Moving beyond Motion: Metaphors for Changing SoundAuthor(s): Robert AdlingtonSource: Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 128, No. 2 (2003), pp. 297-318Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Royal Musical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3557498Accessed: 23/06/2009 16:10

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Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 128 (2003)

Moving Beyond Motion: Metaphors for Changing Sound

ROBERT ADLINGTON

THIS study forms part of a wider project to examine the relation of musical experience to cultural concepts of time. In particular, I am interested to explore the possibility that music - specifically, music as heard by listeners - gives access to experiences of change that are at odds with the ways in which we commonly understand time. In another article I have pointed to the concern, voiced by various thinkers of the last 200 years, that ideas of time act as a constraint upon subjectivity.1 Music, I argue both there and here, has the potential to provide a counterbalance to these prevailing ideas about the form of existence. This is a fact sometimes obscured by the words we use to describe music, which may seem to align it with favoured concepts of time, rather than highlight its points of difference.

A prime example of this tendency of words to convince us that musical form is fundamentally consistent with such concepts of time is our fondness for describing musical change in terms of motion. Music is described in terms of motion in both theoretical and 'everyday' contexts.2 Wallace Berry, for instance, asserts in his theoretical textbook that 'in music, change is motion'.3 And Berry's opinion seems to be supported by a music-lover (Gail) interviewed for the Music in Daily Life Project in Buffalo, New York, who explains a moment in a Bach cantata as 'so going forward, y'know? ... That's

I am indebted to Arnie Cox, Eric Clarke and two anonymous readers for constructive criticism and encouragement in relation to earlier versions of this article. I am particularly grateful to Arnie Cox for providing me with a copy of his thesis, 'The Metaphoric Logic of Musical Motion and Space' (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon, 1999).

1 Robert Adlington, 'Musical Temporality: Perspectives from Adorno and De Man', Repercus- sions, 6 (1997), 5-60. Such thinkers include Hegel and Marx, as well as Adorno and De Man.

2 Recent studies of musical motion include Eric Clarke, 'Meaning and the Specification of Motion in Music', Musicae scientiae, 5 (2001), 213-34; Thomas Clifton, Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology (New Haven, CT, 1983), esp. Chapters 4 and 5; Cox, 'The Metaphoric Logic of Musical Motion and Space'; Naomi Cumming, 'Metaphors of Space and Motion in the Linear Analysis of Melody', Miscellanea musicologica, 17 (1990), 143-66; David Epstein, Shaping Time: Music, the Brain, and Performance (New York, 1995); Christopher F. Hasty, 'Rhythm in Post-Tonal Music: Preliminary Questions of Duration and Motion', Journal of Music Theory, 25 (1981), 183-216;Judy Lochhead, 'The Metaphor of Musical Motion: Is There an Alternative?', Theory and Practice, 14/15 (1989-90), 83-103; Bruno R. Repp, 'Music as Motion: A Synopsis of Alexander Truslit's "Gestaltung und Bewegung in der Musik" (1938)', Psychology of Music, 21 (1993), 48-72; Patrick Shove and Bruno R. Repp, 'Musical Motion and Performance: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives', The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, ed. John Rink (Cambridge, 1995), 55-83; Neil Todd, 'Music and Motion: A Personal View', Proceedings of the Fourth Rhythm Workshop: Rhythm Perception and Production, ed. Catherine Auxiette, Carolyn Drake and Claire Gerard (Bourges, 1992), 123-8.

3 Wallace Berry, Structural Functions in Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976), 8.

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pretty vague ... it's not a musical term there. I don't know ... impetus ... forward ... positive ... [she makes forward-moving gestures].'4 Judy Lochhead writes that attributions of motion 'may be found in virtually all sorts of writing about music',5 and this includes writing that is explicitly concerned to reflect non-theoretical (and non-classical) musical encounters.6

In musicological writing, the idea that continuous, ongoing movement is a necessary condition of music has become something of an orthodoxy. This is partly in reaction to the preponderance, in certain earlier analytical writings, of a rather static perspective of musical form, one that seemed to neglect the fact that music changes.7 In particular, commentators see a basically unidirectional, forward movement as characteristic of music; to listen to music, the argument goes, is to be aware of a 'stream' of sound continually 'passing' the listener. Contrasting impressions of motion may emerge from time to time - for instance, ascending and descending movements; or rocking, swinging and swaying - but a sense of onward, linear movement is believed to remain ever-present, underpinning these other, more momentary impressions.8 The 'path-like' quality of this kind of musical motion is reflected in common descriptive expressions, such as 'this music leads us to' or 'heads towards', 'the music unfolds' or 'drives onwards', and references to musical 'journeys' or 'flow'.

That such an idea should seem natural and uncontroversial to lay- person and theorist alike may partly be due to a shared belief that music's motion is guaranteed by the flow of time. Adherence to a Newtonian view of time, which stresses time's inexorable 'passage', can result in an assumption that onward motion is an intrinsic phenom- enological by-product of all temporal experience. In other words, music moves by virtue of being temporal. This is the position taken in David Epstein's account of musical motion.9 Epstein's discussion builds on an assertion made in his first book, Beyond Orpheus, namely that

4 Susan D. Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, Charles Keil et al., My Music (London, 1993), 96-7. Gail learnt the oboe as a child, but it seems clear that her description is informal rather than theor- etical.

5 Lochhead, 'The Metaphor of Musical Motion', 84. 6 A conspicuous example is Charles Keil and Steven Feld, Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues

(Chicago, 1994). 7 The move beyond this static purview in the area of theory and analysis is symbolized by the

growth of Schenkerian studies over the last 30 years, a growth stimulated by the perception that Schenkerian analysis is 'about directed tonal motion' (Nicholas Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis, London, 1987, 64). Elsewhere in musicology, renewed recognition of the importance of change to the musical experience is reflected in the expansion of the field of performance studies (The Practice of Performance, ed. Rink, can be taken as a representative volume; many of the contribu- tors argue strongly for a recognition of music's 'dynamic' qualities) and studies of musical narrative (see, for instance, Fred Everett Maus, 'Music as Narrative', Indiana Theory Review, 12 (1991), 1-42, and Anthony Newcomb, 'Narrative Archetypes and Mahler's Ninth Symphony', Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher, Cambridge, 1992, 118-36).

8 Throughout my discussion I will treat cyclical motion - which is often invoked in descrip- tions of musical form - as a special case of this onward, linear movement, rather than as something opposed to it. Cyclical motion shares with onward, linear movement a consistency and irre- versibility of movement, and it is these qualities, fundamentally, in which I am interested.

9 Epstein, Shaping Time. Motion is only one of a large number of topics addressed in this volume. For a fuller account and critique of the contents of Epstein's book see my review in Music Analysis, 16 (1997), 155-71.

