever directions and to whatever extent chance and desire may lead. Lastly, whether applying this particular framework or some other, one of the most important caveats to bear in mind is that some musical features and some avenues of musical affect may contribute in potent ways precisely because they are easily overlooked, whether in general or in particular musical contexts.13

220  Beyond Musical Space

10 Review and Implications The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there. Yasutani Roshi

I have described what I take to be some fundamental processes in musical experience and conceptualization. In addition to specific processes, this includes an essential variability in how these play out in different musical practices, among different individuals, and even for a given individual at different points in one’s life. Specialists might rightly note the many sources I have excluded and the avenues I have only pointed toward or overlooked, but I have attempted to offer a coherent story of the relationship among metaphor, embodiment, and affect—or among concept, flesh, and feeling. I want to close by reviewing a few of the central ideas in this book and by describing some of what I take to be their implications. First is the nature of musical imagery—that is, the nature of mental representations of music that are integral to musical memory, planning, imagination, and otherwise thinking about music. Apart from the motor imagery of recalled and planned performance, there is a sensible tradition of thinking of musical imagery primarily in terms of auditory imagery—audiation, auralization, or otherwise imagined sounds. This tradition also includes an emphasis on what one can hear and learn to hear in music. Often included with this is visual imagery, related to the sight of performance but especially the sight of staff notation, so that musical imagery is understood to include visible elements. But the evidence for the mimetic hypothesis indicates that musical imagery in general is also partly motor imagery—not only in relation to planned and recalled performance, but as a normal part of how musical sounds are comprehended. The implications of this are the heart of this book. If musical imagery is partly motor imagery generally, this implies a relationship with music that differs from a perspective that focuses primarily or exclusively on auditory-visual imagery. One of the most helpful ways of seeing this difference is to focus on what is actually audible in music. As we have consid-

ered, pitch height and motion are almost entirely inaudible, as are tension and resolution, instability and stability, and all of the musical properties that depend on these features. But since these can nevertheless certainly seem to be audible properties and features of The Music, there is something fundamental to explore here. The position that I have described holds that there is an external stimulus— the “acoustic-auditory fact,” and often the sight of its performance—and one or more embodied listeners, including any listening performers, who experience and conceptualize the stimulus. Part of this conceptualization involves implicitly projecting onto the stimulus properties that are more accurately understood as properties of the experience that emerges in this scene—equally contingent both on the external stimulus and on its effects upon the listeners. In other words, musical properties do not belong to either party (the stimulus or the stimulee). Part of how this works is that the “listeners” are also co-performers, so that the stimulus is comprehended not only nonmimetically as auditory-visual imagery but also mimetically as mimetic motor imagery. This multi-modal experience is automatically compared to prior experience and is categorized either literally or, more often, metaphorically. Because such experience necessarily has an affective dimension, the resulting conceptualizations are of what is heard, seen, done, and felt. But because so much of this occurs nonconsciously and more or less instantaneously, it can seem instead as though the products of these processes are in fact audible properties of the music. This apparent audibility fosters an I-thou or I-it perspective that is foundational in one of the three epistemologies that I consider next.

Illusions, Fictions, and Epistemologies In comparing present experience to prior experience we categorize, or attempt to categorize, experience. When we categorize across domains we get analogies, similes, and metaphors, and in using such processes we create fictions. For example: we can understand Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as a narrative of heroic struggle and achievement; or more generally and prosaically we can understand the temporal-ordinal relations among musical events generally in terms of length and motion. At another level we can understand heroism and/or motion as properties that we perceive—as audible properties of an external musical object.1 Such fictions are integral to meaning construction and are perhaps not necessarily problematic, but the nature of one’s understanding of the processes that create them contributes to three kinds of epistemology, the first two of which can be interpreted as being problematic. If a fiction is taken not to be a fiction, then it is in effect a kind of illusion; this is the basis of the first epistemology. In the second epistemology the fictional status of the conceptions employed is acknowledged, but the processes that produce them are not integrated into explorations of how music works. The third epistemology varies according to the extent to which one understands and integrates 222  Beyond Musical Space

the relevant processes that underlie our fictions. Its advantages include, among other things, whatever benefits there may be in understanding processes such as those explored in this book. As I consider below, the choice of epistemology matters especially in the context of education. The first epistemology is sensible insofar as it can reflect how things seem, much as the sun seems to rise in the east. It offers familiar solutions and challenges in understanding musical experience—for example, the premise that we feel tension because there is tension in the music. With this in mind, the distinction between these epistemologies simply hinges on what one takes to be perceptible in musical experience. From the perspective that I have described, at one level we perceive the five components of sound—pitch, duration, timbre, strength, and location. At another level, but still often preconscious, we also perceive states and relations among states (change and difference). But we do not perceive motion, differences in pitch height, musical tension, or “beauty,” until we extend the meaning of “perception” to include apparent perception of products of conceptualization, and this extension risks disguising or ignoring the bodily-affectivecognitive processes that create and ground such conceptualizations. Since this goes hand in hand with how we define “music” and how we understand our relationship with music, I turn next to the question of what we are referring to when we speak of music.

Defining “Music” and “The Music” “Music” is an emergent entity: from one perspective, it emerges from the processes we have considered in this book, in concert with top-down and otherwise higher-level processes.2 All of these processes occur within tripartite subjectivity: the first-person element of performance and the quasi-first-person component that arises from mimetic participation when listening; the corporeal secondperson position of receiving sounds; and the quasi-third-person element that emerges in reflection upon experience. Reflection and conceptualization are necessarily informed by the first- and quasi-first-person experience, but to the extent that these motor elements go unnoticed it can seem as though reflection and conceptualization solely concern what is heard and seen (or pictured). Our relationship with music is thus tripartite, and what we take to be perceptible is intertwined with an understanding of tripartite subjectivity. For the next step it will help to distinguish two definitions of perception. Let perception1 refer to auditory perception and perception of nonmetaphoric relations among sounds, and let perception2 refer to apparent perception of the contents of conscious imagery, including the products of habituated metaphoric reasoning such as musical motion.3 Habits of conceptualization can make it difficult or impossible to perceive1 preconceptual properties of sounds—for example, it can be challenging to perceive1 temporal relations without these already being spatialized at the level of consciousness. Accordingly, while perception2 is fictional it can also be phenomenologically real, with perception2 of constructed Review and Implications  223

properties feeling and seeming like perception1. We can identify this as the point at which two basic ontologies emerge. In chapter 3 I pointed to the role of nominalization in conceptualizing music, as when we turn the action of leaping into the object known as a leap. To overstate the matter somewhat: perception of a musical leap is never simply perception of a sound-object; and even when we acknowledge that it includes perception of a leap-producing action, we do not simply hear this action from our second- and quasi-third-person positions. According to the mimetic hypothesis, perception of a leap involves feeling something of what it would be like to perform the same or analogous action, and this quasi-first-person experience is part of our relationship with music.4 But what is perceived is still not a leap without quasi-third-person conceptualization—conceptualization of the sound+action in concert with our spatial metaphoric reasoning. It is here that an understanding of the processes of perception and conceptualization matters. In the case of musical motion, if what I perceive 1 are nonspatial temporal relations among events, and yet these are automatically conceptualized metaphorically as spatial relations, who is doing the conceptualizing? At no point did I explicitly perform the cross-domain mappings described in chapter 5; they were already performed for me.5 My conscious self, estranged from the more ancient nonconscious portions of myself, operates from how things seem, and it certainly can seem as though I have perceived motion as a property of an external stimulus. But if musical motion is nevertheless a product of affective-cognitive responses to nonspatial acoustic-auditory stimuli (that is, if musical motion is a product of conceptualization), and if at the same time I nevertheless take musical motion to be part of my definition of music, then my own affective-cognitive responses are implicitly foundational in what I take “music” to be. At one level, the boundary between me and what I perceive (or what I seem to perceive) is liquid. But this whorl of external stimuli and perceptual and conceptual processes is inconsistent with, or incompatible with, a more general conceptualization of myself as something distinct from the thing I am listening to, and a common solution to this problem is to tacitly sort all of this into two distinct categories: me and the music. This distinction and its corresponding ontology of music (in which, for example, musical motion is perceptible) then lays the foundation for familiar epistemologies of musical experience and meaning, with all of the advantages and disadvantages that they entail. An alternative perspective can begin with a consideration of Berio’s definition of music as “everything that we listen to with the intention of listening to music” (Berio 1981). Two advantages of this view are that it highlights the role of the listener, and it accommodates potentially any sound or silence. But I would also want to say that music includes everything that we do with the intention of doing music, and thereby expand Berio’s definition to something closer to Small’s (1998) concept of musicking. And in order to include recalled and imagined music, we could say that music is every sound and silence that we hear, perform, or imagine with the intention of experiencing music, where intention means to adopt an aes224  Beyond Musical Space

thetic attitude toward creating and/or comprehending a stimulus. Metaphoric uses of music and musical then extend this definition to nonacoustic experience, such as architecture described as frozen music, an idea described as music to my ears, and various other examples of music as a source domain in the conceptualization of extramusical experience.6 Based on all that we have considered, we can think of music as contingent on, and as emerging from, a combination of (1) the sounds and silences, (2) any sound-producing actions (organic and/or mechanical), and (3) the perceptual-affective-cognitive activites of performers and listeners, including mimetic comprehension and the adoption of an aesthetic attitude toward what is performed, heard, and/or seen, in real time, recall, planning, or in imagination otherwise. For deaf music lovers, the auditory elements are attenuated to varying extents, while the acoustic-vibratory elements and the rest of these components remain. This rather unwieldy definition, or description, is meant to highlight the significance of the breadth and mix of the relevant elements and processes, as well as what I take to be a factual indefiniteness in the boundaries of the category known as “music.” But it also leaves us with a curious matter. There is a condition, or a spectrum of conditions, known as amusia—a term that refers, among other things, to an inability to sing in tune, to distinguish “ascent” from “descent” in perception and/or performance, and/or various other statistically nonnormative features of musical experience. In clinical contexts such persons are described as amusic (in the same grammatical form as agnostic, anaerobic, aphetic, and so forth). The term is potentially misleading, however, in that some “amusic” persons thoroughly enjoy listening to music, dancing to music, and/or singing tunes. Of particular interest in the present context, however, is the fact that this implies the opposite condition of musia. Persons with, or in, this “condition” would then be described as music: after the manner of, or nature of, or pertaining to muse; being under the influence of a muse or of the Muses (with the same adjectival form as artistic, poetic, metaphoric, and so forth). Musia would manifest in a proclivity to engage in musical activities for the purpose of experiencing the effects of such activities. The causes of these effects would then include, among other things, everything that we have considered in this book, all of which would comprise a special case of a performance-related aesthetic proclivity (enjoyment of the performing arts and athletics), which in turn would constitute a special case of a more general aesthetic proclivity (to engage with a stimulus and/or an activity for the proximate purpose of enjoying the experience).7

Some Implications I am particularly interested in what the ideas in this book might imply for education. The chief entry point is in college music curricula, since these shape the thinking of those who become scholars and teachers at various levels, who in turn shape the thinking of others within and beyond the field of music. In addition to Review and Implications  225

the demonstrations in chapter 9, here I offer some thoughts on how these ideas might be integrated into the basic curriculum, followed by brief considerations of some of the implications for performance interpretation, enactments of subjectivities and identities, and aesthetic evaluation. Tonal Music Curricula The ideas in this book can be introduced gradually and selectively, and many of the finer details can be omitted from general undergraduate contexts. For example, at some point in my first semester music theory course I ask “What is high about ‘high’ notes?” I do not go into the details of chapter 4; instead I simply draw their attention to the ways in which pitch height is metaphoric and to the fact that this makes this musical property contingent on our imagination. At another point I play a cadential progression, stop on the dominant, and ask “Can you hear how that note wants to resolve?” (in reference to scale degree 7 or 2 in the soprano). The students answer “Yes,” to which I reply that notes do not have volition and that notes do not want anything, let alone to go places and resolve. This is the first of a series of questions designed to draw attention to the roles of expectation and desire: we are the ones who want resolution (if anyone does), and we attribute to the music our own affective-cognitive response.8 In connection with this, whether on the same day or at some other point, I introduce the gist of the mimetic hypothesis. In particular I emphasize that the role of mimetic motor imagery and action in musical contexts is a specialized form of its role in human cognition generally. At another point in the first year I introduce the paradox of the B-flat goes to A (chap. 6) along with a distilled version of the basic logic of temporal-musical motion, focusing on the ancient correlations between affect, action, and movement in the source domain of actual first-person locomotion (anticipation, desire, location-ahead, motion-toward, exertion, arrival, achievement, relaxation, and satisfaction). Because of the deep-seated nature of metaphoric temporal motion, I have found it best to save some details for a second pass at a later point (it can be easy to fall into a debate about “the true nature of time”). These basics—the gist of the mimetic hypothesis, and the perspective that pitch height and musical motion are products of our imagination—already recontextualize the norms of voice leading, dissonance treatment, and form. In this way some basic elements of affect are integrated from the start, and our role in the construction of fundamental musical properties and musical meaning begins to appear quite differently than it might otherwise. Beyond this it is then simply a matter of integrating some selection or some version of the elements in the 5 × 8 analytical framework. Since the gist of this framework takes little time to introduce alongside harmony, voice leading, and form, the integration of these ideas does not require any substantial change to the order of topics in a syllabus. From another perspective, however, the framework could be integrated in reconceptions of music theory curricula, as I describe next. 226  Beyond Musical Space

