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Nordic Journal of Music Therapy
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New Steps in Musical Meaning – the
Metaphoric Process as an Organizing
Principle
Henrik Jungaberle , Rolf Verres & Fletcher DuBois
Published online: 10 Jul 2009.
To cite this article: Henrik Jungaberle , Rolf Verres & Fletcher DuBois (2001) New Steps in
Musical Meaning – the Metaphoric Process as an Organizing Principle, Nordic Journal of Music
Therapy, 10:1, 4-16, DOI: 10.1080/08098130109478013
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08098130109478013
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ARTICLE
Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 10(1), pp 4-16.
New Steps in Musical
Meaning - the Metaphoric
Process as an Organizing
Principle
Henrik Jungaberle, Rolf Verres and Fletcher DuBois
Abstract
Cognitive metaphor theory provides music psychology and music therapy with some principles for
an explanation of musical experience. This is described as personal meaning generation on
different levels of information processing. The listeners or players actively merge internal and
external contexts with their intramusical, acoustical perceptions. We introduce the concept of
"musical scenes " as a characterization of such contexts in music playing and listening. Here
metaphor theory is demonstrated as an empirically based approach that gives insight into some
meaning generation processes. Examples are given from interviews with music therapy clients.
Finally some ideas on the development of music therapy theory are presented.
Keywords: metaphor - musical meaning - musical scenes - mental image and cognitive representation
Introduction
When we talk about music, metaphor is
inevitable. Right at the start some questions
emerge: Is there really music that is "dark",
"heavy" or "floating"? Can melodies have
,arches'? Is a sound ,mellow' and do rhythms
,push'? Can an upright bass actually ,support' a
HENRIK JUNGABERLE
Dr.sc.hum., Dipl. Music Therapist, works
clinically, as a researcher and in teaching students
at the Department of Medical Psychology
(University of Heidelberg, Germany). His interests
include health psychology, philosophy of science
and music psychology. Tel +49-6221-568147
Email: Henrik_Jungaberle@med.uni-heidelberg.de
4 Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 2001, 10(1)
,musical structure'? How does a client feel
"drawn deeply into a piece of music"? Most of
these expressions use the metaphorical concept
of a ,musical space', but is there really something
like a "musical space" and if so where is it?
Moreover, why do people have so many styles of
orientation within that ,space'? And in what
distinct ways do music therapy clients voyage
ROLF VERRES
Prof.
Dr.med. Dipl.-Psych. Director of the
Department of Medical Psychology (University of
Heidelberg). Main focus in research: Subjective
theories of health and disease, psychooncology,
music therapy. He is a passionate piano player.
Email: Rolf_Verres@med.uni-heidelberg.de
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NEW STEPS IN MUSICAL MEANING - THE METAPHORIC PROCESS
through "musical landscapes"?
What this text is about
We will address questions concerning how
meaning in music emerges. Here what is at stake
is whether metaphors are only linguistic
phenomena, alien to music, or if they are a natural
part of our music related information processing.
With cognitive metaphor theory we propose an
uncommon perspective on this traditional topic
of musicology and music psychology. Yet we
want to emphasize that the main concern of this
text is description, not the analysis of a
connection between metaphorically
conceptualizing music and being successful in
music therapy. The latter of course is the
therapeutically more relevant aspect (see
Jungaberlc 2000). We found it useful though to
separate the topics of description and therapeutic
operation (what therapists can do to enhance the
handling of music). Here we are concerned with
the more general level of "organizing principles"
in musical experience. We intend to treat the
second question in a future article.
In cognitive science metaphor is understood
as being a matter of the mind and not only of
language. With this theoretical background we
investigated aspects of musical experience within
and outside of the therapy context. Our point is
not to reduce musical meaning to "verbal
content", but to point out similar structures in
the processing of language and music that are
based in the human mind. Although we assume
that the metaphoric process is universal to
musical experience, our own examples and
clinical evidence chiefly come from outpatient
music psychotherapy clients with a variety of
FLETCHER DUBOIS
PhD,
Assistant Professor in the Department of
Interdisciplinary Studies. Academic Program
Director (Heidelberg International Center of
National-Louis University). His interests include
media research and making pedagogical
therapeutic connections. He is a professional
singer-song writer.
Email: fletcherdubois@compuserve.com
disorders. Some of the material presented here
was collected in the course of a qualitative/
quantitative research project at the Department
of Medical Psychology at Heidelberg University
(Germany).