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'time is perceived as intrinsically related to motion or flow'.10 Epstein declares that

Motion is the very stuff of time itself. To speak of time is virtually to speak of motion, for motion is time's intrinsic correlate. We live, and conse- quently move, within time and through time ... Motion is basically under- stood by using time as its index ... The reverse of that correlation is equally true: time is only experienced, and thus understood, through motion. Motion is thus the quintessential property of time.11

Epstein's belief that 'the essence of temporal experience is movement' has the consequence that, for him, motion is 'possibly the ultimate goal of music'.12 Accordingly, one of the principal concerns of his book is to elucidate the various impressions of motion that arise in music - impressions that he believes are 'widely experienced and confirmed'.13

Is Epstein right to say that motion is the very stuff of time? Philoso- phers have often pointed to some of the logical contradictions surrounding this familiar idea. For instance, is it time that moves, or we that move through time? (Experience can suggest either.) And how can the motion of time be perceived without positing another 'time' within which that motion occurs - thus prompting an endless regress?14 Such complications notwithstanding, Epstein is not alone in his view of time. A broadly Newtonian perspective, however discredited it may be among specialists, remains widespread. This perspective - comprising a 'common-sense' understanding, as it were - sees continu- ous, steady, strongly directional flow as the essence of time. It is an important part of my argument in this article that this common-sense conception of time, regardless of the degree to which it may or may not correspond with some 'actual' natural entity, is a real and powerful presence in people's negotiations with their changing existence.15 It is this social rather than natural time - in other words, the time that impacts most directly on our understanding of ourselves - that is my primary concern. So in this article I treat time as, essentially, a social construction for dealing with change.16 As I have already suggested, I view it frequently to have a constraining influence on our under- standing of experience, and no small part of my argument is intended to underline the possibility of experiences of change that point to the limitations of this idea of time.

10 David Epstein, Beyond Orpheus: Studies in Musical Structure (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 55. 1 Epstein, Shaping Time, 8.

12 Ibid., 5, 26. For a similar view, see Barbara Barry, Musical Time: The Sense of Order (New York, 1990).

13 Epstein, Shaping Time, 487. 14 Stimulating contributions to these debates include Arthur N. Prior, 'Changes in Events and

Changes in Things' (1968), The Philosophy of Time, ed. Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath(Oxford, 1993), 35-46; Keith Seddon, Time: A Philosophical Treatment (London, 1987); G. J. Whitrow, Time in History (Oxford, 1988), Chapter 1.

15 I elaborate briefly on the mechanics of this influence in the third section of this article. I will not enter directly into the question of the existence of a 'natural' time; I do not believe that my larger argument, which is intended to throw into question common-sense time, is irreconcilable with belief in such a thing.

16 It follows that I do not view change as being dependent on time.

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I want here to question the close association between music and time forged explicitly by Epstein, and implicitly by many other writers on music. My motivation for doing so is threefold: first, the concern (already mentioned) that hardened concepts of time represent an ominous constraint on our subjective lives; secondly, a frustration at the inadequacy of the motional framework for dealing with certain kinds of modern music, which tend to get lumbered with the epithet 'static'; and thirdly, a more personal sense that purely motional descriptions, in spite of their attractions, are not adequate to many of my own musical experiences - of music of any sort. I propose to approach the issue through an assessment of recent theories of metaphor. At one level metaphor theory is supportive of the notion that time should be viewed as a set of social strategies for dealing with change, rather than an unchallengeable condition of existence. Metaphor theorists have argued that our common concept of time, with its emphasis on dimension and flow, is purely metaphorical. Their argument will be discussed later in this study. At another level, however, metaphor theory represents a challenge to my argument, for it proposes that this spatialization of change - and particularly the conceptualization of change as motion - is a necessary and unavoid- able aspect of human cognition. Metaphor theory contends, in other words, that we are consigned to a time-like existence, regardless of the fact that time as we conceptualize it does not really exist. This fate (if we should see it that way) is reflected in, among other things, our fondness for describing and understanding music in terms of ongoing, path-like motion.

In the first section of my discussion I sketch out some of the basic claims of metaphor theory in a little more depth. I begin with a descrip- tion of some Debussy, which points to the importance of metaphor in our conceptualization of the world; I then proceed to examine metaphor theory's stance on the particular question of time. The second section proposes that the Debussy description, while substanti- ating some of the metaphor theorists' basic claims, gives a rather different account of the experience of changing music from that implied by metaphor theory. The third and final section elaborates this alternative view of musical experience - one that gives a central place to conceptual metaphor but that also seeks to distinguish the form of music from that attributed to time.

I

Consider the following, loosely phenomenological description of the first 20 bars of Debussy's Nuages (from the orchestral Nocturnes):

Clarinets and bassoons open the piece with a gentle twining figure (bars 1-4). The f 'of the cor anglais (bar 5) sets up a tension that is released only very gradually, with the bat bar 7. The music's tension is not fully expunged, however, for the first string chord itself contains an implied dissonance (the G, which wants to resolve to an F#), and tension is further increased by the

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G# at bar 9. Complete release is achieved only at bar 11, where the strings provide a fuller sound which is further enriched at bar 13, with its doubled three-part counterpoint. This three-part material is given added weight by the one-bar crescendo, although the subito pianissimo in bar 14 instantly lightens the texture. The music descends to settle upon warmer diatonic harmonies (bars 15-20). Pizzicato bass fifths give added cushioning to the dominant sevenths here. Then, the building pressure of an elaborated G9 chord, emphasized by a dramatic crescendo, is suddenly deflated, only for a further increase of pressure with a similarly elaborated Eb9. The emptier texture of bar 21 fails fully to release the music's accumulated tension.

At one level this description is a literal one. Rather than adumbrate fanciful interpretations or poetic narratives, it rests content with the identification of salient aspects of the music's morphology and the way in which they may be experienced by a listener. At another level, though, the description is richly metaphorical. Musical sound does not literally move, become tense, possess height or grow in fullness, warmth or pressure. To attribute such things to musical sound is to hear it metaphorically.

In recent years the idea that musical discourse is inherently meta- phorical has become well established.17 Where metaphors for music were once seen as the preserve of programme-note writers, it is now widely recognized that even the most apparently 'technical' analytical description is replete with metaphorical content. The emergence of this view of metaphor in musical discourse is in no small part the result of work in the field of metaphor by theorists such as George Lakoff, MarkJohnson and Mark Turner.18 Contrary to the traditional under- standing of metaphor as an essentially poetic or figurative linguistic device, these theorists have stressed the centrality of metaphor to cognition and experience. Metaphor, in other words, rather than being subjective and indeterminately connected to its object, is often necessary and unavoidable.

It is the work of these three theorists in particular, as well as some of the music scholars who have elaborated upon it, that I will designate

17 See Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford, 1990); Naomi Cumming, 'Metaphor in Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of Music', Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge, 1994), 3-28;Janna Saslaw, 'Forces, Containers, and Paths: The Role of Body-Derived Image Schemas in the Conceptualization of Music', Journal of Music Theory, 40 (1996), 217-43; Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1997); Lawrence Zbikowski, 'Metaphor and Music Theory: Reflections from Cognitive Science', Music Theory Online, 4/1 (1998), <http://smt.ucsb.edu/mto/issues/mto.98.4.1.zbikowski_essay.html>. Arnie Cox encap- sulates this view with his statement that 'professional music discourse is built on the metaphoric concepts of motion and space, from the most unadorned analytic descriptions to the most fanciful program notes' ('The Metaphoric Logic of Musical Motion and Space', 1).