Beyond Tonal Norms There are at least two challenges in teaching posttonal music for which the 5 × 8 framework can be particularly useful: students’ commonly neutral or aversive responses to the repertoire, and the diversity of specialized theories that this repertoire requires. While any analytical approach has the potential to increase appreciation, an integration of this holistic framework, in whole or in part, can amplify this benefit. Students who still find little resonance with a given work or practice after analytical engagement nevertheless gain an understanding of why this is so, and the value of this understanding can be significant. In plain terms, it is one thing have an opinion, but it is another thing to understand the bases of that opinion. The fuller benefits begin to emerge when we extend this to personal and cultural aesthetic preferences, values, and biases. I return to related issues below under Aesthetic Evaluation.9 With regard to specialized theories, in the transition from tonal to posttonal studies students must set aside much of what they learned in previous semesters and, depending on their curriculum, learn not just one new theory but several. If the 5 × 8 framework is already among their skills, this can then serve as a strand of continuity: all of the same variables remain relevant, but they play out differently. Inclusion of this framework also offers the benefit of a synoptic understanding of the distinctiveness of different posttonal practices and, at a larger level, a synoptic understanding of the differences and similarities among musical practices generally, within and beyond Western traditions. Explicit comparison of distinct practices offers a perspective on musical experience and meaning that is less readily available in compartmentalized study, and this framework is one way of gaining this larger understanding. Performance Decisions Principle 12 of the mimetic hypothesis holds that composers design and performers shape the mimetic invitation. In the bigger picture this applies to the five components and the manner in which these will shape listeners via the eight avenues. Presumably most composers and performers are aware of this to some extent or another and in one way or another, but compositional and performative decisions will have their effects regardless of the extent of this awareness, and the 5 × 8 framework is simply an available tool when it comes to making such decisions. The brief remarks that I offered in connection with Webern’s op. 5, no. 4, in chapter 9 demonstrate some of the ways that the framework is relevant to performance interpretations. Enacting Subjectivities and Identities Musical experience is one of the avenues whereby I enact my identity, my self, whether as composer, performer, listener, and/or commentator (critic, scholar, Review and Implications  227

and/or teacher). For those interested in the corporeal-affective-cognitive correlates of enactments involving gender, race, and other dimensions of identity, the 5 × 8 framework offers a way of specifying the relationship between the sonic details and the modes of responding to and processing those details. While forms of mimetic engagement may be an obvious avenue, all factors in the framework are relevant.10 Aesthetic Evaluation Let us say that aesthetic judgments and preferences involve reflection upon an aesthetic object, including intentional musical objects. From the perspective described above, this object is infused with us, insofar as it is partly contingent on our affective-cognitive response, so that reflection on the musical object is infused with, whether tacitly or explicitly, what one feels. While this feeling might include specific emotions, I am referring to the often subtler affective features described in the preceding chapters. With regard to preferences, liking and disliking music (in whatever terms one might paraphrase these valuations) is an affective-cognitive response; it involves liking and disliking the experience. Perhaps not surprisingly I have received strongly aversive responses to this proposition—which are themselves affectivecognitive responses, and which would seem to reflect an interest in separating personal affective responses from reasoning and evaluation. Along similar lines, we should ask what is being valued in personal and cultural preferences, and from the perspective described in this chapter it is the ways of being that are afforded or motivated by the music. The framework that we have considered offers a way of specifying how these ways of being emerge. When Hamlet says that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” this is accurate (in the practical world beyond Hamlet) if by “thinking” one means to include thinking about experiences (actual and possible) along with the affective dimension that motivates and shapes thinking. Alternatively, we might say rather that feeling makes it so, but by the same token only if by feeling we mean to include conceptualization of that feeling. One way to help keep this perspective in mind is to ask what the pronoun “it” refers to in the case of basic evaluations such as “It’s beautiful” or “It was mesmerizing” or “I found it quite boring.” From one perspective, “it” is an external object with inherent aesthetic properties. From another perspective, “it” is the feeling experienced under the influence of a particular external stimulus in a particular context, which is then attributed to an emergent, constructed object.11 • In reflecting upon musical experience, in real time and afterward, I construct a sense of what seems to be given, and I do so under the influence of what I am implicitly and explicitly told about what is given. Out of this process emerges 228  Beyond Musical Space

my understanding of my relationship with music, which in turns shapes how I understand and investigate questions of musical meaning. When I use metaphors to make sense of musical experience, my understanding of my relationship with music is shaped by the metaphors I use and by my understanding of the logic of these metaphors—that is, by my understanding of the nature of my own metaphoric reasoning. The embodied cognitive processes described in this book offer a way of understanding the nature of such reasoning, which is both a product of and a contributor to what we feel and think in relation to what we hear, see, and do.

Review and Implications  229

Appendix I: Mimetic Subvocalization and Absolute Pitch Absolute pitch (AP) is, loosely speaking, the ability to recognize the pitch of a sound by ear and/or to sing a given note without the aid of an instrument. Traditionally this is implicitly understood to involve nonmimetic processes, and if AP truly is nonmimetic, then this has implications for the overall relevance of the mimetic hypothesis, particularly because of the number of music academics who possess AP and the likelihood that this ability might shape how such scholars think about music and how they teach others to think about music. AP is rare in the general population, and among musicians it is more common among speakers of Mandarin Chinese than it is among speakers of English (Deutsch et al. 2006). Unlike English, Mandarin is a tonal language in which contour carries semantic meaning.1 Since attention to pitch contour in Mandarin carries this additional significance, the greater occurrence of AP among Mandarin-speaking musicians suggests the additional influence of language acquisition and subsequent use upon music processing.2 In connection with this, Deutsch, Henthorn, and Dolson (2004) suggest that the ability to acquire AP may be universal at birth and then is either developed or lost. Levitin and Rogers (2005) and Zatorre (2003) consider the possibility that AP has a genetic basis, but they emphasize that it appears it must nevertheless be acquired early in life, in agreement with the assertion in Deutsch at al. (2004) that there may be a critical period for its development, analogous to the critical period for learning one’s native language.3 The development of AP almost certainly involves some nonmimetic association of sounds with labels (pitch names), but since it is more common among musicians, and still more common among Mandarin-speaking musicians, it is plausible that this absolute association is based additionally on the motor experience of producing the labeled sounds—that is, the experience of playing and singing music. With this in mind we should consider the perceptual aspect of recognizing heard pitches and how it might involve mimetic motor imagery (MMI). The first thing to note is that AP commonly is more robust when listening to one’s own instrument, which is to say that the strength of AP commonly is relative to one’s own experience of performing the sounds heard. This is consistent with the mimetic hypothesis; however, it does not match anecdotal reports of those musicians with AP who claim instead that they simply recognize note names objectively, with no sense of covertly playing or singing the notes. These reports accord instead with Levitin and Rogers’s claim that such people have “direct access to pitch information in the form of linguistic codes that they can apply to pitches” (2005, 31). With these musicians in mind, we should consider the possibility that the development of AP involves a measure of MMI but subsequently can become functionally dissociated from MMI at the level of full consciousness. However plausible this conjecture might be, I have nevertheless found two distinct kinds of AP listeners.

In nonscientific surveys, and with an explicit interest in the role of MMI in recall, I ask students and scholars to recall an instrumental melody (usually the first theme in the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony), and to inquire into whether this recall involves any activation of music-related muscles. About half immediately report some kind of mimetic activity in relation to what it would be like to sing and/or play the melody. For the others I explain subtler forms of MMI, involving any of the musculature related to singing and playing, after which the majority of these likewise discover some form of mimetic motor activity or imagery. Now this approach of course risks biasing the participants, who might “discover” what was not there until I asked them to look for it, but what is pertinent here is that some of those with AP nevertheless report that some form of mimetic representation is a normal part of how they recall music: mimetic representations are not necessary for these musicians to access pitch information, but they report that it is a normal part of their experience anyway. If pitch were the only sonic feature perceived, such cases would motivate one kind of question as to why this occurs; but what is represented in musical imagery is a composite of duration, timbre, strength, and pitch, and this suggests a plausible role for mimetic subvocalization, which integrates all of these. For such listeners mimetic representations of sounds might be superfluous for categorical identification of pitches, but mimetic comprehension of sounds could nevertheless be a normal part of music perception, much as it appears to be for listeners generally. Notably, the few musicians who report no mimetic motor activity or imagery in musical recall are almost entirely music theorists, including those with and without AP. It may be that such listeners actually do not automatically represent music mimetically, or it may be that mimetic processing occurs but is unavailable to consciousness. Whichever it may be, both possibilities may correlate with a tendency to adopt a quasi-third-person position in music analysis.

232  Appendix I

Appendix II: Levels of Abstraction among Metaphors Like all metaphors, those we use in conceptualizing music exist within generic and specific hierarchies. In the most generic hierarchy, conceptual metaphors subsume conventional and novel metaphors. For example, the conceptual metaphor greater is higher subsumes the conventional metaphoric conception of “high” and “low” quantities and magnitudes, which in turn subsumes the concept of “high” and “low” prices and any specific expressions involving “climbing,” “falling,” and so forth. But the conventional notion of “high” and “low” prices also reflects the specific conceptual metaphor greater price is higher price, which is a special case of greater is higher, which in turn is a special case of states are locations, and which in turn is a special case of the most generic level of all, abstract is concrete.1 Figure II.1 offers a spatial representation of this hierarchy. The hierarchy in figure II.1 is then a special case of the more generic hierarchy represented in figure II.2, each level of which includes only a sample of the relevant metaphors.2 This hierarchical relationship among metaphors and their manifestation in particular linguistic expressions is analogous to musical forms and their manifestation in particular musical works, as in the following hierarchical chain, from generic to specific: sonata form > Type 3 Sonata > Beethoven, Symphony no. 5 in C minor, i: Allegro con brio > Dohnanyi’s 1988 recording of the Beethoven with the Cleveland Orchestra.3 The same rough analogy applies to biological morphologies, as in Kingdom > Phylum > . . . > Species > Specimen.

ABSTRACT RELATIONS ARE CONCRETE RELATIONS

STATES ARE LOCATIONS

and other conceptual metaphors

GREATER IS HIGHER

and other specific versions of STATES ARE LOCATIONS

GREATER PRICE IS HIGHER PRICE

and other specific versions of GREATER IS HIGHER

conventional and novel expressions of GREATER PRICE IS HIGHER PRICE

(e.g., “rising” and “falling” prices)

Figure II.1. Hierarchy involving greater is higher.

234  Appendix II



ABSTRACT STATES AND RELATIONS ARE CONCRETE STATES AND RELATIONS STATES ARE LOCATIONS QUANTITY IS SIZE

IDEAS ARE FOOD

ATTRIBUTES ARE POSSESSIONS

TIME IS A RESOURCE

CERTAIN IS FIRM

IMPORTANCE IS WEIGHT

[etc.]

STATES ARE LOCATIONS GREATER IS HIGHER (MORE IS UP)

EXISTENCE IS HERE

DIFFERENCE IS DISTANCE

GOOD IS UP

CHANGE IS MOTION

ANTICIPATED STATES ARE LOCATED AHEAD

REMEMBERED STATES ARE LOCATED BEHIND

PRESENT STATES ARE LOCATED HERE

GREATER IS HIGHER GREATER FREQUENCY IS HIGHER FREQUENCY

GREATER PRICE IS HIGHER PRICE

GREATER QUALITY IS HIGHER QUALITY GREATER RATE IS HIGHER RATE MORE STRESS IS HIGHER STRESS

MORE LEARNING IS HIGHER LEARNING

[etc.]

GREATER FREQUENCY IS HIGHER FREQUENCY

The metaphoric concept of pitch height: RELATIONS AMONG PITCHES ARE VERTICAL RELATIONS

(chapter 4)

Particular expressions of the metaphoric concept: The dissonance of the 7th normally resolves downward by step. The leading tone in an outer voice normally resolves upward.

Figure II.2. Levels relevant to states are locations and greater is higher.

Levels of Abstraction among Metaphors  235

[etc.]

Notes

Introduction 1.  After several drafts of this book I read John Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1929). There are enough similarities to think of the present book as, in effect, an application and extension of his ideas. Readers will also find similarities to Christopher Small’s Musicking (1998), in the concerns and even in an occasional wording, although I did not happen to read Small’s book until I was finishing the manuscript for this book. My overall approach is inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s view of the phenomenology of perception (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 1964), even if what I present here does not do justice to his ideas. There is also overlap with Eric Clarke’s ecological approach (Clarke 2005), although the ecology of musical experience, from the perspective explored here, includes mimetic participation (chapters 1–2) and a resulting tripartite subjectivity (chapters 6 and 8–10). 1. Mimetic Comprehension 1.  I am avoiding the noun form of mimesis because, although Aristotle’s writings on the matter include audience members’ comprehension of performance via mimesis, the predominant interpretation today is, roughly speaking, in terms of art imitating life, which is the opposite of what I intend here. See Max Paddison (2010) for a potent discussion of the various meanings of the term and its role in the construction of musical meaning. The hypothesis and my exploration of its implications overlap with Merlin Donald’s account of the role of imitation and mimesis in the evolution of human cognition and culture (Donald 1991), except that he defines mimetic more strictly than I do here. 2.  There is a definition of nonconscious that applies only to processes that are never available to consciousness; however, with mimetic processes this appears to vary among individuals, as well as for a given individual across one’s life. In addition, unconscious bears connotations that may confuse my intention, so I am using this broader definition of nonconscious. 3.  A partial list includes: Spencer (1951 [1857]), Clarke (1993), Iyer (2002), Godøy (2003), Godøy et al. (2006), Jackendoff and Lerdahl (2006), Molnar-Szakacs and Overy (2006), Phillips-Silver, Aktipis, and Bryant (2010), and Toiviainen, Luck, and Thompson (2010). More broadly, it also overlaps with the unpublished writings on aesthetics of the philosopher Adam Smith (Malek 1972), and with ideas from James (1890), Barthes (1977), Walton (1990, 1993, and 1994), and Dissanayake (1992). 4.  Cusick’s essay originally appeared in 1994 in the first edition of Queering the Pitch. While the notion of invited participation occurred to me prior to reading Cusick’s essay, the related portions of the mimetic hypothesis and its implications are in effect an exploration of her idea.

5.  Among the extensive literature, helpful collections include Meltzoff and Moore (1983), Papoušek et al. (1992), Nadel and Butterworth (1999), Meltzoff and Prinz (2002), and Hurley and Chater (2005), but among the most relevant for the mimetic hypothesis and its implications are Trevarthen, Kokkinaki, and Fiamenghi, Jr., (1999) and Meltzoff (2002). 6.  For a philosophical application of infant studies in a book-length essay, see Gallagher (2005), who offers a theory of the how the adult mind is shaped by experience, including mimetic experience. For a different interpretation of the data on infant imitation, see Heyes (2001). 7.  See Gallese and Goldman (1998) for a theory of how this relates to inferring the intentions of others in adult-adult interactions. 8.  Meltzoff and Moore found that imitative behavior for newborns can occur after a delay of twenty-four hours. If a mimetic response is delayed, then there must be some form of representation of the modeled behavior that makes this delayed imitation possible. I argue below that this representation includes mimetic motor imagery, which in adults persists indefinitely. 9.  Exertions schemas are analogs of the image schemas of conceptual metaphor theory, which we will consider in chapter 3. 10.  We could refer to this as entrainment, just as when we move in time to music as adults (London 2012; Phillips-Silver, Aktipis, and Bryant 2010), but entrainment is perhaps best understood as a special case of mimetic engagement, as will become clear by the end of chapter 2. 11.  One could also think of abdominal exertions as modally multivalent. The term supramodal might also be adapted for this purpose. 12.  Although abdominal exertions anchor limb and vocal exertions, in exercises such as I have described you might also notice exertions in your leg muscles, revealing the role of the abdomen to be more of a fulcrum. 13.  See Hatten (2004) for an exploration of musical gestures and their role in musical semiotics. In particular, Hatten’s chapter 5 overlaps with the present discussion. 14.  The song lip-synched by Brolsma is Dragostea din tei, performed by the Moldovan pop group O-Zone. A search for “Numa Numa” and “Chinese Backstreet Boys” should immediately produce links to these videos. The number of views does not compare to current popular videos, but the numbers are proportionally comparable when adjusted for the overall number of visitors in 2005 when YouTube was new. 15.  See Luck, Toiviainen, and Thompson (2010) on the perception of conductors’ expression. Per the dominant tradition, perception in this study is taken to be nonmimetic. 16.  It is possible that these finger movements approach imitation of the finger movements of the pianists in those examples involving piano repertoire, and this might extend to the fingerings of the violinists in other repertoire. As always, top-down forces likely contribute as well, such as a notion of Mozart’s music as “refined” influencing both the recorded performances and the intensity and “shape” of participants’ motor responses. 17.  The specialization of neurons within the category of mirror neurons was recognized as early as Keysers et al. 2003. See also Gallese and Lakoff 2005. 18.  Specific brain areas are conventionally referred to without the definite article; thus, “activation of premotor cortex” instead of “activation of the premotor cortex.” 19.  Right cerebellum and bilateral activation in the dorsal pathway reaching premotor cortex. Meaningful actions also elicited bilateral activations in the supplementary motor area and in orbitofrontal cortex.

238  Notes to Pages 000–000

20.  There is an overlap here with the motor theory of speech perception, but I am making only the claims discussed here and basing these claims on the evidence and arguments provided here. 21.  Bilateral mid-temporal gyrus (MTG), left inferior parietal lobule, and left premotor cortex (BA 44/6). This is consistent with early findings in macaques in similar contexts. I should note that the strength of data based on human brain imaging has been called into question by Kriegeskorte et al. (2009), owing to an apparently common failure in statistical analysis of the data; however, Kriegeskorte et al. explain that they have no way of assessing the severity or significance of the distortions. This is relevant for some details of the mimetic hypothesis but not for its basic principles. 22.  This passage is cited in Armstrong, Stokoe, and Wilcox (1995, 43). 23.  Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, from the beginning of chapter 1. Nabokov’s elaboration on the experience of pronouncing this name extends to include the saturation of the entire opening paragraph with the phonemes /t/ and /l/. 24.  The effect was lateralized to the left hemisphere; stimulation of the right hemisphere did not produce comparable results. 25.  For a discussion of music-related brain organization beyond the focus here, see Peretz and Zatorre (2005). 26.  The central implication for the development of musical imagery in musicianship courses (aural skills, ear training) is relatively straightforward: musical imagery combines not only auditory and visual imagery, but also motor imagery. The extent to which the motor component is mimetic is a finer detail. 27.  Premotor cortex, superior temporal sulcus, and the parietal-temporal boundary within the Sylvian fissure. 28.  The areas of activation in Callan et al.: “Left planum temporale/superior temporal parietal region, as well as left and right premotor cortex, lateral aspect of the VI lobule of posterior cerebellum, anterior superior temporal gyrus, and planum polare” (1327). 29.  The VI lobule of the posterior cerebellum, in which they found bilateral activation. 30.  In his conclusion, Crowder writes that “a strictly motoric representational mode (such as singing to oneself) may be ruled out. Humans are utterly incapable of reproducing physically any but the grossest dynamic or spectral features of timbre” (478). 31.  The prompt for the imperative task was staff notation for pianists and tablature for guitarists, each projected onto a screen for three seconds. Pianists played a silenced electronic keyboard; guitarists were instructed to finger but not play the chords. 32.  The areas in question were SMA, mid-premotor cortex, and cerebellum lobule VI. Ventral premotor cortex was active only during the conditions of the first experiment: action-coupled perception (anticipation of action) and action. 2. Mimetic Comprehension of Music 1.  This and the previous chapter constitute a fuller version of Cox (2011). 2.  Neisser (2003) suggests something similar, but in the more specific context of intentional imagery and the construction of metaphor. His emphasis on the shared phenomenology across domains of experience is akin to the approach I take in the following chapters. 3.  See chapter 2 of Franz (2012). 4.  I thank Candace McNulty for drawing my attention to the performative elements of font-related experience.

Notes to Pages 000–000  239

5.  Helen Keller learning to speak despite being both blind and deaf is an extraordinary example of the third point. See this part of her story in Keller (1902), 58–61. 6.  The definition of musical imagery could be expanded to include associated images (such as picturing Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart when hearing “As Time Goes By”), but the main point here is to attend to the motor component of musical imagery. 7.  Limitations: voluntary actions and thoughts are necessarily conscious; conscious actions and thoughts are not necessarily voluntary; and nonconscious thoughts, or brain processes, are necessarily involuntary. 8.  In common-time music that emphasizes beats 2 and 4, such as swing, blues, and rock ’n’ roll, these beats invite mimetic participation in part by way of acoustic emphasis (e.g., hits on the hi-hat, snare drum, etc.). They are musical and physical goals that are layered with those of beats 1 and 3. Preference for engaging primarily with one layer or another, and for music that emphasizes one over the other, is an aesthetic matter based in part on goal-oriented mimetic participation. 9.  Compare Hatten’s use of the term intermodality (Hatten 2004). 10.  This is akin to “energetics,” as described in Rothfarb (2002), and more distantly akin to Clynes’s “sentics” (1977), but the specifics of these relationships are another topic. 11.  The relationship between abdominal exertions, the state of the viscera and the internal milieu (Damasio 1999), and one’s affective state is at once a profound and subtle, or largely hidden, source of musical affect, the processes of which I cannot properly treat in this book. 12.  For the moment I am passing over a number of fine details, some of which I consider more carefully in later chapters. See Moore (2004) for relevant details. 13.  Strictly speaking, pitch is not an acoustic property; there is no pitch until our auditory system transforms the frequency of an acoustic pressure wave into pitch. With respect to mimetic comprehension, however, this distinction does not matter because the transformation occurs prior to awareness, so that pitch in effect is given prior to conceptualization. Pitch height, however, is another matter, as we will see in chapter 4. 14.  Compare Cusick (2006), as referenced in chapter 1. 15.  See Witek et al. (2014) for additional details. 16.  The Italian terms cantabile and ballabile are suitable substitutes for singable and danceable so long as the mimetic and -abile aspects are borne in mind. 17.  I believe it was Anton Kuerti in an issue of Clavier magazine in the 1980s. 18.  Mimetic comprehension of guitarists’ facial expressions can of course amplify the sense of effort. 19.  The issue of coordination in musical performance deserves more consideration than I can provide here, but relevant writings include Agawu (1995), Wallin, Merker, and Brown (2001), and Perlman (2004). See also Margulis (2014), chapter 7, on the relationship between musical repetition and communal overt mimetic participation. 20.  We can also understand Berg’s joining in as a response to feeling excluded. See Ashton-James et al. (2007) and Lakin, Chartrand, and Arkin (2008) on the relationship between mimetic participation and social exclusion in general. 3. Metaphor and Related Means of Reasoning 1.  For a thorough and subtle discussion of the relation between metaphor and music, see Zbikowski (2002) and his other publications listed on his University of Chicago web page, “Lawrence Zbikowski” (http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/zbikowski/), in-

240  Notes to Pages 000–000

cluding especially his concise overview in Zbikowski (2008). In the present context I am addressing only enough of the basics to prepare the explorations and arguments in subsequent chapters, where I cite others who have applied conceptual metaphor theory to music. One of the topics that I am not considering in the present book is metaphor within the domain of music, as discussed in Hatten (1994, 1995, and 2012a) and Spitzer (2004). While the approach that I describe here is certainly relevant to metaphor within the domain of music, a meaningful treatment of that topic would involve a more significant digression than I wish to take in this context. 2.  Though not centered on music, Kövecses (2000, 2002, 2005) offers a helpful introduction to the details of conceptual metaphor theory that likewise considers some of these other reasoning processes. 3.  See chapter 9 of Gibbs (1994), where the examples from children are either concrete-to-concrete or concrete-to-abstract. 4.  The Holmes quote comes from Anu Garg’s A Word A Day, http://wordsmith.org /awad/. 5.  A conceptual metaphor can be thought of as a kind of schema that is realized in particular linguistic expressions, but I am not referring to conceptual metaphors in this way, only to avoid confusion with the other schemas (image schemas) discussed below. 6.  Compare Hatten’s (1995) discussion of the motivational basis of metaphoric conceptualizations. 7.  See Spitzer (2004) and his adaptation of Paul Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor, particularly Ricoeur’s use of the concept of epoché. 8.  The notion of metacategories is comparable to that of blended spaces, discussed in §6. 9.  Or at least consumable / not-consumable. Edelman’s technical use of “recognition” (Edelman 1992), at the molecular level of the immune system, can be understood similarly. Lakoff and Johnson (1999, 17) offer a comparable example. 10.  Efforts at education in this matter reach only a portion of the population, and even in academia such efforts still encounter the general preference for simple categorization. One of the ways that this preference manifests is in the ethics of sex assignment for persons born intersexed; see Sytsma (2006) and Cohen and Sweigert (2001). For a discussion of five biological sex categories in connection with the role of emotions in humans and other animals, see Panksepp (1998, 231–236). 11.  See Johnson (1987), especially 18–30 and 152–165, and particularly his explanation of the path schema on 113–117. See also Lakoff (1987b) and Lakoff and Johnson (1999). The relevance of the path schema for music has been explored by Saslaw (1996), Brower (1997–98, 2000), and Johnson and Larson (2003), and I explore it here in chapter 6. 12.  The path schema is also informed by second- and third-person observation of the motion of others along paths; however, in line with the mimetic hypothesis, the full meaning of such observations normally depends on one’s first-person experience of moving along paths. Exceptions might include the paths of arrows and comets, which would lie near one end of the imitability spectrum (principle 3 of the mimetic hypothesis). I address the role of third-person visual perspectives on motion and space variously throughout the following chapters. 13.  For a helpful exploration of the corporeal-affective dimension of image schemas see Neisser (2003). 14.  Fixed visual representations also disguise the dynamic nature of image schemas, as Johnson emphasizes when qualifying his use of visual representations in introducing the notion of image schemas (1987, 29–30).

Notes to Pages 000–000  241

15.  On musical schemas, see chapter 11 of Huron (2006). For a study of a more specific set of schemas in eighteenth-century classical music, see Gjerdingen (2007). For a synoptic discussion of schemas in terms of action, perception, goals, and planning, see Arbib (2013). 16.  As in the early work of Saslaw (1996), Zbikowski (1997, 1997–98), and Brower (1997–98, 2000). 17.  A scoop is a kind of portamento. A side-slip chord is an embellishing neighbor chord. 18.  The shared components are the invariant elements in cross-domain mapping. See Zbikowski (2002) for a musical application of the invariance principle of Lakoff (1993). 19.  For a semi-overlapping view of schemas in relation to mimesis, see Zlatev (2005), where the emphasis is on deliberate mimetic processes. 20.  This section is based on Johnson (1987) and Sweetser (1990). 21.  Etymologies throughout this book are drawn primarily from Harper (2015). The asterisk attached to PIE roots indicates that the root is inferred. See Deutscher (2005) for an explanation of PIE roots in the context of a larger study of etymology and language evolution. 22.  The category of homonyms overlaps with those of homographs (spelled the same) and homophones (sounding the same), but for the present purpose these distinctions will not matter. 23.  My thanks to Rebecca Leydon for this example. 24.  See Fauconnier and Turner (2002) for a general approach, and see Zbikowski (2002) and Hatten (2012a) for applications to music. For linguistic discussions of the relation between metaphor and conceptual blending, see Grady, Oakley, and Coulson (1997), and Lakoff (2008). 25.  In figure 3.1 I am reversing the customary direction of the arrows in order to match the linguistic form of a is b, where the thing to be conceptualized is specified first: target domain is source domain (target domain ← source domain). 26.  It is of course possible to read the masculine associations as part of the metaphor, in connection with the impulsiveness of the young Romeo in not thinking through his own metaphor. 27.  Conceptual blending theory speaks of spaces instead of domains, but I am using domain in order to facilitate comparison of the two theories. 28.  See Neisser’s (2003) discussion of Black’s (1962) interaction view of how the two domains relate (as opposed to Aristotle’s substitution view). See Hatten (2012a) on the different kinds of relationships that emerge when both domains are musical domains. 29.  See Lakoff (1987a) on the disadvantages of the notion of “dead” metaphors. 30.  These state-location metaphors are part of the location event-structure metaphor, as described by Lakoff and Johnson (1999, 178–206, which is an elaboration of Lakoff 1993), whereby we conceptualize events in general in terms of motion-in-space. These same state-locations metaphors are also in included in Grady’s typology of primary conceptual metaphors (Grady 1997). 31.  The metaphoric meanings of prepositions are not sedimented for us as children, where (when) we first learn the literal meanings and then learn nonspatial uses; see Douglas (2012), chapter 4. 32.  On this issue I recommend the discussion in Deutscher (2005, 244–251). 33.  Verb was originally a nominalization of the act of speaking (PIE root *were-). The “verbifying” expansion to verbify (1823) was subsequently nominalized into verbification. Object, objectify, and objectification follow a similar history, where object was originally a nominalization of the act of throwing (Latin iacere, from the PIE root *ye-, to do).

242  Notes to Pages 000–000

34.  For an exploration of the topic of musical agency from a kindred perspective, see Monahan (2013). For an exploration in terms of music listening as social intersubjectivity, see Palfy (2015). For an exploration in terms of inferring musical agency from a primarily nonmimetic perspective, see Hatten (2012b). 35.  I explore the details of this idea in Cox (2012). 36.  See Spitzer (2004). Larson (2012) identifies Boretz (1989) as the originator of the term “hearing-as” in musical contexts, although the concept goes back at least as far as Kant. 37.  The families are Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Uralic, respectively. Gray and Atkinson (2003) estimate the emergence of the Indo-European language family at 7,800– 9,800 years ago. Blench and Post (2014) estimate the emergence of the Sino-Tibetan, or Trans-Himalayan, language family at around 9,000 years ago. There is broad agreement that Uralic emerged at least 4,000 years ago. 38.  But see Jack et al. (2012) on some specific nonuniversal details in both expression and perception of emotions among Western Caucasian and East Asian participants. 39.  With this correlation in mind we might think of happy is up as an example of synecdoche (part-for-whole) instead of metaphor. The pertinent issue, however, is the bodily basis, which applies whether we categorize this as metaphor or synecdoche. 40.  See note 25 concerning the direction of the mappings. 41.  Here is an etymology based on Harper (2015): Greek melos, song, from PIE *mel-, a limb, + oide, song; related to aeidein (Attic aidein), to sing; aoidos (Attic oidos), a singer, singing; aude, voice, tone, sound, probably from PIE *e-weid-, and perhaps from root *wed-, to speak. A connection to auditory is apparent; however, the roots of this term in listening (as in aural and oracle) direct us to a likely connection between speaking and listening. 42. Bach’s Aria with 32 Variations (“Goldberg Variations”); Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, op. 111 (“Arietta”); Franck’s Prelude, Aria, and Finale. 43.  See Seitz (2005) for a typology of metaphors beyond music. 44.  As we will see, cross-domain mapping is generally more specific than the notion of transfer, but the shared spatiality is the pertinent issue here. In the metaphor known as metaphor, the target domain (A) is the practice of understanding one domain of experience in terms of another, and the source domain (B) is the act of carrying something from one place to another. The conceptual metaphor is then understanding a in terms of b is transferring b-ness to a. Of course, this transfer (mapping) is of only a portion of the source domain into the target domain, or else the difference between the domains would disappear and there would be no metaphor. 4. Pitch Height 1.  Pitch height is fictional in that it is culturally constructed. It is illusory in that it can seem to be a perceptible property of sounds—even when one understands its fictional basis. 2.  The following account overlaps somewhat with Duchez (1979), Guck (1991), and Zuckerkandl (1956), but explores details not previously considered from the perspective described here. 3. The Oxford English Dictionary distinguishes nineteen categories, thirteen of which are metaphoric. 4.  In James Clavell’s 1975 novel Shogun, the English protagonist hangs a pheasant outside for several days to allow it to become high: slightly tainted and thus more flavorful.