18 Significant texts in this field include George Lakoff and MarkJohnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980); George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago, 1987); MarkJohnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagin- ation, and Reason (Chicago, 1987); George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago, 1989), 44-6; Mark Turner, 'Aspects of the Invariance Hypoth- esis', Cognitive Linguistics, 1 (1990), 247-55; George Lakoff, 'The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor', Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1993), 202-51; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, 1999).

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as 'metaphor theory'. In fact, in recent years the insights of these theorists have influenced and merged with developments in parallel fields to an extent that reference to a coherent 'metaphor theory' is made somewhat difficult.19 Nevertheless, the work of Lakoff and Johnson in particular presents a crisply articulated view of the relation of words to experience, which may readily be applied to the domain of music - and which is, indeed, frequently cited in existing work on musical metaphor. Although this work is now relatively widely known, a concise synopsis of its basic contentions will prove useful for my longer-term argument.

Rather than conceive of metaphor as a relatively insignificant aspect of language, metaphor theory has been concerned to demonstrate the extent to which it permeates ordinary speech and thought. Statements such as 'it's hard to get that idea across to him', 'it's difficult to put my ideas into words' and 'the idea is buried in terribly dense paragraphs', for instance, are all dependent on metaphor (the metaphorical components are italicized; all of them attribute an 'idea' with meta- phorical properties drawn from the physical world).20 As Janna Saslaw has pointed out, 'When we make statements like these, we have the sense that we are being quite literal.... Metaphorical expressions like these are used unconsciously. When we use them, we don't usually think about the structure of the concepts.'21 This characteristic of everyday language has led metaphor theorists to conclude that metaphor is not simply a feature of verbal descriptions, but is actually fundamental to the way in which we experience the world. As George Lakoff puts it, 'The locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another.... Metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic in nature.'22

This contention revolves around the idea that understanding is dependent on recurring patterns of experience, which are projected from one domain of knowledge to another. Specifically, the point of conceptual metaphors is to achieve a firmer grasp of relatively unfamiliar or abstract phenomena by employing patterns of experi- ence - often referred to as 'image schemas' - drawn from more familiar, concrete domains. The principal source of these schemas is our most immediate bodily experience: for instance, 'our bodily move- ments through space, our manipulations of objects, and our percep- tual interactions'.23 Thus, in the everyday metaphorical expressions

19 For instance, metaphor theory intersects in important ways with recent writings on the evolution of the 'embodied mind'. See Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA, 1991), and Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, 1994). Mark Johnson's recent work has incorporated insights on metaphor into the broader field of concep- tual blending; see Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities (New York, 2002).

20 These examples, taken from Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, are cited in Saslaw, 'Forces, Containers, and Paths', 221.

21 Ibid. 22 Lakoff, 'The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor', 203, 244. 23 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 29.

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mentioned in the previous paragraph, notions relating to the communication of ideas are organized according to depth, path and container schemas. Lakoff andJohnson perceive this process of 'meta- phorical' transfer to underpin our understanding of all abstract concepts. In Lakoff's words, 'Metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning.... The most common abstract concepts - TIME, STATE, CHANGE, CAUSATION, ACTION, PURPOSE and MEANS - are conceptu- alized via metaphor.'24 Even the structure of rationality itself, commonly 'regarded as transcending structures of bodily experi- ence',25 is ultimately organized around bodily image schemas. Thus argument and reasoning is deemed to 'progress towards' a conclusion, and may involve propositions that either help us 'on our way' or throw us 'off course'.26 It is this recurrent inclination towards the physical in our descriptions of experience that leads Lakoff andJohnson to make repeated reference to what they call 'the embodied mind'.27

Let us return to my Debussy description. In the light of this under- standing of metaphor, the metaphorical qualities of my description are hardly surprising, nor should they be taken to undermine its 'accuracy'. Musical sound, for all its intimate relation with certain perceptual faculties, can be neither seen nor touched; it has no 'visually discrete body'.28 It is easy to understand why a listener might be driven to more concrete domains of experience - such as tension, fullness, warmth or pressure - in order to grasp music's qualities as an object of apprehension. This applies regardless of how 'objective' or 'scientific' one's description aims to be. A more thoroughly technical, less overtly phenomenological description of the Debussy passage might involve different imagery, but it would remain metaphorical by virtue of references to such things as pitch height, contour, speed, texture and so on. As it is, my description gives (I believe) a clearer sense than a 'technical' one would of how a non-specialist listener might construe the musical object. In other words, it gives a good indi- cation of what Arnie Cox has called 'the uneliminable role of embodied cognition in music conceptualization and in the construc- tion of musical meaning'.29

Having introduced the fundamental claims of metaphor theory, let us turn to the specific question of time. As we have seen, metaphor theorists argue that cognitive metaphor and the embodied mind inform our understanding of very many basic concepts, including time and change. Metaphor theory views cultural conceptions of time as inherently and unavoidably metaphorical. Lakoff and Johnson note

24 Lakoff, 'The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor', 244, 222. 25 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, x. 26 Ibid., 53-4. 27 As in the title of their most recent book, and that of George Lakoff and Rafael Nufiez, Where

Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York, 2001). 28 Lawrence Kramer, 'The Mysteries of Animation: History, Analysis and Musical Subjectivity',

Music Analysis, 20 (2001), 153-78 (p. 162). 29 Cox, 'The Metaphoric Logic of Musical Motion and Space', 7.

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that 'we cannot observe time itself';30 instead, they argue, we are driven to posit a moving time by analogy with the more concrete experiential domains of location and movement. Specifically, our preferred concept of time is the product of a metaphorical conceptualization of the abstract notion of change 'based on movement along a physical path'.31

It is clear that, from the perspective of metaphor theory, the notion of change, slippery to grasp in any literal sense, invites an embodied conceptualization. But why should change be understood in terms of movement, rather than some other sort of bodily experience? Lakoff and Johnson believe that underlying the motional conception of changing events is the fundamental metaphor 'STATES ARE LOCATIONS'.

Expressions such as 'I'm in love', 'she's come out ofher depression', 'he's on the edge of madness', and 'we're far from safety' reflect our under- standing of the discrete states of an individual or a thing in terms of locations - or what Lakoff and Johnson call 'bounded regions in space'.32 It follows from this conceptualization that changes of state 'are conceptualized as movements from location to location'.33 For Lakoff and Johnson, the metaphor 'CHANGES ARE MOVEMENTS' governs our understanding of the interrelation of events.34 We perceive complex events to possess qualities of motion because it is a logical consequence of our conceptualization of states as locations. It follows that, for Lakoff and Johnson, the only way of understanding changing experience is via motion or path metaphors. Thus, life, love and careers are conceived as journeys,35 argument and reasoning are understood in terms of 'motion along a path toward some destina- tion',36 and purposes are conceived as physical goals.37 Complex events in general, narrative and music included, are 'understood in terms of a source-path-goal schema', which stipulates that such events 'have initial states (the source), a sequence of intermediate stages (the path), and a final state (the goal)'.38 As for time itself, Lakoff and Johnson note that our attribution of motion takes two distinct forms, which they describe as 'moving time' and 'the moving observer' respectively.39

30 Lakoff andJohnson, Philosophy in theFlesh, 138. Compare Whitrow: 'Time certainly is a funda- mental characteristic of human experience, but there is no evidence that we have a special sense of time, as we have of sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. Our direct experience of time is always of the present, and our idea of time comes from reflecting on this experience' (Time in History, 4-5).