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5.  Exalt also has a literal meaning: to set something in an elevated position. 6.  The intoxicated meaning of high might involve a different logic, in addition to or instead of greater is higher. 7.  Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have shown how we also map height onto goodness, happiness, consciousness, and rationality, in terms of the closely related metaphor more is up. 8.  The proposition that mimetic subvocalization is a normal part of musical imagery understandably meets doubt and often outright rejection from some musicians, even while others find it to be obvious. Chapters 1 and 2, along with appendix I, acknowledge that this embodied cognitive process varies in strength and nature among individuals, including the extent to which one is, or can be, aware of it. 9.  Translation is from the Blue Letter Bible online: https://www.blueletterbible.org /kjv/gen/21/16/s_21016. 10.  I thank Robert Hurwitz for this example and leading me to this ancient conception of height in relation to the human voice. 11.  I thank Joshua Levy for help in clarifying the use of these two words. 12.  See Duchez (1979) for a fuller treatment of this part of the story. 13.  See Pettersen et al. (2005), who found a tendency toward increased activity in the respiratory muscles among advanced classical singing students when singing their highest notes. The fact that this does not necessarily correlate with a salient feeling of effort is important as an exception. 14.  Singers, especially in opera and art song, learn the technique of “head voice” (voce di testa), which blends falsetto with chest voice in various proportions. Both of these generally involve a pronounced difference from the lower register of “chest voice” (voce di petto) in male voices. 15.  The paradox in the Problemata applies to instruments of greater size, such as the double bass, tuba, and contrabassoon, where greater size correlates with lower pitch. Within the range of each of these instruments, however, the paradox all but disappears; there are “high” and “low” notes on any instrument and in any human voice. 16.  Classical singers have a variety of more specific uses of these terms, but I am using these in the more general sense in which head voice is commonly equated with falsetto (however inaccurate this may be from some perspectives) and chest voice is understood as “full voice.” 17.  In holding a hand to the throat you might notice your larynx ascending slightly as its muscles constrict, and this is sometimes cited as a source of the concept of pitch height. I am not sure how salient this is for most people, but for those who are aware of this movement, this is an additional source of the concept. 18.  We do not commonly speak of “higher” and “lower” exertion or effort, but the magnitude of exertion and effort are integral to the phenomenon that is conceptualized. 19.  A sense of effort also applies in the experience of mental effort, although I am not sure to what extent this might contribute to the concept of pitch height. 20.  For string instruments, the increased finger pressure required as one plays closer to the bridge (in connection with leverage) takes part in the same correlation between greater exertion and effort and higher pitch, even if the extent of its contribution is another matter. I thank Jack Boss for this example. 21.  Apart from this reference to loudness in its technical sense, for the present purpose I am using volume in the common loose sense, in lieu of the more precise acoustical terms.

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22.  Brumm (2006) found that some birds in urban environments, such as the great tit (Parus major), have raised the overall pitch of their calls relative to birds of the same species outside urban environments, plausibly to be better heard amid the noise of a city. What a person might do in specialized temporary circumstances, these urban birds have adapted as the norm. 23.  Another term is spectral centroid, but its alternate visual metaphoric basis would be unhelpful here: in such spectra, greater (“higher”) frequencies are represented to the right, not vertically, while greater (“higher”) amplitude is represented vertically. 24.  The practice of lead alto saxes in jazz bands, and singers performing with orchestras, of tuning slightly sharp increases prominence not simply by being very slightly out of tune (otherwise playing or singing slightly flat might achieve the same effect), but by increasing the timbral intensity and the ability to “cut through” the rest of the ensemble. 25.  This part of the lecture begins at 14:13. The situation is complicated by the change in pitch of the engines, but the issue at hand concerns the difference between microphones (or those used in the 1960s, when this oddity was noticed) and human ears. 26.  Huron (2011a) and Eitan et al. (2012) also discuss the metaphors for pitch used by persons who are born blind and those who lose their sight early in life. 27.  Huron (2011a) points out that congenitally blind listeners do not learn the correlation, while listeners with acquired blindness (when acquired after the age of approximately five) do learn the correlation, and he explains how this implies that the ear and the eye coordinate in learning the correlation. However, since observing, for example, planes taking off and landing presumably is rare in the first five years of life for most persons, the question arises as to how often we perceive individual sound sources, or particular species of sound sources, at different elevations. Or perhaps the correlation does not depend on perceiving individual sound sources at different elevations and the process is more subtle. 28.  The verticality in staff notation involves an extra cognitive step when the page lies flat. It also involves another extra step in that lower notes in one system are above higher notes on the system below. These low-level issues involve bracketing paradoxes (or disanalogies) in our metaphoric conceptualization. 29.  Tone-related musical terms (diatonic, intonation, tune, etc.) grow out of this etymology, as do muscle tone (literal), fine tuning (usually metaphoric), etc. 30.  We can use a similar formulation for the other properties of sound (timbre, duration, strength, and location). 31.  If it seems that I have merely taken the long way around to using pitch as it is used in the field of music psychology, where pitch chroma is distinguished from pitch height, the term chroma reflects the same problem and trades metaphoric height for metaphoric color. 32.  That said, I can imagine other accounts of the logic of pitch height that embraced gravity as a source. My main interest here is to indicate that its relevance, particularly in connection with the embodied experiences of listeners, is not as straightforward as it might seem. 33.  This fictional world can then be understood as part of the substrate of the analytical fictions discussed in Guck (1994). 5. Temporal Motion and Musical Motion 1.  The metaphor of architecture as frozen music is often attributed to Goethe: “‘I have found, among my papers,’ said Goethe, ‘a leaf, in which I call architecture frozen

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music. There is something in the remark; the influence that flows upon us from architecture is like that from music.’” Eckermann (1839), 282. But compare this remark from book 4, chapter 3, of de Staël’s novel Corinne, or, Italy (1807): “The sight of such a monument is like continual and stationary music” (La vue d’un tel monument est comme une musique continuelle et fixée) (Hoyt 1922). It seems that the notion may have been generally current in Europe at the time. Goethe may well have offered the complementary metaphor, that music is liquid architecture, but I have not found it. 2.  For a more thorough and otherwise differently organized discussion of kinds of musical motion, see Bharucha, Curtis, and Paroo (2006), particularly 157–165. 3.  Among the most familiar are Epstein (1995), Hasty (1981, 1997), Kramer (1988), and London (2012). 4.  My application of conceptual metaphor theory to the topic of musical motion overlaps with those by Saslaw (1996, 1997–98), Brower (1997–98, 2000), and Johnson and Larson (2003). The difference is in the attention to the experience that motivates the concept. The theory of conceptual blending has been applied to music by Zbikowski (1997, 1997–98, 1998, and 2002). For additional details see Fauconnier (1985, 1997) and the very approachable Turner (1996). 5.  In focusing on the phenomenology of anticipation, presence, and memory, my approach overlaps with Husserl’s (1991) discussion of protention, attention, and retention and Augustine’s (1991) discussion of expectat, adtendit, and meminit (see book 11, chaps. 14–28), but my focus is primarily on the connection with conceptual metaphor theory. 6.  This is from Lakoff and Johnson (1999), some principles of which are also reflected in McTaggart (1908). For an application of McTaggart’s analysis to music, see Lochhead (1989–90). 7.  Here I return again to Damasio’s emphasis on maintenance of homeostasis as the prime motivator of action and thinking. 8.  I thank Anna Shelow for bringing to my attention the importance of these other directions. I also thank Mark Johnson for bringing to my attention the work of Lera Boroditsky, cited in what follows. 9.  These two scenarios are more symmetric than McTaggart’s B-series and A-series, but the divergences go beyond what we need to consider in order to gain the basic understanding of musical time and space that I am offering. 10.  The Joni Mitchell example is from “River,” from the 1971 album Blue. The pronoun it in the opening line, It’s coming on Christmas, is more complex than a human pronoun would be, but the difference only affects the entity that is understood to be approaching Christmas. 11.  See Callender (2002), in which several of the authors respond in this way to McTaggart (1908) either directly or indirectly. 12.  Exist is from Latin ex- + sistere, cause to stand (compare assist); hence, standing out, standing forth. Exist is ultimately spatial but not necessarily locomotive. 13.  Late originally meant slow, sluggish, lazy, from Old Germanic *lato-, *lat-, and PIE *led-, slow, weary. 14.  PIE root *pet- is also the source of pinna (wing), the outer ear in humans and other vertebrates, discussed in chapter 4. 15.  Gertrude Anscombe (1971) tells the following story involving Ludwig Wittgenstein: “He once greeted me with the question ‘Why do people say that it was natural to think that the Sun went around the Earth rather than that the Earth turned on its axis?’

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I replied ‘I suppose because it looked like the Sun went around the Earth.’ ‘Well’ he asked ‘what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the Earth turned on its axis?’” (151). This story exemplifies the ease with which one can mistake a tacit interpretation for a perception of an absolute fact of the matter, independent of interpretation or biased conceptualization. I thank Martin Jones for directing me to this story. 16.  One could distinguish levels of what is given, such that temporal motion is “given” at the level of habituated conceptualizations: it is given in the linguistic habits of the cultures that shape developing minds. As factual as this may be, acknowledgement of this fact does not necessarily help in understanding the constructed nature of this sense of what is given. 17.  Zuckerkandl quotes Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in making his argument (Zuckerkandl 1956). 18.  Strictly speaking, the spatial foundations of the prepositions of and between create tautologies by representing spatiality in the nonspatial target domain of musical states (as explained in chap. 3). The alternative formulations in parentheses here remove the tautologies. 6. Perspectives on Musical Motion 1.  See Hasty (1997, 10–13 and 91–95), where he quotes Fraisse’s remarks on what in this context amounts to mimetic participation (Fraisse 1982). Regarding the other use of “projectionism,” see Zuckerkandl’s discussion of its contributions and limitations with regard to rhythm and meter. More broadly, the mimetic hypothesis is nevertheless consistent with Zuckerkandl’s wave theory of meter and the notion of listeners’ “sympathetic oscillation” (Zuckerkandl 1956, 168). 2.  This view of first-, second-, and third-person positions is distinct from that described in Leman (2008, chap. 4). 3.  In Cox (2012) I focus on the implications of this tripartite perspective with respect to the subjectivity of music listening, where I speak of a tripartite subjectivity. 4.  London cites Cooper and Meyer (1960, 139) as the source of the notion of loud rests. See also chapter 6 of London (2012, example 6.6; example 5.6 in the first edition, 2004). 5.  One’s experience of this event is also contingent on the familiarity and aesthetic attitude that one brings to the experience. This includes Huron’s explanation of schematic and veridical prediction, along with the extent to which one is willing or able to “play along” (akin to Walton’s concept of make-believe) or to immerse oneself in the aesthetic experience. If this event in the Beethoven is not felt to be a salient event, then there is no “loud rest” to be explained. 6.  These four perspectives are described in Cox (1999a). Three of these (all except the exterior perspective on the stationary observer) are also discussed in Johnson and Larson (2003), Johnson (2007), and Larson (2012). 7.  The following overlaps in part with Cox (2012 and forthcoming). I am leaving aside the relationship with narrativity because of the complexities involved, but I will suggest that the same processes of embodied cognition are relevant to music and narrativity generally. For an introduction to some of the basic issues, see Maus (2014). 8.  The following is adapted from Cox (2006). 9.  See Watkins (2011) for insights into Schenkerian “depth” in connection with the concept of “depth” in nineteenth-century German classical music. Graphic represen-

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tations of Schenkerian analyses conventionally locate the background at the top of the page and the foreground at the bottom—a paradox that results from the practicalities of a two-dimensional visual representation of a three-dimensional space. 10.  I do not know that greater is faster occurs as a conceptual metaphor, but if it does it is not as pervasive as greater is higher. Since the correlations in Eitan and Granot are across domains, and thus involve metaphor, it may be that greater is faster is folded in along with other less pervasive metaphors. But the more idiosyncratic a metaphor is, the less value there is in identifying its underlying conceptual metaphor, as in silence is a salve and people are celestial bodies in chapter 3. 11.  There is then the most generic metaphorical space as well, musical space, which subsumes all the generic spaces and all the musical motion. 12.  At other scales it is also analogous to the movement of electrons within an otherwise solid dinner table, or to the movement of stars that comprise a galaxy. These are extreme examples of the multiplicity-to-mass image-schema transformation described in Lakoff and Johnson (1999, 145). 13.  By contrast, for those who feel as though they are moving through time with the accompaniment (that the accompaniment is a moving entity and not a location), there is only the paradox of mimetically moving in two different ways simultaneously. 14.  From another perspective this is not a misattribution at all; however, such a perspective hinges on what one takes to be the definition of music, as I consider in chapter 10. 15.  To the extent that diachronic experience includes “jumping back and forth in time,” recalling events and imagining possible and likely events, there is no “pure” diachronic experience of music. By the same token, nondiachronic (or synchronic) analysis commonly includes a sense of the temporal relations of the parts under study. Explicit nondiachronic analysis can be said to set aside normal musical experience temporarily for the purpose of better understanding normal musical experience. 16.  See Johnson and Larson (2003, 79–80) on the pluralistic ontology of musical motion. 17.  I offer additional thoughts on this in Cox (2013). 18.  The authors do not happen to cast their arguments in terms of first-, second-, and third-person perspectives; I am merely aligning their analysis with the notion of tripartite subjectivity. 19.  Ecstasy: Greek ekstasis: ek-, out, + histanai, to place, from *sta-, to stand. Transport: “across-carry.” Emotion: Latin emovere: ex- + movere; hence, ways of being moved, and thence, kinds of emotions. 20.  One thing that I have not included in these chapters is the location event structure metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 179–194; Johnson and Larson 2003). The number of details and variables explored in chapters 4–6 is multiplied in this larger cognitive structure, and I have chosen to focus on what I take to be some of its underlying foundations. 7. Music and the External Senses 1.  This chapter is in effect an exploration, in the context of music, of some of the principles in Sweetser (1990, chap. 2). 2.  In addition to Sweetser (1990), see Evans and Wilkins (2000) for relevant details. 3.  The herb sage appears to be a genuine homonym, coming from Latin salvus, healthy (Proto-Indo-European *sol-, whole), and not from Latin sapere, to have good taste; to be wise (PIE *sap-, to taste).

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4.  By contrast, but following the same principle, the origin of the idea of persuasion is based on an analogy with sweetness: per- + suadere, from PIE *swad- sweet, pleasant, which is also the source of suave. (The sense of “sweet” in dolce, however, has a different root: PIE *dlk-u-.) To find an argument convincing is another matter: it is to be conquered (com- + vincere), which is an aspect of argument is war (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). 5.  One can substitute see, understand, and know for hear in this expression and feel the slightly different meaning in each case. 6.  In this brief comparison of the five external senses I have not distinguished listening from hearing, looking from seeing, touching from feeling, tasting from savoring, or sniffing from smelling. These relationships are relevant in the bigger picture, but they are not essential to the basic picture that I am developing. With respect to music-related auditory processing, see Kane (2014) on the relationship between entendre, écouter, ouïr, and comprendre. 7.  Etymologically related terms include index, indicate, and diction. 8.  The likeness for seeing includes an amodal, or supra-modal, feeling of knowing that can involve any sensory modality or combination of modalities. For example, when I taste the soup and say, “I see what you mean about how a pinch of cinnamon adds depth,” this “seeing” is unlike vision at the level of tasting, but at another level it is like stepping back, into a third-person position, and beholding the relationship among gustatory parts. Similarly, metaphoric following includes a portion of the temporal-ordinalspatial reasoning explored in chapters 5 and 6. 9.  I am not distinguishing neurological and mental representations in this context. 10.  See Sweetser (1990) for more on the relationship between the seeing and grasping. For example, grasping is more concrete than seeing, and grasping thus sometimes serves as the source domain for vision, as in seeing is touching (as in making “eye contact”) and seeing is grasping (as in “be-hold”). 11.  In addition to Boroditsky’s work cited in chapter 5, Boroditsky (2011) offers a nonspecialist introduction to this larger issue. 12.  I explore these issues to a limited extent in Cox (1999a, 1999b), but see Kane (2014) for a more thorough exploration in connection with acousmatics. 13.  The reviewer is identified only as H. K. M. (1918). O’Toole (2010) quotes this review as part of his investigation of the origins of the oft-repeated remark, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” His research points to comedian-actor-musician Martin Mull as the likely originator of this more recent version of the simile. 14.  See Leppert (1993) for an exploration of music-performing bodies and the mutual influence between these, their visual representations in painting, and broader cultural constructions of embodiment in seventeenth–nineteenth-century Western Europe. 15.  See, for example, Huron (2015) for a discussion of the relationship between facial expressions and musical affect. 16.  Maysles said words to this effect in an interview once broadcast on television; I have been unable to find record of it. 17.  Scorsese made this remark on the NBC television program Today, aired Septem­ ber 22, 2003. 18.  This is not to say that there are not invisible features in our access to the material of each of the other arts. Scorsese is simply drawing attention to two of the most salient features of musical experience. Note also that he did not say of music that “it’s invisible and it’s intangible.” Invisibility and intangibility matter because they preclude our seeing

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and touching; the inabilities highlighted by “can’t see it” and “can’t touch it” are integral to the nature of the experience. 19.  Obviously the power of the eye is another matter for those born blind and for those who have lost their sight. Each of us has our own set of abilities and vulnerabilities, with each kind offering actual and potential advantages and disadvantages; the sighted are sometimes “blind” to available elements of experience. 20.  On supervision and oversight, see Foucault (1977) for a fuller treatment in the context of the history of imprisonment. On the relationship between hearing and obeying, compare Clifton (1983, 287–290) and Kane (2014, 273, n. 115). English obey is from Old French obeir and Latin obedire, to obey, serve, pay attention to, give ear; literally “listen to,” from ob, to (toward) + audire, listen, hear. 8. Musical Affect Epigraph: Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962, screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson). 1.  If, as I might have done myself, you have turned to this chapter before reading the previous chapters, let me emphasize that the perspective offered in this chapter does not stand particularly well on its own. Apart from the relationship between spatial concepts and musical affect, the story here depends on the arguments in chapters 1, 2, and 7. 2.  The breadth of current psychological research on music and emotion is well represented in Juslin and Sloboda (2010). Philosophical writings, such as those of Budd (1985) and Kivy (1989, 1990), intersect only occasionally with the view presented here. Robinson (2005, chap. 13) and Robinson and Hatten (2012) intersect somewhat more directly, but most closely akin is Ridley (1995), particularly in his attention to musical-vocal melisma and the roles of sympathy and empathy in music listening. 3.  I believe that these eight avenues can accommodate most if not all of the various experimental findings on music and emotion; however, it is not my purpose to persuade specialists to adopt a framework which plainly reflects my interest in the connection to metaphoric reasoning. Readers interested in a synoptic view meant for specialists, and the challenges that this entails, should see the six-part (seven-part) view in Juslin and Västfjäll (2008) and the commentaries published along with it. See also Huron (2015) for a consideration of mechanisms of affect induction, two of which intersect with the framework described here: mimetic participation and associations. 4.  I am distinguishing this from, for example, the systematic study of counterpoint, in which considerations of affect are integral (e.g., in attending to the affective consequences of dissonant suspensions), whether or not these considerations are discussed explicitly in terms of affect. 5.  This perspective is akin to the notion of a “spectrum of affective musical experience” described by Bharucha and Curtis (2008). In this way I am using affect more broadly than it is sometimes used in empirical research. 6.  This perspective is derived from Damasio (1999). One could distinguish conscious and nonconscious states and consider the implications of “listening to music” during sleep and/or of having music-related dreams. 7.  See London (2012, 25–33) on some specific limits. 8.  See Palfy (2015) on social affordances in music listening. This issue also bears upon the notion of tripartite subjectivity that I describe in chapter 6, as well as the nature of listening subjectivity as described in Cumming (2000).

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9.  For this purpose I am not distinguishing expectation, prediction, and anticipation. Huron (2006) distinguishes anticipation from expectation in this way: anticipation is “the subjective experience accompanying a strong expectation that a particular event will occur” (409). He uses prediction in a way that does not require language (see 357–358 for a summary). 10.  See also chapter five of Margulis (2014) on the processes involved in repeated exposure to particular musical works and practices. 11.  See chapter 6 and Cox (2012) for an explanation of tripartite subjectivity. 12.  This conjecture is broadly consistent with the celebrated study by Strack, Martin, and Stepper (1988) in which holding a pen in the mouth in different ways shaped participants’ affect-related judgments. It is also consistent with the principle that deliberate adjustment in posture, facial expression, and/or vocalization can shape one’s affective state. 13.  The question of what is expressed may be relatively straightforward in some cases, but in many cases, particularly in instrumental music, it is not. Semiotic approaches concerned with embodiment are among the most amenable to the processes described in this chapter and the next, particularly Cumming (2000) and Hatten (1994, 2004), who examine the combined questions of who, what, and how in connection with musical affect. The present discussion is relevant to the etiology of expressive musical agents discussed by these two authors. 14.  Bear in mind that the focus here is on the fact that listeners have affective responses to music, and that listeners commonly approach musical experiences as if music expresses emotions. Kivy’s notion is relevant in this connection, but the philosophical tradition from which it emerges does not align well with the tripartite, cognitive perspective under consideration. See Kania (2014) for a survey of some of the relevant Western philosophical approaches. 15.  As in Stravinsky’s familiar remark on the subject (Stravinsky 1936, 53–54). His reference to illusion and to confusion of apparent expression with music’s essential being is consistent with the process I have sketched here. 16.  The mimetic aspect involves feeling what it would be like to have the same impact upon other listeners. I believe that this is generally relevant but that it is secondary. 17.  A composite effect will emerge from a string of repeated impacts. Also, at least in principle the salience of the impacts can fade, but I am not sure how often or to what extent this occurs. I find that the impact of the repeated notes in Schubert’s Erlkönig fade somewhat over time but that they do not become negligible. 18.  The issues related to levels of conceptualization explored by DeBellis (1995) apply to the asking and answering of such operating questions. Kane (2014) describes the related question How does he do that? in connection with the music of Les Paul, which can be understood as a special case of How does it work, where “it” is the process used by Paul. (The analysis of affective-cognitive processes in the present book is itself an example of explicit analysis of processes.) 19.  I take this paragraph to be consistent with Guck (1996, paragraphs 13–14). I explore the general matter of our relationship with music in chapter 10. 20.  Because the mere exposure effect operates nonconsciously, its relationship with explicit analysis is partly paradoxical. I thank Elizabeth Margulis for directing my attention to this matter. I am not sure precisely how this relationship plays out in the overall picture, but when we undertake explicit analysis, implicit analytical processes operate in parallel; whether and how this might include the processes of the mere exposure effect is a question to be explored.

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21.  I thank Charity Lofthouse for the idea of the gradual, fuller integration of the quasi-third-person component. In paraphrase: The effort in acquiring explicit understanding is responsible for the sense of being pulled out of immersion, but with practice comes greater cognitive efficiency and, consequently, less of a sense of being pulled out of immersion as the three components in tripartite engagement become both more equal and less distinct. 22.  For the sighted, music listening always also includes a visual component, even if or especially if this component is “empty,” as in listening to recorded electronic music with one’s eyes closed. 23.  Huron (2015) also suggests a role for mimetic comprehension in the induction of affect in listeners. 24.  Philosophical discussions of the matter of enjoying negative emotions in musical experience can be found in Budd (1985), Kivy (1989, 1990), and Levinson (1997b). Notable empirically informed approaches include Garrido and Schubert (2013), Kawakami et al. (2013), Schubert (1996), and Vuoskoski et al. (2011), although Huron (2011b) and Huron, Anderson, and Shanahan (2014) best align with the ideas offered here. 25.  These kinds of taboos are often subtle and more personal than the other sources of affect, and I believe that the extent of their relevance is easily underestimated. If they tend not to generalize to as many listeners and musical contexts as some other factors, they are nevertheless part of the whole story. 26.  As Panksepp (1998) emphasizes, reference to a binary “fight or flight” response is inaccurate in that it excludes the freeze response. The freeze response may be the only one of the three that is normally relevant to engaged music listening. (Actual flight from a concert hall and the act of turning off a recording, for example, are acts of aesthetic disengagement). 27.  Skin contraction simultaneously raises bumps around the base of hair follicles (hence, goose bumps), which is commonly explained in connection with conserving heat (raised hair as an insulator) and/or appearing larger to potential threats. Both of these functions can be understood as adaptations of a more ancient contraction/freeze response. 28.  In some respects I am merely offering a conjecture as to the underlying mechanisms of the vulnerability discussed in Maus (1993). 29.  Huron’s conjecture (2012), that emotional tears are part of an adaptation of an allergic response to a disagreeable stimulus, would make tears, a lump in the throat, etc., the analogs of chills. 30.  Since the effect here depends to a great extent on there being an everyday power that is suspended or enfeebled, this avenue of affect is fundamentally different for blind listeners, with likely differences between congenitally blind persons and those who have lost their sight at some point during their life. 31.  That is, the relative “invisibility” of invisibility, intangibility, and ephemerality. In focusing on the invisibility of sounds I am of course setting aside the significant visual components of musical experience. In addition to Leppert’s exploration of cultural history of the sight of music-performing bodies (Leppert 1993), there is an extensive literature on the role of observed bodies in music perception. This literature includes many of the references I cited in relation to the mimetic hypothesis (chaps. 1 and 2), but readers interested in additional research can find numerous empirical and empirically founded papers at the websites of Rolf Inge Godøy (University of Oslo) and Marc Leman (Ghent University).

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32.  The various kinds of invisibility of sound sources are part of the acousmatics of music; see Kane (2014). 33.  As it is in the observation of manipulable tools (Chao and Martin 2000), which is consistent with Gibson’s theory of affordances (Gibson 1979). 34.  Related to this is fear of the dark, in connection with the disempowered eye, and waking while still in a state of sleep paralysis (REM atonia), in connection with the disempowerment of the hand and the rest of the musculoskeletal system. 35.  See Margulis (2014) for details on some of the relevant processes. 36.  Hence, the notion of truth as something that endures, like a hard thing, like a tree, as we considered in chapter 5 with regard to duration: PIE *deru-/*dreu- to be firm, solid; whence, tree, truth, trust, troth, durable, endurance. 9. Applications 1.  As an alternative to this homogeneous grid, one might imagine the size, shape, and color of each cell continuously changing through the course of an experience. At a larger level, one might also attempt to represent the character of different formal sections or the entirety of a work via a composite image. 2.  For those with no exposure to Western music for strings, a spontaneous description of this opening as “strange” would have a different basis. 3.  That is, schematic anticipation, as discussed in chapter 5. 4.  The music can be understood as an expression of Stockhausen’s compositional plan and as an expression of Stockhausen’s feelings about music and the kinds of experi­ ence(s) that music might and/or ought to offer. (This applies to composed music generally.) The music can also be understood as the electromechanical expression of the “instructions” of the composition, loosely analogous to the biological expression of genes. 5.  It is notable that Stockhausen renamed the work from Bewegungen (movements; motions) to Studie II (Stockhausen 1963, 44), although this fact naturally affords various interpretations. For example, on the face of it the more generic name of Studie II encourages attenuation of the connection to motion, which is roughly analogous to indicating tempo in beats per minute rather than via motion-related terms such as andante. However, regardless of the title of the work the conceptual metaphors states are locations and change is motion remain relevant, and they will nevertheless motivate (but not guarantee) a metaphoric sense of motion. 6. Or cyborgs, a term coined by Clynes and Kline (1960—the same Manfred Clynes cited in chaps. 1 and 2). The relationship between humans and machines in the performance of electronic music is a large topic, particularly in connection with the emergence of controllers that translate the movements of various body parts in live performance, but one source, if now somewhat dated, is Bahn, Hahn, and Trueman (2001), who notably refer to Donna Harraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” chapter in Harraway (1991). 7.  Unlike explicit reflection and analysis, it may be that implicit analysis, such as the neurological processing of harmonic intervals, does not move one toward a quasi-thirdperson position. 8.  We can think of melody and accompaniment in terms of a figure-ground relationship, but in the present context this would be helpful only if the listener’s relationship with the figure were understood to include quasi-first-person engagement. 9.  See Lakin, Chartrand, and Arkin (2008) on the relationship between social mimicry and inclusion/exclusion. Dido’s abandonment by Aeneas can be understood as a

Notes to Pages 000–000  253

special case of social exclusion, the distress of which is expressed or enacted vocally, to her sister, in this soliloquy. Dido’s relationship with her environment is reflected in the quasi-social relationship between the melody and the accompaniment. If the metarelationship between a narrative relationship (a narrator and her diegetic environment) and the relationship between melody and accompaniment applies somewhat obviously to recitatives and arias generally, the contribution of the perspective I am describing concerns an audience member’s tripartite experience and comprehension of these relationships. 10.  I take the following to be compatible with the perspective in Marion Guck’s (1996) analysis of the same movement. 11.  Other celebrated examples in which this plays out include Bach’s “Erbarme dich” and Bellini’s “Casta Diva.” 12.  The demographics of my choice of repertoire in this chapter is a compromise that goes against my broader interest in inclusivity, but for the overall purpose of this book this seemed an optimal compromise. In another context I intend to show more directly how this approach can be applied to other repertoires and practices, including examples mentioned only in passing in earlier chapters. 13.  One of the more common ways that this plays out is in the ordinariness of a given feature. For example, a continuous meter or a straightforward tonal center might not draw attention to itself, but the ease of comprehension that they afford is integral to affective responses. But another way in which this plays out reflects habits of focus, as in the role of timbre: it is always relevant and even crucial to the feel of any music, but a habit of not attending to it in musical studies can disguise its potency. 10. Review and Implications 1.  I am thus using “fiction” in the sense that our metaphors are elemental stories that we learn and pass on to others. These can then become part of larger stories, such as the analytical fictions described by Guck (1994). See also Moreno (2005). 2.  For a semiotic perspective that blends lower-level and higher-level processes, see in particular chapter 3 of Cumming (2000). 3.  I am passing over finer details in order to focus on the basic point at hand. 4.  See chapter 2 for the range of analogous, or congruent, mimetic representations. 5.  I am arguing from the premise that even though metaphoric concepts have a top-down dimension and are given to me in a cultural sense, my full understanding nevertheless involves the bottom-up processes described in earlier chapters and that are at issue here. 6.  I once presented one of my teachers with a bottle of fine cognac (Hennessy XO), and after pouring an ounce into a warmed snifter, admiring its color and bouquet, and finally tasting and savoring its flavor, texture, warmth, and lingering complexity, he raised the glass and pronounced it liquid Brahms. Cognac and the music of Brahms are nothing alike on the surface, in their objective flavors and sounds, but the experience of the two can be enough alike to motivate such a cross-domain categorization. 7.  If there is a spectrum of amusia, then there would be a spectrum of musia, but it may be helpful to think of all of these in terms of a single spectrum, with each of us having an innate and acquired set of music-related abilities and proclivities. This would overlap with the spectrum of mimetic abilities and proclivities, and it might overlap with what are commonly referred to as specialties among musical performers and scholars. Prefer-

254  Notes to Pages 000–000

ences with regard to musical practices and ways of experiencing, responding to, and understanding music might then reflect an individual’s set from among this spectrum. 8.  The series of questions and answers can be found in Cox (2012). 9.  As I recall it now, the composer Herbert Brün once said in a lecture that, rather than saying that he disliked a given musical work, he preferred to think of the situation as not liking himself in the presence of the music. I like to think that this view is largely consistent with a tripartite perspective. In the bigger picture this applies to the study of art generally, as well as to an understanding of the bases of other individuals’ and groups’ values. 10.  Whatever areas of research this might assist, it can be especially useful in introducing undergraduate students to some of the specifics of how, for example, gender is relevant in various musical contexts, from the music for different characters in opera to considerations of larger cultural issues. 11.  See Correia (2010) for an empirically founded kindred view. Appendix I: Mimetic Subvocalization and Absolute Pitch 1.  In English, the same word can be intoned at different pitch heights and with different contour to carry different connotations (known as “intonation”), but with Mandarin what might sound to a non-Mandarin speaker like the same word said differently can in fact be a different and unrelated word. 2.  However, Mandarin does not depend on absolute pitch. The contours of its four tones are fixed, but their overall pitch range is relative to a given speaker’s voice. 3.  See Zatorre (2003) for a discussion of the variables relevant to developing AP. Appendix II: Levels of Abstraction Among Metaphors 1.  This generic level also includes concrete is concrete, abstract is abstract, and concrete is abstract, although abstract is concrete and concrete is concrete presumably are the more ancient. 2.  See Grady (1997) for a taxonomy of primary conceptual metaphors. 3.  “Type 3” sonata form is from Hepokoski and Darcy (2006).