31 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 117. 32 Lakoff andJohnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 180. 33 Ibid., 176. 34 Ibid., 183ff. 35 Lakoff, 'The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor', 224-5. 36 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 54. 37 Ibid., 114. 38 Saslaw, 'Forces, Containers, and Paths', 220. 39 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 141, 145. These correspond to what Judy

Lochhead ('The Metaphor of Musical Motion', 103) describes as 'dynamic' and 'static' time respectively. Lochhead's discussion of the idea of 'static' time rather neglects the fact that, in this conception of time, the observer moves, even though time does not. I will not dwell on the contra- diction that Lakoff andJohnson perceive between the two models, as both possess similar qualities of motion, and it is these qualities, rather than the question of precisely what is moving, that are my main interest.

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The first of these perspectives accounts for expressions like 'the time will come when . . .' and 'time is flying by'; the second accounts for

sayings such as 'he passed the time happily' and 'we're coming up to Christmas'.40

Now, at this stage a caveat with metaphor theory must be noted. In important respects, metaphor theory presents a picture of time congruent with the position I set out at the beginning of this article. Metaphor theory says that the common-sense notion of time, with its emphasis on certain perceptible properties, most notably its steady onward motion, is in fact a metaphorical construct - in other words, a social rather than a natural entity, as I expressed it in my introduction. Time understood thus is the product of an urge to endow something intangible (change) with physical characteristics. In fact, though, this apparent parallel between my position and that of metaphor theory is complicated somewhat by a perceptible continuing faith on the part of metaphor theorists in a rather traditional view of an actual 'time' - a time that acts as the basis for the metaphorical construct. In spite of metaphor theorists' protestations that motional metaphors do not give us access to a truth about time or changing experience - that, at best, such metaphors are a 'constitutive part of our best understanding of what is true'41 - we are sometimes referred to a common-sense concep- tion of time as a basis for these metaphors. This kind of circularity can be detected, for instance, in Lakoff and Turner's proposition that a literal grounding for motional metaphors can be found in the 'non- incidental property of time that it inevitably passes'.42 A similar circu- larity is detectable inJanna Saslaw's claim that the metaphor of motion along a path is appropriate for harmonic progression and modulation because of the latter's articulation of 'the passage of time'.43 In both instances, the reader is effectively referred to the product of meta- phorical constructions of change as the source of those very same metaphorical constructions. I will return to the incongruity of aspects of metaphor theorists' discussions of time, in the light of their wider claims, in the next section.

This difficulty aside, it has in any case to be recognized that, despite the convergence of metaphor theory's claim of the metaphorical nature of time with my own position, the larger picture is rather different. The fact that motional metaphors do not provide good grounds for claims about the 'actual' nature of change does not affect the fact that they are our principal means, not just of describing our experience of change, but of coming to terms with it experientially. For metaphor theory, a motional conception of change is an inevitable consequence of the inclinations of the embodied mind. Thus, even while we distance ourselves from cultural concepts of time, we are left

40 Lakoff, 'The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor', 217-18. For more on this dual conceptualization of time, see Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, 44-6.

41 Lakoff andJohnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 160; see also p. 158. 42 Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, 37. 43 Saslaw, 'Forces, Containers, and Paths', 230.

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with a view of experience that possesses many of the same character- istics.

Arnie Cox, who develops the work of Lakoff and Johnson without reinscribing the constructed time that metaphor theory effectively dismantles, spells out the consequences of this view for our under- standing of music. For Cox, 'it makes perfect sense to understand and describe the relations of musical events in terms of motion through space because, in the large, we do this with events generally'.44 Cox offers an additional reason why it should be so natural for us to under- stand the relation of musical events in terms of the relations of spatial and motional events. Both domains of experience share a common 'phenomenology of anticipation, presence, and memory'.45 Anticipation, presence and memory inform and affect our experience of all temporal events, but it is in the domain of spatial experience that they have their most clearly embodied associations. Anticipation tends to be associated, in the spatial domain, with a destination not yet reached. The present is associated with current location - the place at which one has now arrived. And memory is associated with locations now departed. Cox explains that 'because musical events, like other events we experience, are anticipated, present and remembered, we are strongly motivated to understand them in terms of "approach", "arrival", and "departure", and to understand them in terms of motion "in" and "through time"'.46 In this, music is no different from any other experience involving anticipation, presence and memory: given that 'the mapping of basic, embodied experience onto more abstract domains of experience is a normal, habitual part of human cogni- tion',47 all such experiences will be understood as possessing qualities of path-like motion. In this way, metaphor theory offers strong support to the idea that such motion is an experiential property of all music.

II

Now let us return to my description of the opening of Debussy's Nuages. As I stated previously, at one level this description provides good evidence of the centrality of embodied cognition to the experience of music. The description is full of imagery borrowed from the physical and visual world, imagery that should not be literally imputed to the music's sound but is rather the result of a metaphorical conceptualiz- ation. At another level, though, the description is at one remove from the accounts of experience given by metaphor theorists. This is because a significant proportion of the music is described without reference to the path-like motion that they would see as a corollary of all temporal (or changing) experience. In fact the metaphor of relative

44 Cox, 'The Metaphoric Logic of Musical Motion and Space', 267. Cox's argument is elabor- ated at length in Chapter 4 of his dissertation ('Temporal Motion and Musical Motion').

45 Ibid., 207. 46 Ibid., 214. 47 Ibid., 268.

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motion is used to describe the music's changing qualities at only one point (the 'descending' string crotchets in bar 14). For the rest, non- motional metaphors (involving heat, pressure or hardness) or meta- phors that involve motion only indirectly or as a secondary feature (such as tension and weight) predominate.

Two straightforward explanations for this apparent incongruity offer themselves. The first is, simply, that my description is incomplete. That is to say, as a concise description it singles out certain aspects of the experience of listening to this music while neglecting others - the motional aspect foremost among them. Under this explanation, the music does, in fact, possess ongoing, path-like motion, as metaphor theorists and musicologists such as Berry, Epstein and many others would aver; my description simply omitted to mention the fact. The second explanation for my description's omission of references to path-like motion is slightly more complicated. It proposes that the description assumes an impression of forward motion to be the unavoidable corollary of the various sorts of change explicitly noted therein. Thus, a sense of continual, forward motion is assumed to accompany the 'twining' of the opening, or the setting-up and gradual release of tension by the cor anglais, or the fluctuations in fullness in the strings in bars 7-13. This second explanation would be consistent with Lakoff and Johnson's assertion that all change is grasped as motion: motion is implicit, as it were, in the very identification of change.