Notes to Pages 000–000  255

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Index Note: Page numbers for figures and musical examples are italicized, followed by f. Page numbers for tables are italicized, followed by t. Conceptual metaphors appear in small caps. MMA and MMI represent mimetic motor action and mimetic motor imagery, respectively. abdominal exertions, 18, 45–46, 238nn11– 12, 240n11 absolute pitch, 19, 56, 231–232 abstract conceptual domains, 166 abstract is concrete, 70, 233–235, 255n1 acoustic-auditory fact, 46, 185–187, 240n13; experience and conceptualization of, 222; interface with analysis, 188; interface with cultural associations, 190; in a musical work, 154. See also duration; 5 × 8 framework; location (sound); pitch; strength (volume); timbre and timbral intensity acoustic impact: as an avenue of musical affect, 185–187, 195, 251n16; in Stockhausen’s Studie II, 210. See also musical sounds acoustic motion, 110 action schemas, 65, 66 Adlington, Robert C., 111 aesthetic attitude, 194–195, 225, 247n5 aesthetic evaluation, 227, 228 aesthetic interest versus practical interest. See mimetic motor action (MMA), description of; mimetic motor imagery (MMI) affect, 4, 81, 199, 220, 240n11; happy is up, 74–76. See also anticipation; desire; homeostasis, maintenance of; mimetic engagement; motor imagery; musical affect Agawu, Kofi, 201 air guitar, 20, 32 amodal imitation, 45–46. See also crossmodal and amodal mimetic behavior

amusia and musia, 225, 254n7 Ancient Greeks: conception of pitch, 95; staff notation, 90 Andrews, Julie, 48 Angelou, Maya, 58 Anscombe, Gertrude, 246n15 anthropomorphization, 73. See also mimetic engagement anticipation: as an avenue of musical affect, 179–182; compared to prediction, 251n9; and desire, 114–115; kinds of, 130–131, 247n5; role in cognition, 6; in Stockhausen’s Studie II, 209. See also affect anticipation-presence-memory, 121–125; mimetic and nonmimetic components of, 135; role in musical affect, 176; and state-location metaphors, 126–127 architecture, metaphor with music, 109, 225, 245n1 Aristotelian Problemata, 89, 244n15 Aristotle, 237n1 (chap1) Ashley, Richard, 86 asymmetries of musical space, 146–147 Atmosphères (Ligeti), 48 Atticus Finch, 108 auditory-motor schemas, 44 auditory perception: music perception by young children, 18–19; nonvocal sounds, 25–26, 239n21; speech, 25, 26– 28; vocal and instrumental music, 28– 34. See also hearing; motor theory of music perception; musical sounds; perception auditory receptivity. See receptivity

Aurelian of Réôme: Musica disciplina, 90 Australian Aborigines’ conception of pitch, 94, 95 aversive responses to music, 202, 207, 209, 212, 227. See also mimetic engagement Aymara language speakers, 112–113, 116 Aziz-Zadeh, Lisa, et al., 76 Bach, Johann Sebastian: Cello Suite in G major, 42; “Erbarme dich” (St. Matthew Passion), 254n11; Goldberg Variations, 78, 243n42; partitas, 33, 52; two-part inventions, 49 Barber, Samuel: Piano Concerto, 182 Barker, Andrew, 86, 89, 90 Barthes, Roland, 28 “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” 29 beat. See downbeats and strong beats Beethoven, Ludwig van: “Hammerklavier” Sonata, 47, 240n17; “Moonlight” Sonata, 190–191; Piano Concerto no. 4, 213; Piano Sonata, op. 111, 78, 91, 243n42; Symphony no. 3, 138–139, 138f, 247n5; Symphony no. 5, 130–131, 186, 222, 233; Symphony no. 9, 104 behavior, use of term, 12 Bellini, Vincenzo: “Casta Diva” (Norma), 254n11 Berg, Alban: Violin Concerto, 182 Berio, Luciano, 224; Visage, 195 Berry, Wallace, 132 Billy the Kid (Copland), 186 binary categorization, 63–64, 241n10 Bizet, Georges: “Habañera” (Carmen), 193 bodily comprehension of metaphoric concepts, 76–77 bodily exertions. See exertion and effort bodily representations of actions, 40–41 body language, 19–22 Boroditsky, Lera, 115 Boroditsky, Lera, and Alice Gaby, 116 Boroditsky, Lera, Orly Fuhrman, and Kelly McCormick, 115 bottom-up processes, 2, 76, 104, 156–157, 254n5 Brahms, Johannes: Piano Concerto no. 2, 154; Symphony no. 1, 30, 31 breathing, 178–179

274 Index

Brodsky, Warren, et al., 42, 80 Brolsma, Gary, 21; Dragostea din tei, 238n14 Brower, Candace, 147, 153 Brumm, Henrik, 245n22 Brün, Herbert, 255n9 Byrd, William: Mass for Three Voices, 52 Callan, Daniel E., et al., 29–30, 239nn28–29 Carmen (Bizet), 193 Carnegie Hall, 130 categorization: role of metaphor in, 4–5. See also musical meaning change is motion, 71, 106, 125–127 Chartrand, Tanya L., and John A. Bargh, 20 Chatwin, Bruce, 94 Chen, Joyce L., Virginia B. Penhune, and Robert J. Zatorre, 34 child and infant studies: child-caregiver interactions, 16–18, 238n8, 238n10; musical perception, 18–19; overt imitation, 15–16 chills as fear response, 193–195, 252nn26– 27, 252n29 “Chinese Backstreet Boys,” 21 Chopin, Frédéric, 78 chords, mimetic comprehension of, 50 circle of fifths, motion through, 148–149 climactic moments, 92, 97 “Cloches à travers les feuilles” (Debussy), 151–153, 152f Clynes, Manfred, 22, 240n10 Clynes, Manfred, and Nathan S. Kline, 253n6 Coltrane, John, 48 composers: as expressing agents, 183; musical decision-making of, 227; role in mimetic invitation, 47 conceptual blending theory, 67–69, 69f, 122f, 123, 242n25, 242n27. See also conceptual metaphor theory; source domain, description of; target domain, description of conceptualization, 80; of abstract experience, 59; meaning of, 40; musical sound and action, 81; role of mimetic comprehension in, 54; of timelessness, 197. See also conceptual metaphor

theory; human cognition; knowledge and understanding; metaphor; musical meaning Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (Zbikowski), 6 conceptual metaphors, 70–71. See also specific conceptual metaphors conceptual metaphor theory, 2, 58, 241n5; anthropomorphization, 73; categorization, 62–64; domains and mappings, 60–61, 68f, 77–79, 78f, 80, 165– 166, 243n44; image schemas, 64–66, 241n14; kinds of metaphors, 69–71, 79; levels of abstraction in, 233–235, 234f, 235f; linguistic relationships, 66–67, 242nn21–22; logical entailments, 71– 72; metaphor in human cognition, 74–77; musical affect and, 1; in music scholarship, 6; nominalization and verbification, 72, 224, 242n33; objective and subjective bases, 62; principles of, 60–62, 241n1. See also conceptual blending theory; conceptualization; Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson; metaphor, concept of; source domain, description of; target domain, description of; and specific conceptual metaphors conductors’ movements, 22 conscious and nonconscious processes in imagery, 12–13, 237n2 consciousness and self-identity, 4 container schema and its paradoxes, 153–156 continuity and discontinuity. See Webern, Anton: Five Movements for String Quartet control. See power and control Copland, Aaron: Billy the Kid, 186 Corelli trio sonata genre, 214 Corinne, or,, Italy (de Staël), 109, 245n1 Crawford Seeger, Ruth: String Quartet, 148 crescendo and decrescendo, 98, 146 cross-cultural metaphors, 74–76, 243n37 cross-domain mappings, 68, 68f, 79, 80, 243n44; human voice and instrumental music, 77, 78f; of pitch height, 102t, 106; temporal and musical motion, 127–129,

128f; verticality and pitch, 106–107, 107f, 245n28 cross-modal and amodal mimetic behavior, 17–18. See also amodal imitation; intramodal imitation cross-modal imitation, 45 Crowder, Robert, 239n30 cultural and personal associations, 252n22; as an avenue of musical affect, 189–192; in Stockhausen’s Studie II, 211 Cumming, Naomi, 14, 29, 251n13 Cusick, Suzanne, 14 Damasio, Antonio, 3–4, 6 danceability, 47, 201–202, 240n16 dancing: children’s, 17–18; cross-modal imitation in, 45; expert dancers’ imagery, 24 Davidovsky, Mario: Electronic Study no. 1, 202 Davis, Miles, 53 Debussy, Claude: “Cloches à travers les feuilles” (Images), 69, 70, 151–153, 152f; Nuages, 148; use of metaphor, 1 Decety, Jean, and Julie Grèzes, 24 density, theory of, 111 Descartes’s Error (Damasio), 6 Desdemona, 183 desire, 16; and anticipation, 114–115; motivating motion along a path, 147– 148, 151; role in musical affect, 176; suspensions and appoggiaturas, 213–214, 214f, 215. See also affect; goal-directed action Deutsch, Diana, Trevor Henthorn, and Mark Dolson, 231 Dewey, John: Experience and Nature, 231n1 (Introduction) Dickinson, Emily, 173 “Dido’s Lament” (Purcell), 213, 216–217, 216f, 253n9 Die Erlkönig (Schubert), 186, 210 difference is distance, 125–127 Dissanayake, Ellen, 6, 17 dissonance, 98, 107–108; and meter, 215– 219, 254n11; of suspensions and appoggiaturas, 213–215 Donald, Merlin, 237n1 (chap1)

Index  275

Donatus, 90 downbeats and strong beats, 43, 137–139, 180, 240n8; meter and dissonance, 215–219, 254n11; mimetic participation with, 240n8 Drost, Ulrich C., Martina Rieger, and Wolfgang Prinz, 33 Duchez, Marie-Elisabeth, 86 duration: brevity and attention, 206–207; conceptual metaphor for, 121; contribution to acoustic impact, 186; mimetic representation of, 46; Proto-Indo-European root (PIE), 253n36. See also acoustic-auditory fact Dvořák, Antonín: “New World” Symphony, 30, 44, 102–103 Dylan, Bob, 212 ecstasy, 158, 248n19 education, implications for, 225–228, 239n26, 255n10. See also teaching and learning Eitan, Zohar, and Renee Timmers, 86, 146, 147 Eitan, Zohar, and Roni Y. Granot, 88, 98, 146, 248n10 Eitan, Zohar, Eitan Ornoy, and Roni Y. Granot, 245n25 electronic music, 12, 37, 187, 210–211, 219, 253n6. See also Stockhausen, Karlheinz Electronic Study no. 1 (Davidovsky), 202 embellishments, 65, 242n17 embodied cognition: meaning of, 2; metaphoric reasoning in experience, 157. See also metaphoric reasoning Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, The (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch), 6 emotional state as source of pitch height, 100 ensemble music, 49–50, 178 ephemerality. See invisibility, intangibility, and ephemerality epistemologies of musical experience, 170– 173, 222–223 Erwartung (Schoenberg), 91 Escher, M. C.: Relativity, 168

276 Index

etymology. See linguistic metaphors; Proto-Indo-European roots (PIE) Eurydice, 183 Evans, Nicholas, and David Wilkins, 165, 168 evolutionary theory: development of embodied minds, 3–4; metaphoric reasoning, 74–76 exertion and effort, 17–18; as an avenue of musical affect, 178–180; in comprehension of the beat, 137–139; in experience of time, 126–127; and quiet sounds, 207; role in musical affect, 176; as source of pitch height, 97–98, 244n13, 244nn18–20. See also mimetic engagement; mimetic participation; mimetic subvocalization exertion schemas, 18, 65–66, 238n9 Experience and Nature (Dewey), 231n1 (Introduction) expertise: effect on mimetic responses, 51–52; role in mimetic comprehension, 24, 32–33, 37. See also specialized knowledge exposure effect, 48–49, 51, 56, 181; effect on motion along a path, 148; in musical analysis, 189, 251n20; and posttonal music, 206, 210. See also mimetic engagement; repetition expression: as an avenue of musical affect, 182–185, 251n13; mimetic participation in Webern’s music, 205–206; in Stockhausen’s Studie II, 209–210, 253n4 face perception, 50 Fadiga, Luciano, Laila Craighero, and Etienne Olivier, 27 falsetto, 90–91 fear. See chills as fear response feeling: being moved by music, 158; conceptualization of, 228 Feeling of What Happens, The, 6 Feldman, Morton: The King of Denmark, 182; Rothko Chapel, 207 Ferneyhough, Brian: La Chute d’Icare, 50 fictions, creation of, 222, 254n1 finger movements, studies of, 22, 238n16

first-person perspective. See tripartite perspective in music listening 5 × 8 framework: applied to Stockhausen’s Studie II, 208–213; applied to tonal music, 213–219; applied to Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet, 204–208; description of, 200–201, 203, 203t, 219–220, 253n1; in music curricula, 226. See also acoustic-auditory fact; musical affect, avenues of Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5, no. 4 (Webern), 200, 201–208, 204f Four Last Songs (Strauss), 155–156 Franck, César: Prelude, Aria, and Finale, 78, 243n42 frequency (of acoustic waves) as source of pitch height, 93–94, 96–97, 100–101 Fuhrman, Orly, and Lera Boroditsky, 115

Grewe, Oliver, et al., 193 Grèzes, Julie, Nicolas Costes, and Jean Decety, 24 Guck, Marion, 69, 245n33, 254n1. See also music-literal, concept of Guitar Hero (video game), 20–21

Hagar (Genesis 21:16), 88–89 Halpern, Andrea R., and Robert J. Zatorre, 30 Halpern, Andrea R., et al., 31–32 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 164, 228 “Hammerklavier” Sonata (Beethoven), 47, 240n17 “Happy Birthday,” 44 happy is up, 74–76, 243n39 harmonic-melodic resolution, 149–150, 149f, 159 Hasty’s theory (projection), 135 Gazzola, Valeria, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, and Hatten, Robert S., 143–144, 145, 251n13 Christian Keysers, 25 Haueisen, Jens, and Thomas R. Knösche, Gesang der Jünglinge (Stockhausen), 195 32–33 gestural signs, 19–20; in Webern’s music, head voice and chest voice, 95–96, 244n14, 205–206 244n16 gesture theory, 143–144 hearing: and perceiving, 159; as a source Gibson’s theory of affordances, 253n33 domain, 165. See also auditory percepGilberto, João, 193 tion; listening “Girl from Ipanema, The,” 193 Hebrew speakers, 115 Glennie, Evelyn, 41 Heinlein, Robert A., 67 goal-directed action Hickok, Gregory, et al., 29, 239n29 : activation of MMA and MMI, 43; high, definitions of, 86–87, 243nn3–4, goal-directed imitation, 24–26, 27; and 244nn5–6. See also magnitude, expemusical affect, 182. See also desire rience of Godøy, Rolf Inge, 28 high notes, 85, 88–89, 90–91. See also pitch Godøy, Rolf Inge, Egil Haga, and height, sources of Alexander Refsum Jensenius, 20 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 58, 60, 62, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 109, 245n1 241n4 Goldberg Variations (Bach), 78, 243n42 Holst, Gustav: “Mars, the Bringer of War” Goodman, Nelson, 111 (The Planets), 148 gradus ad parnassum, 130 homeostasis, maintenance of, 3–4, 54–55, gravity and pitch, 106–107, 245n32 114–115, 187, 246n7. See also affect greater is higher, 61–62, 70–72; asymHomo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From metry in, 146–147; counterexamples, 92, and Why (Dissanayake), 6 244n15; historical background of, 88– human cognition: development of, 59; 90; levels of abstraction involving, 233– metaphor as feature of, 74–77; role of 235, 234f, 235f; logic of, 90–92; and pitch mimetic comprehension in, 54–55. See height, 85, 92–95, 97–100, 102–104, 103t. also conceptualization See also magnitude, experience of human development, 3–4, 15–16

Index  277

human voice: as source domain for metaphor, 77–79, 78f Huron, David, 154–155, 193; downbeats and strong beats, 137–138; on expectation, anticipation, and prediction, 115, 180, 181, 189, 247n5, 251n9; exposure effect, 48–49; pitch and elevation, 100, 101, 245nn25–27; Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, 6 Huron, David, Neesha Anderson, and Daniel Shanahan, 191 illusion and fiction, 222–223, 246n15. See also temporal motion imagery, 12, 237n2 image schemas, 64–66, 241n14 imitation, overt and covert, 11–13. See also under mimetic imitative behavior, general, 16–17 inference in applying 5 × 8 framework, 201 inhibition, meaning of, 40 instrumental music: instrumental sounds are vocal sound, 77–78; intramodal imitation of specific instruments, 32–34; related to pitch height, 102–104, 103t; subvocalization in recall of, 30–31 intensity, mimetic representation of, 46 interior and exterior perspectives on musical motion, 139–143, 140f, 141t intertexuality as source of affect, 190–191 intramodal imitation, 45–46 invisibility, intangibility, and ephemerality, 249n18, 253n32; as an avenue of musical affect, 195–197, 252n31; in Stockhausen’s Studie II, 212–213 invitation to participate, 14. See also mimetic invitation Isidore of Seville, 86, 90 “It’s Coming on Christmas” (Mitchell), 119 “I Want It That Way” (video) (Chinese Backstreet Boys), 21 Jay, Martin, 166 “Jingle Bells,” 29 Johnson, Mark, 54, 64, 147, 241n14 Johnson, Mark, and Steve Larson, 133, 157, 158

278 Index

Jones, Marie Reiss, 137 “Joy to the World,” 29 Kaluli of New Guinea, conception of pitch, 94, 95 karaoke, 21 King of Denmark, The (Feldman), 182 Kivy, Peter, 184, 251n14 knowing is seeing, 113, 165, 166–168, 249n8. See also seeing, cognitive representations of; vision knowledge and understanding, 166, 169; compared to innocence and confusion, 188; role of sensory experience, 163–165, 170, 249n6. See also conceptualization Kövecses, Zoltán, 6, 75, 76, 164 Kreisler, Fritz, 130 Kriegeskorte, Nikolaus, et al., 239n23 Lacey, Simon, Randall Stilla, and Krish Sathian, 76 La Chute d’Icare (Ferneyhough), 50 Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, 2, 6, 58, 100; metaphoric containers, 153; temporal motion, 109, 112, 116, 117. See also conceptual metaphor theory landscape as a type of musical container, 155 Larson, Steve, 106–107 leaps and steps, 76, 224; leap schema, 65– 66, 242n18 Leman, Marc, 14, 28 Leppert, Richard, 252n31 Levitin, Daniel J., and Susan E. Rogers, 231 Lewin, David, 142–143 Lidov, David, 14, 28 Lieder ohne Worte (Mendelssohn), 78 Ligeti, György: Atmosphères, 48; Musica Ricercata, 186. See also posttonal music Lincoln Memorial steps, 168 linguistic metaphors, 79. See also nominalization and verbification linguistic relationships, 66–67, 242nn21– 22. See also Proto-Indo-European roots (PIE) listeners: as co-performers, 222; experience of pitch (See pitch height, sources of); as expressing agents, 183; listener’s desire, 14; mimetic participation of, 142,

180; and musical cues, 191–192; role in mimetic invitation, 48 listening: being quiet, 196–197; extent of mimetic participation in, 56; hearing as, 73, 243n36; to posttonal music, 210; relationship to imitation, 11–13; tripartite perspective in music listening, 135– 136, 139, 143, 247n3; vulnerability in music listening, 173. See also hearing Liszt, Franz: Nuages gris, 148 location (sound): conceptual metaphor for, 70–71; contribution to acoustic impact, 187; mimetic representation of, 46. See also acoustic-auditory fact; musical motion; state-location metaphors Lochhead, Judy, 109, 112, 116 Locke, John, 80 locomotion, experience of, 121 London, Justin, 138 L’Orfeo (Monteverdi), 104 loudness and volume. See strength (volume) low, definitions of, 88 low notes, 91–92, 244n15 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 58 machines, mimetic engagement with, 39 magnitude, experience of, 87. See also greater is higher; high, definitions of Magritte, René: The Treachery of Images, 172 Malloch, Stephen N., 17 Mandarin speakers, 115, 231, 255nn1–2 Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth, 179 Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth, et al., 33–34 “Mars, the Bringer of War” from The Planets (Holst), 148 Martianus Capella, 86, 90 Mass for Three Voices (Byrd), 52 Maysles, Albert, 172 McLuhan, Marshall, 166 McTaggart, John E., 116, 246n9 Mead, Andrew, 14, 178–179 melody, 243n41; auditory imagery for, 30; as metaphor, 78–79 Meltzoff, Andrew N., and M. Keith Moore, 238n8 Mendelssohn, Felix: Lieder ohne Worte, 78

mere exposure effect. See exposure effect Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 231n1 (Introduction) metacategories, 63, 241n8 metaphor, concept of, 58–59, 60, 61, 241n1; elements of conceptualization, 150; kinds of, 69–71; novel and conventional, 69–70; reach of, 80–81. See also conceptualization; conceptual metaphor theory; metaphoric reasoning Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Kövecses), 6 metaphoricity, 70; happy is up, 75–76 metaphoric reasoning: asymmetries of musical space, 146–147; being moved by music, 158; container schema and its paradoxes, 153–156; example in Schubert’s Piano Sonata, 144–145; mimetic participation and musical motion, 135–139, 157–158; motivation for, 156–157; music as agent, 143–145; path schema and its paradoxes, 147–153; perspectives on temporal and musical motion, 139–143; psychoacoustic component of musical motion, 145–146. See also metaphor, concept of; sedimentation process Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Kövecses), 6 Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson), 6 meter and dissonance, 215–219, 254n11 Meyer, Leonard, 180 mimesis, 237n1 (chap1) mimetic and nonmimetic processes, 15, 16, 135–136, 222. See also auditory perception; epistemologies of musical experience; mimetic engagement; mimetic hypothesis, principles of; musical affect, avenues of; tripartite subjectivity mimetic comprehension. See conceptual metaphor theory; mimetic hypothesis, principles of; musical affect, avenues of; neurological studies of MMI and MMA; pitch height, sources of; psychological studies of imitation; vocal and instrumental music, evidence for MMI

Index  279

mimetic engagement, 238n10; with different kinds of music, 46–48; effect of inaccurate MMI, 52–53, 240n18; and goal-oriented action, 25, 43; in live and recorded performances, 50–51, 52; with loud rests, 137–139, 247n5; nature of, 15, 38–39, 184. See also affect; anthropomorphization; aversive responses to music; exertion and effort; exposure effect; mimetic hypothesis, principles of; mimetic participation; musical affect, avenues of; tripartite perspective in music listening; tripartite subjectivity mimetic hypothesis, evidence for. See neurological studies of MMI and MMA; psychological studies of imitation; speech, evidence for MMI; vocal and instrumental music, evidence for MMI mimetic hypothesis, principles of, 12–14, 45–51, 53–54; mimetic behavior (general), 38–45; mimetic behavior (specific to music), 45–51, 53–54; mimetic comprehension as part of human cognition, 54–55; questions, concerns, and doubts about, 55–57, 244n8; social reward of mimetic participation, 53, 240n20; sounds and their sources, 36– 38; variations in mimetic engagement, 51–53. See also mimetic engagement; mimetic participation mimetic invitation, 46–48; of ensemble music, 49–50; lack of, 209; in posttonal music, 201–202. See also mimetic participation mimetic motor action (MMA), description of, 12, 38, 39, 239n2. See also mimetic participation; motor imagery; neurological studies of MMI and MMA mimetic motor imagery (MMI), 238n8, 239n2; and absolute pitch, 231–232; description of, 12, 38, 39, 237n2; in human development, 16. See also mimetic participation; motor imagery; neurological studies of MMI and MMA mimetic participation, 231n1 (Introduction); and affect, 157; as an avenue of musical affect, 178–180; and anticipation, 181–182; cross-modal imitation,

280 Index

45; defined, 15; in ensemble music, 49– 50; and expression in Webern’s music, 205–206; and goal-directed action, 43; and hearing the beat, 137–139, 234n8; with melody and accompaniment, 152– 153, 248n13; resistance to, 48–49; role in phenomenology of musical motion, 157–158; in Schubert’s Piano Sonata, 144–145; singing along, playing along, and air guitar, 20–22; in Stockhausen’s Studie II, 209; with suspensions and appoggiaturas, 213–215; voice leading, 149–151, 149f. See also exertion and effort; mimetic engagement; mimetic hypothesis, principles of; mimetic invitation; mimetic motor action (MMA), description of; mimetic motor imagery (MMI); musical affect, avenues of; psychological studies of imitation; tripartite perspective in music listening; tripartite subjectivity mimetic subvocalization, 28–32; and absolute pitch, 232; and dissonance, 214, 216–217; and feeling of exertion, 91; and pitch height, 85; in recall and perception of music, 88, 244n8; in recall of melodies, 88. See also exertion and effort; subvocalization minuet and trio, 65 mirror neurons, 23, 238n17 Mitchell, Joni, 119 MMA. See mimetic motor action (MMA) MMI. See mimetic motor imagery (MMI) Molnar-Szakacs, Istvan, and Katie Overy, 28 Monteverdi, Claudio: L’Orfeo, 104 “Moonlight” Sonata (Beethoven), 190 Morley, Thomas: A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Musicke, 86 motion-toward, 114–115 motor imagery, 221. See also affect; mimetic motor action (MMA), description of; mimetic motor imagery (MMI) “Motor-Mimetic Music Cognition” (Godøy), 28 motor theory of music perception, 29–30, 239n26. See also auditory perception; perception

moving and stationary observer scenarios, 116–117, 117f, 118–119, 122–125, 126–127, 155–156, 246n9. See also musical motion: four perspectives on; tripartite perspective in music listening moving time metaphor, 116 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: “Ach, ich fühl’s” (Die Zauberflöte), 182; Oboe Quartet, 43; Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 488, 217–219, 218f; Requiem, 110 Mull, Martin, 249n13 Münte, Thomas F., Eckart Altenmüller, and Lutz Jäncke, 33 musia and amusia, 225 music, definitions of, 223–225 music, writing about, 170, 249n13 Musica disciplina (Aurelian of Réôme), 90 musical affect: conceptual metaphor theory and, 1; difficulties related to, 220; role of mimetic participation in, 53. See also affect musical affect, avenues of: acoustic impact, 185–187, 195, 251n16; analysis, 187–189; anticipation, 180–182; associations, 189–192, 252n22; expression, 182–185, 251n13; invisibility, intangibility, and ephemerality of musical sounds, 195–197; mimetic participation, 178–180; summary and description of, 176–178, 197–199, 220, 250n1, 250nn3–6, 254n13; taboos, 192–195. See also 5 × 8 framework; mimetic engagement; mimetic participation; tripartite subjectivity musical containers, 154–155 musical cues and emotion, 191–192 musical events: definition of, 124; metaphoric conceptualization of, 150 musical experience: components of, 223; conceptualization of, 176; and issues of identity, 227–228, 255n10; role of intention in, 224–225 musical imagery: definition of, 41, 240n6; motor imagery in, 41–42; nature of, 221; teaching and learning about, 239n26 musical knowledge and understanding, 170–173

musical meaning: and bottom-up conceptualization, 2; through metaphoric reasoning, 229; use of 5 × 8 framework for understanding, 227. See also categorization; conceptualization musical metaphors to describe extra-musical experience, 225, 254n6 musical motion, 54–55, 109; conceptualization of, 111, 122f, 123, 224; conceptual metaphor for, 71; cross-domain mappings, 127–129, 128f; definition of, 132– 133; four perspectives on, 139–143, 140f, 141t; kinds of, 110–112, 136–137; mimetic and nonmimetic components of, 135; paradoxes of, 148–156; phenomenology of, 111, 121–129, 246n5; in Stockhausen’s Studie II, 211, 253n5; use of visual terms for, 167. See also location (sound); mimetic participation; temporal motion musical motion and space, theory of, 124–125 musical performances, visibility in, 171, 195 musical preferences, 228, 255n9 musical schemas, 64–65 musical sounds: and acoustic impact, 185; invisibility, intangibility, and ephemerality of, 195–197, 252n31. See also acoustic impact; auditory perception; sounds and their sources musical space, metaphor of, 248n11 musical work, 124 music analysis: as an avenue of musical affect, 187–189, 195, 251n18; and exposure effect, 251n20; levels of, and affective response, 189, 252n21; perspective adopted for, 142; in Stockhausen’s Studie II, 210–211; and tripartite subjectivity, 188, 189, 215, 253nn7–8 music and agency, 73, 79, 137, 143–145; and emotional expression, 183, 184–185, 251n15; moving through a landscape, 148–151; and musical cues, 191–192 Musica Ricercata (Ligeti), 186 music is language, 79 music is organic life, 79 music is painting, 79 musicking, 224, 231n1 (Introduction)