To my mind, though, neither of these explanations gets to the nub of why my description does not make more of a feature of path-like motion. My description of the Debussy certainly is far from 'complete', but I do not hold this to be the real reason why motion is relatively neglected within it. It does strive, after all, to record the principal meta- phorical imagery in my hearing of the music, and path-like motion appears not to figure highly. The second of the two explanations for this 'omission' is also mistaken, I believe, and I will explain why presently. First, I want to state my view of the relation of motion to my description, which is quite different from either of those given above. There may be moments in the opening of Nuages that suggest path-like motion more strongly than my description suggests. But my descrip- tion is true to experience, I believe, to the extent that it conveys the impression of the involvement of not one, but a host of different 'embodied' metaphors by means of which I grasp the changing music. Motion is one of these, but, in contradiction to many writers attempt- ing to describe musical temporality, I hold it to have no special prece- dence over the others. My description envisages musical experience as an inherently metaphorical matter, but it proposes that changing musical sound may be conceptualized via a wide range of physical source domains - a variety of different sorts of 'bodily interactions', to use Mark Johnson's phrase.48 There are moments where motion is

48 Johnson, The Body in the Mind, xx.

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particularly appropriate to the sounding stimulus: the 'descending' strings in bar 14 might be taken as one of these. Elsewhere, however, other source domains come to the fore, effectively effacing the motional one. The changing music in bar 13, for instance, seems to me to motivate a conceptualization in terms of spatial movement far less than it does one of fluctuations of weight; at this moment, therefore, a 'weight' schema comes to the fore in my experience. It supplants the 'fullness' schema that was appropriate in bars 11-13, and it is then in turn eventually superseded by the 'vertical movement' schema in bar 14. The experience of listening to the opening of Nuages, in other words, is not dominated by a single metaphor - specifically, that of path-like motion - but involves moments understood in terms of motion and others grasped through non-motional physical schemas, creating a sort of kaleidoscope of metaphorical imagery.

Of course, non-motional metaphors feature prominently in many existing descriptions of music. Music is often described as 'brighten- ing' or 'softening'; as 'heating up' or 'swelling'; as 'floating', only to become more 'weighty'. A programme note accompanying a compact- disc recording of Tchaikovsky's 'Pathetique' Symphony notes various moments of the piece that 'gain in intensity', 'explode', 'inhabit a void', undergo 'violent transformation', 'gradually strengthen', 'collapse' and 'darken'.49 These ways of describing (and, implicitly, experiencing) musical change are instantly recognizable. Yet musico- logical writings sometimes find it hard to accept that such conceptual- izations of music are genuine alternatives to descriptions in terms of ongoing motion, rather than optional supplementary characteriz- ations.50 For instance, 'tension' and 'relaxation' figure prominently in musicological texts as metaphors for changing sound, yet they are typi- cally seen as implicated in music's forward motion, rather than as a potentially wholly autonomous, non-motional metaphor.51 The same might be said of Lakoff andJohnson's theorization of temporal experi- ence. In the course of their writings they identify a number of non- motional domains that could form the basis for metaphors for conceptualizing change: these domains include weight and heat ('growing anger is increasing weight'; 'growing anger is increasing heat'), emptiness and fullness ('life is the filling of a container'), verti- cality ('happier is upwards'), hunger ('growing lust is increasing hunger'; 'acquiring ideas is eating'), dissolving and crystallizing ('overcoming problems is dissolving ("solution")'), light and dark

49 Jonathan Swain, booklet note to compact-disc recording of Tchaikovsky, Symphony no. 6 ('Pathetique'), Russian National Orchestra, Mikhail Pletnev (Virgin Classics 791 487-2).

50 A rare exception to this general tendency is Marion Guck's 'Musical Images as Musical Thoughts: The Contribution of Metaphor to Analysis', In Theory Only, 5 (1981), 29-43. In it, she describes a variety of non-motional metaphors used by a class of students in descriptions of a Chopin Prelude, including varying degrees of darkness and the sensation of breathing.

51 See, for instance, Epstein, Shaping Time, 27. It may be objected that tension and relaxation, as phenomena of the physical world, invariably involve movement of some sort. I would argue, however, that the motion involved in (for instance) flexing and relaxing a muscle, or stretching an elastic fabric, is epiphenomenal - secondary to the sensations of tautness and pull that lie at the core of physical sensations of tension. The back and forth typical of tensing and relaxing movements is in any case at odds with the continual onward motion commonly attributed to music.

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('greater understanding is greater light'), transformation ('natural change is evolution').52 Yet when it comes to contemplating change or temporal events per se, the emphasis (as we have seen) returns squarely to path-like motion.

One of the reasons for this might be the belief, mentioned earlier, that change of any sort is accompanied by a sense of motion. The argument runs something like this: while growing anger may be conceptualized as 'increasing heat' (that is to say, using a heat schema), the increasing heat can itself only be grasped in terms of the movement from one moment of heat to the next moment of even greater heat. Similarly, this argument would state that the growing 'pressure' of each of the crescendos in bars 17-20 of Nuages is accom- panied by a sense of motion from moment to moment as the pressure increases. In other words, as stated before, under this argument motion is implicit in the very notion of change.

But why should this be so? After all, the conceptualization of change as motion is purely metaphorical - as Lakoff and Johnson themselves strongly assert. It is an effective metaphor, frequently used in response to the need to find a physical correlate to the relatively abstract notion of 'change'. But if an alternative physical correlate suggests itself for a particular type of changing experience - increasing pressure, for instance - the requirements of cognitive metaphor are already fully satisfied: an abstract notion is grasped using an appropriate metaphor. To insist that this experience of increasing heat is additionally accom- panied by a sense of motion is to impose a second-level metaphor where one is not needed. We all have a ready knowledge of the feeling of increasing pressure; it is an immediate, physical experience that requires no additional metaphorical overlay. One may choose to identify the successive moments of increasing heat with spatial movement, but it is hardly a requirement to do so in order to grasp the nature of the experience. And of course, as the arguments of metaphor theory clearly imply, there is no 'truth' about temporal experience that requires to be identified as motion, for motion is merely a convenient metaphor for the experience of change.53

Something of what I am trying to argue here may be crystallized if I return to bar 14 of Nuages. I stated earlier that this was the one

52 I have adapted metaphors discussed by Lakoff and Johnson in the following places: Lakoff andJohnson, Metaphors We Live By, 14, 51, 143; Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 388-9, 396, 406, 409; Lakoff andJohnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 207, 545, 560-1.

53 The idea that motion is a literal property of changing existence tends to be reinforced by our vocabulary: our favoured words for identifying different moments in a changing event - music included - are often locational and linear. Thus we talk about one moment 'following' another; say that something happened 'in between' other things; refer to parts of temporal events as 'passages'; and so on. Metaphor theorists take such words as indication of our inherently loca- tional and motional experience of change. But, as the present argument is intended to suggest, this descriptive bias reflects a long-lived cultural reluctance to countenance change reflectively in a non-motional way (say, in terms of varying weight or heat, rather than in terms of varying spatial locations) as much as it reflects any actual property of changing experience. (Reasons for the prominence of motional metaphors in descriptions of music, specifically, are offered in the next section.) Non-motional metaphors have to fight for prominence, as it were, alongside the habitual motional ones. It is at this point that I have to depart somewhat from the assumption undergird- ing metaphor theory, namely that descriptions invariably give a sound indication of modes of experience.

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(a) (b)

Figure 1. Two different conceptualizations of the motion in bar 14 of Debussy's Nuages.

moment that my description identified with path-like motion. In contrast to the sort of motion regularly imputed to music by musicol- ogists and theorists, however, my description identified 'downward' rather than 'onward' movement. Of course, it is possible to have both downward and onward movement. The musical notation in this bar, for instance, combines a left-to-right 'onward' motion with a gradual descent. The resulting diagonal line might be the metaphorical image conjured up in this bar for the listener wedded to the idea of music's ongoing motion (see Figure 1(a)). My description, though, envisages a different sort of downward motion: a strictly vertical descent (see Figure 1 (b)). The fact that the music continues to change is captured by the progressive nature of this vertical descent; no further 'movement' is necessary to conceptualize the music's changing char- acter. The additional lateral or horizontal element in Figure 1 (a) is, I would argue, the product of a second-level metaphorical conceptualiz- ation (in terms of 'onward' movement as well as descent) - an additional conceptualizing move that goes beyond what is strictly needed in order to grasp the music.54

So, to summarize: my Debussy description stands for a view of music in which motional conceptualizations are a possible part of, rather than necessarily underlie, a metaphorical listening experience. Onward motion is not ever-present, nor is it a condition of music's temporal existence. Instead, identifications of movement intermingle with other metaphorical schemas. Motion comes to the fore at some moments, but in others it is not so apt and an alternative metaphorical image is preferred - on which occasions the music no longer 'passes'. To hear musical change in terms of a variety of physical metaphors is to dethrone onward motion as an assumed corollary of musical form.

III

This account of musical experience may seem difficult to square with well-worn intuitions about music's motional qualities. This is partly because there are a number of factors encouraging us to prioritize motion over other physical or embodied metaphors. Arnie Cox notes

54 My preferred conceptualization here is, of course, consistent with the metaphorical associ- ation of scalic voice-leading with vertical motion encouraged by many centuries of text-setting and, more recently, cartoon soundtracks.

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how motional metaphors tend to be reinforced by such things as 'an actual, literal sense of sounds moving through the air, the influence of the notated page, and the movements of performers in producing musical sound'.55 In other words, although changing sound does not in itself possess qualities of onward motion, there are many different sorts of actual motion involved in the making of music which one might subconsciously associate with the 'form' of the sounds them- selves.56 The moving mechanics of different recording media - the needle through a groove, the tape around a spool, or the laser tracing a disc - also need to be considered in this connection.

Additionally, though, we need to return to an idea mooted at the start of this article: namely, the way in which time itself is sometimes held to guarantee music's motion. That is to say, we might wonder about the ability of cultural ideas of time to persuade us that motion is the best way of grasping a changing experience, even when that experience gives evidence to the contrary. This is most likely to happen when we are reflecting upon that experience, rather than actually having it: our concepts of time tend to work against a reflective acceptance of alterna- tive ways of making sense of change. Hoyt Alverson has pointed to the way in which the clock, that pervasive symbol of time, has conditioned our notions about the form of existence:

With the establishment of clocks as the embodiment of time, it was not long before the experienced essence of clocks (uniform motion) became metonymically the experienced essence of time itself. Time became a medium in uniform motion.... The clock became not simply the measure of time but its canonic exemplification.57

A listener's adherence to the idea that music has an inherently motional form thus does not necessarily indicate that his or her musical experience gives irrefutable evidence to this end. Rather, it may simply reflect the listener's confidence that, first, clocks embody time and, secondly, time dictates the form of all existence.

This is not to deny that some music motivates impressions of onward motion by virtue of its own structural properties. The relationships between chords and keys in tonal music spring to mind as an example. It is difficult to conceptualize these without reference to path metaphors; as Saslaw observes, 'try to imagine talking about progressions or modulations without speaking of going and

55 Cox, 'The Metaphoric Logic of Musical Motion and Space', 193. 56 For more on the influence of performers' movements on listeners' perceptions of musical

motion, see Shove and Repp, 'Musical Motion and Performance', and Andrew Mead, 'Physio- logical Metaphors and Musical Understanding',Journal of Music Theory, 43 (1999), 1-19. For more on the impact of notation on our understanding of musical form see Trevor Wishart, 'Musical Writing, Musical Speaking', Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical Languages, ed.John Shepherd et aL (London, 1977), 125-51.

57 Hoyt Alverson, Semantics and Experience: Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi and Sesotho (Baltimore, 1994), 102. Alverson finds evidence for spatial conceptualizations of change in all of the diverse cultures he examines, and some of these conceptualizations take the form of path-like motion. (Others take intriguingly different forms.) On the basis of this evidence, it is clear that the urge to construct a time with phenomenal properties to 'explain' change is not limited to Western culture. Alverson's data deserve fuller study by metaphor theorists.

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returning'.58 In seeking to establish why certain music should motivate certain metaphors - be they motional or otherwise - it is useful to make reference to what Lakoff and Turner have called 'the invariance hypothesis'.59 This states that metaphorical mappings, far from being arbitrary, are constrained by the 'schematic structure' of the phenom- enon for which a metaphor is sought. If a metaphor is to seem apt and to avoid dissonance with the thing it describes, the skeletal image- schema of that thing must not be violated by the metaphor.60 Path-like motion is appropriate as a metaphor for tonal relations because it is consistent with the basic structure of those relations. This structure comprises an ordered sequence of essentially discrete musical 'objects' (harmonies) that may readily be perceived as distinct features of the passing surroundings - marking out, as it were, the ongoing journey. Additionally, tonal relations permit a measure of accurate anticipation of future events; these events can then be conceptualized as 'lying ahead', as 'approaching' (or being approached), and as 'arriving' (or being arrived at). Susan McClary has commented on the appropriate- ness of tonality's evocation of 'progress' and 'quests after goals' to the ideologies of the culture in which it first flourished.61 She points particularly to the fondness of composers for delaying decisive moments of 'arrival' - namely, structural cadences - as a way of drama- tizing the journey on which the listener has embarked.

The failure of parts of the post-tonal repertory to motivate comparable impressions of motion has been a frequent source of criti- cism.62 There are, of course, identifiable structural reasons why this music fails to support metaphors of paths and goals. For instance, expectations in post-tonal music tend to lack specificity; identifiable, locatable goals are replaced by more indeterminate, generalized possi- bilities of continuation. The musical past is often similarly fluid and unenduring, as opposed to the ordered sequence that we like to believe is inscribed into memory by tonal harmony.63 The relative

58 Saslaw, 'Forces, Containers, and Paths', 229. At least, path metaphors predominate in descriptions of the heard effect of music in which these relations occur. When tonal relations are conceptualized more abstractly, metaphors of hierarchy are often preferred; see Lawrence M. Zbikowski, 'Conceptual Models and Cross-Domain Mapping: New Perspectives on Theories of Music and Hierarchy', Journal of Music Theory, 41 (1997), 193-225.

59 For a summary of this notion see Turner, 'Aspects of the Invariance Hypothesis'. 60 Ibid., 251. 61 Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley, 2000); see esp.

pp. 66-8. 62 See, for instance, George Rochberg, 'The Structure of Time in Music: Traditional and

Contemporary Ramifications and Consequences', The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer's View of Twentieth-Century Music (Ann Arbor, 1984), 137-47; Barry, Musical Time.

63 Music theorists and music psychologists have, in fact, often argued that even in tonal music memory and expectation take a variety of forms - from the precise and detailed to the most generalized and selective. See, for instance, Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956); Jamshed J. Barucha, 'Neural Nets, Temporal Composites, and Tonality', The Psychology of Music, ed. Diana Deutsch (2nd edn, San Diego, 1999), 413-41; Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca, NY, 1997); Irene Deliege and Marc Melen, 'Cue Abstraction in the Representation of Musical Form', Perception and Cognition of Music, ed. Irene Deliege and John Sloboda (Hove, 1997), 387-412. Arnie Cox's proposal, discussed earlier in this paper, that the metaphorical conceptualization of music in terms of path-like motion is grounded by the phenomenology of expectation and memory shared by both realms of experience, presumes an unwarrantedly restricted view of these faculties.