Index  281

music-literal, concept of, 69–70, 133. See also Guck, Marion music theorists, 232 “My Favorite Things,” 48 Nabokov, Vladimir, 26–27, 239n23 Nakamura, A., 98 Necker figure, 116, 117–118, 118f, 246n9 negative emotions and experiences, 192–193 Neisser, Ulrich, 16, 26, 239n2 “Nessun dorma” (Puccini), 43, 91 Neuhoff, John G., and Michael K. McBeath, 98 Neuhoff, John G., Michael K. McBeath, and Walter C. Wanzie, 98 neurological studies of MMI and MMA, 23–25, 238nn17–19; instrumental sounds, 31–34, 239nn30–31; nonvocal sounds, 25; rhythm and meter, 34, 239n32; vocal sounds, 29–30, 239nn28– 29. See also mimetic motor action (MMA), description of; mimetic motor imagery (MMI) “New World” Symphony (Dvořák), 30, 102–103 nicknames, 60 Nike commercial, 55 Nishitani, Nobuyuki, and Riitta Hari, 27 nominalization and verbification, 72, 224, 242n33. See also linguistic relationships Nuages (Debussy), 148 Nuages gris (Liszt), 148 “Numa Numa” (video) (Brolsma), 21 Nuñez, Rafael E., and Eve Sweetser, 112, 113 observer scenarios. See moving and stationary observer scenarios ocularcentrism, 166 “Old Man River” (Showboat), 21–22, 53 organic metaphors, 79 Pachelbel, Johann: Canon, 189 Paddison, Max, 237n1 Panksepp, Jaak, 193 Pater, Walter, 170 path schema, 64, 147–153, 241n12 Paul, Les, 251n18

282 Index

pedal point, 144–145, 144f, 151–153 perception: definitions of, 223–224; and illusory perception, 118–119; meaning of, 40. See also auditory perception; motor theory of music perception; time: perception of; visual perception and MMI performances: live and recorded, 50–51, 52, 100; visible elements of, 171, 195 performers: and evidence of MMA and MMI, 32–34, 239n31; as expressing agents, 183; imitation of, 21, 57, 179–180; and musical cues, 191–192; musical decision-making of, 207–208, 227; role in mimetic invitation, 47–48 personification, 73 Phillips-Silver, Jessica, and Laurel J. Trainor, 19 Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff and Johnson), 6 pictorial metaphors, 79 pitch: conceptual metaphors for, 104–105, 105t, 245n31; mimetic representation of, 46, 240n13. See also acoustic-auditory fact pitch height: contribution to acoustic impact, 186; and experience of vocalizing, 90–92; implications of conceptualization, 107–108; meaning of, 85, 243n1; use of visual terms for, 167; as Western concept, 86 pitch height, sources of, 92–104; correlation of pitch and elevation, 100–101, 245nn25–27; emotional state, 100; exertion and effort, 97–98; frequencies, 93–94; head voice and chest voice, 95– 96, 244n14, 244n16; loudness and volume, 98–99, 244n21, 245n22; propagation, 96–97; staff notation, 94–95, 101, 245n28; summary of, 92–93, 101– 104, 102t, 103t; timbral intensity, 99, 245nn23–24. See also high notes pitch imagery: role in timbre imagery, 31–32 pitch taboos, 193 Plaine and Easie Introduction to Musicke, A (Morley), 86 planned action, 44–45

Poème Electronique (Varèse), 202 poetic metaphors. See metaphor, concept of: novel and conventional Pormpuraawans (Australian Aboriginal), 116 posttonal music, 227, 254n12. See also Ligeti, György; Stockhausen, Karlheinz; Webern, Anton power and control: enactment through the senses, 173–175, 174t. See also understanding is grasping; volition, consciousness, and overtness practical interest versus aesthetic interest, 38, 239n2 prediction. See Huron, David: on expectation, anticipation, and prediction; moving and stationary observer scenarios prediction effect, 48–49, 181 printing fonts, 39 Problemata (Aristotelian), 89, 92, 244n15 Prokofiev, Sergei: Piano Concerto no. 2, 98; Romeo and Juliet, 52 Proto-Indo-European roots (PIE), 242n21; conceptualize, 80; duration, 253n36; knowledge and understanding, 166, 169; melody and singing, 243n41; nominalization and verbification, 72, 242n33; order, 120; outer ear, 246n14; taste, 249n4; teaching, 167, 249n7; terms of manipulation, 169; time terminology, 120–121, 126, 246nn12–14; vision terminology, 166–167. See also linguistic metaphors psychoacoustic component of musical space, 145 psychoacoustic motion, 110 psychological studies of imitation: children and caregivers, 15–19; social interactions of adults, 19–22. See also mimetic participation Puccini, Giacomo, 91; “Nessun dorma” (Turandot), 43 Purcell, Henry: “Dido’s Lament” (Dido and Aeneas), 213, 216–217, 216f, 253n9 quantities: experience of, 87–88 Quasthoff, Thomas, 22, 53

quiet music, 49; and bodily exertions, 52, 193, 207; as taboo, 193 quietness (being quiet), 196–197 Rachmaninov, Sergei, 130 Raposo, Ana, et al., 76 receptivity, 174–175, 185, 194; auditory, 174– 175; invisibility and intangibility of musical sounds, 196; role in musical affect, 176 recognition, meaning of, 40 reenactment and mimetic motor imagery, 29, 44 Relativity (Escher), 168 repertoire of possible actions, 44 repetition, 179. See also exposure effect Repp, Bruno H., and Günther Knoblich, 33 Requiem (Mozart), 110 respiration, 178–179 rhythm: and evidence of MMI, 34. See also duration Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky), 148 Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Cirradi Sinigaglia, 40–41 Rock Band (video game), 20 Rohrer, Tim, 76 Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev), 52 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare): metaphors in, 61, 62–63, 68–69, 68f, 69f, 242nn25–26 Rothko Chapel (Feldman), 207 Saslaw, Janna, 147, 153 Schenkerian analysis, 197 Schenkerian depth, 145–146, 247n9 Schoenberg, Arnold: Erwartung, 91 Schubert, Franz: Die Erlkönig, 186, 210; Die Schöne Mullerin, 183; Piano Sonata in A Major, D. 959, 143–145, 144f; “Unfinished Symphony,” 43 Scorsese, Martin, 163, 170, 173, 249n18 second-person perspective. See tripartite perspective in music listening sedimentation process, 70, 71, 78, 80, 242n31. See also metaphoric reasoning seeing, cognitive representations of, 168. See also knowing is seeing

Index  283

sensory experience: and mimetic comprehension, 41, 240n5; power and control related to, 174; role in knowledge and understanding, 3, 163–165, 249n6 sentics, 22, 240n10 Shakespeare, William, 58; Hamlet, 164, 228; Macbeth, 58; Romeo and Juliet, 61, 62–63, 68–69, 68f, 69f, 242nn25–26 sharpness and flatness, 99 sharpness and heaviness, 86, 89–90, 95, 99 Shostakovich, Dmitri: Viola Sonata, 190–191 silence, 38, 60, 62, 187, 196–197, 209. See also sounds and their sources Silver Apples of the Moon (Subotnick), 186, 202 simulation, involuntary, 24 simulation theory, 23 singability, 47, 55–56, 240n16; of posttonal music, 201–202; of Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet, 206 singing: classical singers’ experience of, 90–91, 244n13; and instrumental music, 78–79; vocal exertions in, 88–89 singing along, 20, 21–22 Sloboda, John, 193, 194 SMA. See supplementary motor area (SMA) Small, Christopher, 224, 231n1 (Introduction) smell as a source domain, 164 social rewards of mimetic participation, 53, 180, 240n20 sounds and their sources: being quiet, 196– 197; electronic music, 211; as evidence of human motor actions, 37–38; familiar sounds, 36–37; features comprising sounds, 46; mimetic and nonmimetic engagement with, 73; silences, 38. See also musical affect, avenues of: invisibility, intangibility, and ephemerality; musical sounds; silence source domain, description of, 60. See also conceptual blending theory; conceptual metaphor theory source-path-goal schema, 148 spatial concepts: components of musical affect, 176; nature of, 159

284 Index

specialized knowledge: effect on mimetic responses, 51–52. See also expertise speech, evidence for MMI, 25–28, 239n20 “Spem in alium” (Tallis), 49–50 Spencer, Herbert, 28 Spitzer, Michael, 79, 111 stability and instability, 213–215 staff notation, 79–80, 221; emergence of, 90; motor imagery in reading, 42; as source of pitch height, 94–95, 245n28; as visual representation, 171–172 state-location metaphors, 125–127; emotional state-locations, 158. See also location (sound); states are locations states are containers, 153–154 states are locations, 70–71, 242n30; levels of abstraction involving, 233–235, 235f; and pitch height, 106; Schenkerian depth, 145, 247n9; in temporal and musical motion, 121, 125–127. See also statelocation metaphors stationary observer scenario. See moving and stationary observer scenarios steps. See leaps and steps Stern, Daniel, 183–184 “Still I Rise” (Angelou), 58 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 195; Studie II, 200, 202, 208–213, 253nn4–5. See also electronic music; posttonal music Strack, Fritz, Leonard L. Martin, and Sabine Stepper, 251n12 strangeness in music, 205, 253n2 Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), 67 Strauss, Richard: Four Last Songs, 155– 156; “Morgen!,” 217; Tod und Verklärung, 213 Stravinsky, Igor, 251n15; The Rite of Spring, 148 strength (volume), 187; contribution to acoustic impact, 187; loudness effect, 98; quiet sounds, 207; as source of pitch height, 98–99, 244n21, 245n22; as taboo, 193. See also acoustic-auditory fact Studie II (Stockhausen), 200, 202, 208–213, 253nn4–5 sublimity, 154–155 Subotnick, Morton: Silver Apples of the Moon, 186, 202

subvocalization, 28; conceptual metaphor related to, 77–78; and mimetic hypothesis, 56. See also mimetic subvocalization Sumer is icumen in, 116 “Summer Madness” (Kool & the Gang), 55 Sundara, Megha, Aravind K. Namasivayam, and Robert Chen, 27 supplementary motor area (SMA), activation of, 29–30, 31–32 suspensions and appoggiaturas, 213– 215, 214f Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Huron), 6 Sweetser, Eve, 166, 174 symphony (form), 154 taboos: as an avenue of musical affect, 192–195, 252nn24–25; in Stockhausen’s Studie II, 211–212 Tallis, Thomas: “Spem in alium,” 49–50 target domain, description of, 60. See also conceptual blending theory; conceptual metaphor theory taste, 249n4; as a source domain, 164, 244n4, 248n3 teaching and learning, 249n7; 5 × 8 framework, 207; metaphors related to sensory experience, 167; musicianship courses, 239n26; posttonal music, 206. See also education, implications for temporality: of MMA and MMI, 43–44; terminology to describe, 119–121 temporal motion, 109; challenge of metaphor, 129–130, 247n16; and change of state, 131–132; cross-domain mappings, 127–129, 128f; experience of, 126–127; four perspectives on, 139–143, 140f, 141t; paradox of, 116–119; phenomenology of, 111, 121–129, 246n5. See also illusion and fiction; moving and stationary observer scenarios; musical motion; time temporal relations are spatial relations, 127–129 tempos, 136–137 textural depth, 110 Theremin, 211

third-person perspective. See tripartite perspective in music listening timbre and timbral intensity: contribution to acoustic impact, 186; mimetic representation of, 46; as source of pitch height, 99, 245nn23–24; taboos, 193. See also acoustic-auditory fact timbre imagery, 31–32, 239n30 time, 119–120, 246nn12–14; the end of time, 131–132; the future, 113–114, 115– 116; metaphors for, 121–129; perception of, 133, 247n18; spatial orientation of, 112–114; stopping time, 131–132; temporal relations, 119–121. See also temporal motion Todd, Neil, 14 Tod und Verklärung (Strauss), 213 To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), 108 Tom Sawyer, 173 tonal music, 254n12; dissonance in, 213–219, 220; teaching and learning about, 226 top-down processes, 76, 106–107, 156–157, 254n5 Tosca, 183 touch as a source domain, 164–165 Treachery of Images, The (Magritte), 172 Trevarthen, Colwyn, 18 tripartite perspective in music listening, 135–136, 139, 143, 247n3; and being moved by music, 158; performers’ choices, 207–208. See also mimetic engagement; mimetic participation; moving and stationary observer scenarios tripartite subjectivity, 247n3; and engagement with dissonance in tonal music, 213–219; and musical affect, 181–182, 184; and musical experience, 223; in music analysis, 215, 253nn7–8. See also mimetic engagement; mimetic participation; musical affect, avenues of 12-bar blues, 65 unchangingness is hardness, 121 understanding is grasping, 165; relationship with seeing, 169–170, 249n10; vocabulary and types of, 168–170. See also power and control

Index  285

vagueness, 204–205 Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, 6 Varèse, Edgar: Poème Electronique, 202 Visage (Berio), 195 vision: cognitive representations and, 168; disempowerment of, 195–196; as a source domain, 165; vocabulary of, 166–167. See also knowing is seeing visual information, 172, 221; as an avenue in musical affect, 198–199; elements of musical imagery, 221 visual perception and MMI, 24. See also perception vocal and instrumental music, evidence for MMI, 28–34 vocalization, exertion and changing pitch, 90–91 vocalizations between children and adults, 17 vocalizing is lifting, 89 vocal resonance, 95, 244n17 voice leading, 149–150, 149f volition, consciousness, and overtness: role in mimetic behavior, 42–43, 240n7. See also power and control volume. See strength (volume)

286 Index

vulnerability, 185, 195, 252n30; and affective response, 194; and senses, 173, 250n19 Wagner, Richard, 196 Walton, Kendall, 15 Watkins, Kate E., Antonio P. Strafella, Tomas Paus, 27 Webern, Anton: Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5, no. 4, 200, 201–208, 204f; Six Bagatelles for String Orchestra, op. 9, 202. See also posttonal music Wei, Wei and Huang Yixin, 21 Westergaard, Peter, 142 Wilson, Stephen M., et al., 27 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 246n15 Wohlschläger, Andreas, Merideth Gattis, and Harold Bekkering, 24–25 Yu, Ning, 76 Zatorre, Robert, 231 Zatorre, Robert, et al., 29 Zatorre, Robert J., Joyce L. Chen, and Virginia B. Penhune, 28 Zbikowski, Lawrence, 6, 86 Zuckerkandl, Viktor, 109, 112, 132, 133; rhythm and meter, 247n1

Musical Meaning and Interpretation Robert S. Hatten, editor

A Theory of Musical Narrative Byron Almén Approaches to Meaning in Music Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Naomi André The Italian Traditions and Puccini: Compositional Theory and Practice in Nineteenth-Century Opera Nicholas Baragwanath Debussy Redux: The Impact of His Music on Popular Culture Matthew Brown

Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation Robert S. Hatten Intertextuality in Western Art Music Michael L. Klein Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject Michael L. Klein Music and Narrative since 1900 Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music Steve Larson

Music and the Politics of Negation James R. Currie

Is Language a Music? Writings on Musical Form and Signification David Lidov

Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini’s Late Style Andrew Davis

Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony Melanie Lowe

Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy William Echard

Breaking Time’s Arrow: Experiment and Expression in the Music of Charles Ives Matthew McDonald

Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert Robert S. Hatten

Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of DanceMusic Relations in 3/4 Time Eric McKee

The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, Pastoral Raymond Monelle Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber Jairo Moreno Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema David Neumeyer Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Practice of Embodied Interpretation Alexandra Pierce Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith

288  Series Titles

Expressive Forms in Brahms’s Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet Peter H. Smith Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style Michael Spitzer Death in Winterreise: Musico-Poetic Associations in Schubert’s Song Cycle Lauri Suurpää Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for La pellegrina Nina Treadwell Reflections on Musical Meaning and Its Representations Leo Treitler Debussy’s Late Style: The Compositions of the Great War Marianne Wheeldon

ARNIE COX is Associate Professor of Music Theory and Aural Skills at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. His writings and teaching focus on the relationship between embodiment, affect, metaphor, and musical experience. He has published and forthcoming essays on music and gesture, the role of embodiment in music analysis, and the nature of musical subjectivities.