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absence in some post-tonal music of psychologically discrete 'events' (as opposed to ongoing states or processes) further works against the mapping of distinct locations onto the musical sound.64 Yet criticism of these features of post-tonal music has rarely sought to enquire whether other metaphors may arise in place of onward motion as a means of conceptualizing the music's change. If we wish to understand which structural features in music lend themselves to non-motional metaphors, then the post-tonal repertory would seem to be a good place to turn, for it is arguably here that such metaphors are crucial to the music's changing character.

Let me describe a particular moment from Ligeti's Atmospheres (letters [D]-[G] in the score).65 Initially, the music rests momentarily on a still, middle-register near-unison. Gradually, though, elements of the texture begin to rise from this relaxed position, ascending ever higher. Cellos and violas remain at the original register, but eventually disappear from view as attention focuses on the intense straining of violins, trumpets and high woodwind. As these instruments, too, gradu- ally drop out, the music's sustained protraction seems increasingly vulnerable. Eventually the tension is too great, and the music suddenly retracts, tutta laforza, to an earthy bass register.

It will be noted, first of all, that motional metaphors are prominent in this description. However, in contradistinction to the forward, goal- orientated motion of tonal syntax, my description of the Ligeti records only vertical movements - rather as I described the movement in bar 14 of Nuages in purely vertical terms. The fact that not all the orches- tra initially joins this upward motion informs the wider metaphorical frame that organizes my experience of this extract. For there is a strong sense here of upward motion in relation to an entity that remains unmoving. I am inclined to associate the music's change with the experience of raising an arm. From a relaxed resting point, my arm gradually moves above the rest of my (unmoving) body. And this embodied understanding of the music remains relevant as the stable parts of the orchestra are phased out of the texture. At this point, as my description suggests, motion is no longer uppermost in my experi- ence - in spite of the fact that the instruments are, from a notational perspective, continuing their registral ascent. Instead, a new metaphor comes into play; namely, the accumulating tension of an upward stretch (the description refers to 'intense straining', 'sustained protrac- tion', 'great tension' and 'sudden retraction').66 What motivates this shift from a metaphor of motion to a metaphor of strain or tension? Various factors are significant. The disappearance of the middle register has an impact. The 'upward' progress of the clotted violin and

64 Fred Lerdahl, for instance, points to the way in which this characteristic of many contem- porary musical works 'inhibits the inference of structure'; see 'Cognitive Constraints on Compo- sitional Systems', Contemporary Music Review, 6/2 (1992) ('New Tonality'), 97-121 (p. 104).

65 This extract begins just under three minutes into the recording by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted byJonathan Nott, of Ligeti's Atmospheres (Teldec 8573 88261 2); see sound clip 1, taken from this recording, at <www.jrma.oupjournals.org>.

66 This occurs at letter [F] in the score. 'Stretching' features as a prominent metaphor in Guck's 'Musical Images as Musical Thoughts'; see esp. p. 34.

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wind lines is more pronounced against the backdrop of a fixed element than it is in isolation; and the exclusive focus eventually given to the 'outstretched' element rings true with the physical experience of sustaining a stretch, where it is the growing muscular tension, rather than the position of the arm relative to the body, that dominates one's awareness. The acute dissonances between the separate wind and string lines, emboldened by fitful dynamics and the uncertain intona- tion caused by the literal strain of playing at extreme registers, inten- sify the association with physical discomfort. Finally, the tapering of the musical texture corresponds to the increasing precariousness of any sustained stretch; contraction and an accompanying release of tension at the end of the extract eventually become inevitable. There are, then, aspects of the structure of the music that lend themselves to a non- motional metaphor at this point - and that distance the extract as a whole from the onward movement sometimes thought an inevitable corollary of musical change.67

Elliott Carter's music generally presents a more complex picture than the extract from Atmospheresjust discussed. Nevertheless, it is still possible to identify predominant metaphors for certain passages in Carter's music. The opening of A Celebration of Some 100 X 150 Notes from Three Occasions for Orchestra presents a case in point.68 The feathery, tremulous beginning in winds and strings seems decidedly airborne. A more cumbersome brass fanfare serves notice, however, of what is to follow, namely four successive, clearly marked brass entries on sustained chords, largely divested of the figuration that character- izes the very opening. The weighty impact of each entry is com- pounded by their accumulation on top of each other. Much of this substantial load is soon lifted, although a stopped horn chord sounds as a kind of reeling aftershock; the music does not fully get off the ground again until the fluttering figuration resumes on the celesta.

As with the Ligeti, the verticality schema is perceptible in this description. However, the more prominent metaphor is that of weight; motional attributions are largely secondary and supportive. To associ- ate heaviness with loud music in low registers, and lightness with quieter music in higher registers, as my description basically does, may seem simplistic to the point of naivety. There are, nevertheless, strong reasons for making these connections: the pervasive verticality schema associates bass frequencies with lowness and thus, by extension, with relative heaviness;69 and the actual impact of loud bass sounds on the human body is in certain respects akin to a weighty physical force.

67 Of course, the title of Ligeti's work suggests a rather different governing metaphor for this music. Additionally, the composer's programme note for the work refers evocatively to images of entanglement (the relevant passage is quoted in Gyorgy Ligeti in Conversation, with Peter Varnai, Josef Hausler et al., London, 1983, 25). These alternative metaphorical frames seem to me more apt for other parts of Ligeti's score.

68 See sound clip 2, taken from the recording by the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Oliver Knussen, of Carter's A Celebration of Some 100 X 150 Notes from Three Occasions for Orchestra (Virgin Classics 791 503-2), at <www.jrma.oupjournals.org>.

69 On the verticality schema see Zbikowski, 'Metaphor and Music Theory'.

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There are, additionally, other features of the music grounding these metaphors. Each separate brass entry is immediately at full volume, and involves unchanging, sustained notes -just as, say, the weight of a stone is immediately felt and remains undiminishing as long as one holds it. Each entry also occupies a fairly specific registral region. This helps to keep the entries distinct as metaphorical 'objects', and supports a mapping from a domain of physical experience that is typi- cally spatially localized rather than all-pervasive (such as heat or light).

Could the Carter extract be heard in terms of other metaphors? What reasons are there for preferring metaphors of lightness and heaviness over, say, metaphors of liquid and solid? Gy6rgy Kurtag's orchestral work Stele opens with music that I hear in terms of solidity and fluidity, and it may help us determine some of the distinguishing qualities between these two metaphorical frames.70 The musical struc- ture in the Kurtag is simple and bold. The opening gesture is a single, sustained note (G) played by flutes, brass and strings at multiple octaves. This edifice initially remains solidly intact, although it is immediately subject to a diminuendo; eventually, though, the outlines of the chord are blurred as individual instruments gradually disperse in exaggerated vibrato and gooey 'quasi glissandos'. As Paul Griffiths notes, the music 'weeps away from confidence':71 it seems literally to dissolve. Three clarinets continue this process of dissolution once the rest of the orchestra has disappeared; their origin in the entity that opened the work becomes increasingly indiscernible.

The opening chord is crucial here in determining the metaphor: its crisp articulation (achieved with the help of timpani) gives an un- deniable impression of solidity. But the modest dynamic and ensuing diminuendo mean there is little physical impact on the listener, and so considerations of weight are not to the fore. Similarly, the multiple octaves, being spread across the register, fail to give the impression of localized force conveyed by Carter's registrally distinct, and more obvi- ously 'forceful', brass entries. In the context of Kurtag's opening gesture, it is difficult not to hear glissandos and microtonal inflections as breaches of the music's self-containedness. Where Carter's strings and wind flutter whimsically, Kurtig's retain the general shape of the music's original state for some time after its actual boundaries have degenerated; dissolution is inevitably a gradual process.

This is not to legislate against hearing the Carter in terms of coales- cence and dissipation; there is in certain respects a kindredness between metaphors of solidity and weight. But the invariance hypoth- esis implies that some metaphors will be apt and others not: metaphors are not freely interchangeable. For instance, qualities of light and dark,

70 See sound clip 3, taken from the recording by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Claudio Abbado, of Kurtag's Stele (Deutsche Grammophon 447 761-2), at <www.jrma.oupjour- nals.org>. ? 2002 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH. The materials contained herein are protected under various laws. These materials are for non-commercial use only. Any reproduction, publi- cation, further distribution or public exhibition of materials provided at this site, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited.

71 Paul Griffiths, booklet note to the Berlin Philharmonic compact-disc recording of Stele.

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or of shifting colours - common images in many descriptions of music - are specified by quite different musical structures. The familiar association of 'high' registers with brightness and 'low' registers with darkness is a component of this specification,72 but other structural qualities are important in determining these particular metaphors as opposed to, say, relative weight. In particular, a lack of sharp outlines works against a conceptualization in terms of discrete 'objects' - and thus makes metaphors concerning weight, solidity or relative location less appropriate. The connection of 'washes' of musical sound with evocations of light and colour is, of course, a staple of text-book descriptions of musical impressionism. And similar qualities can be found in much recent music. The arresting opening of Kaija Saariaho's orchestral piece Du cristal serves as an example of this trend in contem- porary composition.73 Most of the orchestra is deployed from the very start, playing either sustained or insistently reiterated notes at varying dynamic levels. The triangle and glockenspiel, and the bass drum, form the extremes of a palette of brightness that is subtly modulated by allowing different parts of the richly dappled texture successively to gain prominence. Saariaho largely eschews clear outlines, preferring to allow the play of light to alter subtly and without sudden contrast. The simultaneous presence of different shades of brightness under- lines the appropriateness of the prevailing metaphor: the visual field can readily incorporate such a multiplicity, where it is difficult to know how one could interpret a music as being both heavy and light.

To place the foregoing discussion of musical works in the context of my larger argument, I have proposed that musical change may be understood in terms of a variety of physical metaphors, and that onward motion does not have the precedence in this metaphorical conceptualization that is often assumed. It is important to underline the implication of this for the musical extracts just described. Conceived in the ways I have suggested, this music can no longer be said to be passing, or unfolding, or flowing by; it is not leading towards anything, driving onwards, or following a path. Instead it is stretching and retracting, fluctuating in weight, gradually dissolving, or darken- ing and brightening. More accurately, these are the conceptualizations that loom prominently in the metaphorical mix at these particular moments: hearing music metaphorically is never a simple matter (earlier I referred to the way in which music prompts a 'kaleidoscope' of metaphors), and broad sweeping descriptions - as, for instance, when we describe tonality simply by reference to onward motion -

inevitably involve some crude simplification. The inevitable limitations of any description of experience notwithstanding, it remains possible to see how different sorts of music could motivate non-motional

72 One assumes there is a straightforward association at work here between the lightness of the ('high') sky or sun and the darkness of the ('low') earth.

73 See sound clip 4, taken from the recording by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, of Saariaho's Du cristal (Ondine ODE 804-2), at <www.jrma.oupjournals.org>.

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conceptualizations of changing sound, and how descriptions of those experiences could reflect these conceptualizations - as long as we are able to distance ourselves from the assumptions about time and temporal existence that typically condition our reflections on musical experience.

Let me give a summary of my claims in this article. I have pointed to the importance of metaphors in the description and experience of music, and shown how this accords with recent metaphor theory, which argues for the centrality of physical metaphors in all experience. However, I have also suggested that music's changing sound does not require to be experienced in terms of ongoing, path-like motion - a suggestion that is counter to the claims of many writers on musical temporality, and those of metaphor theorists themselves. I have argued instead that music frequently prompts a 'kaleidoscope' of meta- phorical imagery, within which ongoing motion is only one of many candidate conceptualizations. The idea that ongoing motion has some sort of priority as a way of conceptualizing musical change, in relation to other metaphorical frames such as heat, weight, light, tension or transformation, is, I have suggested, a product of numerous extrane- ous factors which may intervene when we come to reflect upon musical experience. One of the most important of these factors is our idea of time itself, which is typically understood to involve ongoing motion, and which is sometimes accorded an existential actuality even by those metaphor theorists who point to its thoroughly metaphorical status.

In the final section of this article I pointed to a number of specific examples of music that foreground non-motional metaphors. These were all drawn from avant-garde concert music of the second half of the twentieth century - in part because of my desire to indicate how our appreciation of music may be constrained if undue importance is attached to the metaphor of ongoing motion. My view of the place of motion in musical experience is perhaps more obviously borne out by non-tonal music of this sort, given the conduciveness of tonal syntax to conceptualization in terms of directed motion. However, the phenom- enological variety of musical experience which my account attempts to underline is also evident in more traditional repertory: this is suggested by the Debussy extract discussed in this article, and indeed by the programme note to the Tchaikovsky 'Pathetique' from which I quoted. In this connection it should be emphasized that it is not my concern to rule the conceptualization of music in terms of ongoing motion as inappropriate per se, but rather to see that conceptualiz- ation treated as part of a wider repertory of physicalized responses.

One of the consequences of doing so would be to remind ourselves that, contrary to the impression given by cultural concepts of time, change possesses no intrinsic properties that give it a special affinity with onward motion over any of the other physical metaphors by means of which we might grasp it. Another way of expressing this would be as follows: music, partly by virtue of its susceptibility to metaphorical conceptualization, implicitly points to the limitations of our customary

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dealings with change. As I have suggested in this article, concepts of time work to obscure these limitations. But it has been my intention to

suggest that musical experience offers a counter to time, by alerting us to aspects of our encounters with change that take forms far removed from time's onward motion.

ABSTRACT

This article argues that music offers experiences of change that are at odds with our common understanding of time. Specifically, I question the wide- spread belief that onward motion is a condition of musical temporality. I approach this issue through metaphor theory, which tends to argue for the necessity of metaphorical experiences of time and music in terms of motion. I argue that music's changing sound evokes a variety of bodily metaphors; motion is not ever-present, but intermingles with metaphors of heat, light, weight, tension and so on. Works by Ligeti, Carter, Kurtag and Saariaho are discussed as case studies.