As we want to point out the framework of ideas
for our metaphorical investigations we give some
preliminary notes concerning the development of
theory in music therapy. Then we present the
basic ideas of cognitive metaphor theory. We
report on our methods of investigation and
thereafter discuss the evidence for an impact of
metaphor as an organizing principle in musical
experience by means of an analysis of client
comments on their musical experience in group
therapy. The "metaphorical circle" completes our
presentation.
Common challenges in building
music therapy theory
The question of musical meaning within
music therapy
Recently in the field of music therapy there has
been growing interest in issues of epistemology
and clinical theory. As it has become clear that
music (psycho)therapists reflect and engage in
dialogue as other therapists do, research on
musical meaning generation is also dependent on
the dialogical, non-musical context of therapy.
In our group therapy research project for example
the video observers recorded how long therapists
and clients where engaged in certain activities.
For two groups, the average time therapists and
clients were occupied with making or listening
to music was 19% (5.45h of 31.30 in 12 sessions),
while 60% (18.30h) of the time was spent with
dialogue. Music related drawing and mind-body
exercises consumed 12% of the time (cf.
Jungaberle 2000 for more details). We have to
put away the "blinders" of therapy ideologies
which maintain that music therapy treatments
homogeneously consist of musical actions.
The pervasive role of context (Stige 1998), or
"musical pragmatics" as Ruud (2000) calls it, is
clear if we take a look outside of the narrower
Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 2001, 10(1) 5
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HENRIK JUNGABERLE, ROLF VERRES
&
FLETCHER DUBOIS
topic
of
acoustical perception.
Our
sketch
of
"musical scenes" is based on the notion of internal
and external contexts
(cf.
Bateson 1972; Goffman
1959).
If frames (=contexts) are decisive
in
generating
musical meaning,
the
influence
of
that context
on music itself might be
as
important as the music
played
in
therapy
-
since
the
therapist's
aim is to
facilitate therapeutically valuable experience.
How then
do we
introduce, support
and
teach
musical interventions?
Overcoming theoretical scepticism
In general, scepticism towards theory kept music
therapy isolated from interesting developments
for example
in
systems theory, health-
and
music
psychology.
A
romantic "Two-worlds-theory"
maintains that
the
aesthetic "world
of
music"
is
completely different from
the
"world
of
language"
(cf.
Jungaberle 2000). However
the
reciprocal relationship between idea
and
experience
(cf.
Kuhn
1962;
Habermas
1985;
Lincoln
and
Guba
1985;
Damasio
1994)
exists
even within music
itself.
Following Ruud (2000)
we want
to
avoid
the
"fundamental attributional
error", which causes people
to
overlook
situational factors
and the
role
of
cultural
and
individual elaborations.
Looking
for
interesting differences
A practical sense of,science based' music therapy
entails partial inclusion
and
delimitation
of
approaches from neighbouring disciplines.
Clinical practice
and
science
can
confidently
be
treated
as
different operational fields
(see
Buchholz
and
Kleist 1997). With
a
field
of
practice like music therapy there will
be
sectors
or subdisciplines which relate more closely
to
scientific knowledge
and
others that don't.
We
are not
looking
for
identity of practice
and
science,
but are
searching
for
interesting
differences between
the two
fields.
The
results
of qualitative
and
quantitative research
are
most
valuable when they keep somewhat "alien"
to
their subject-matter (Sells, Smith
et
al. 1995)
and
so inspiringly provoke
our
views. This
is
what
metaphor analysis certainly does.
As a
practical
consequence
of
this "philosophy
of
science"
music therapists
can
self-confident!y decide
on
the most convincing theories
and
associated
academic fields
to
apply
in
practice
and
research.
In metaphor analysis
e.g., we do not
adhere
a
traditional view of a categorical polarity between
"emotional"
and
"cognitive" (discussed
for
example
in
Erkkilå 2000: 14f). There
are
several
theories
in
psychology
and
neuroscience worth
considering that resolve that "polarity" under the
idea
of
integrated representational systems
(Horowitz
1987;
Stern
1988;
Edelman
1992;
Laughlin
Jr.,
McManus
et al. 1992;
Damasio
1994).
Are
we
talking about music
or
musical
experience?
What might seem trivial
at
first, proves
to be
crucial: There
is a
distinct difference between
music
and
musical experience.
We
could cite
dozens of sentences in music therapy texts where
that difference
is not
delineated
and the
concept
of music gets mixed
up
with
the
related musical
experience
of
the authors
or
their clients. While
a minimum consensus definition seems to
be
that
"music
is the
intentional organization
and use of
acoustical events" (Bruhn, Oerter
et al.
1994),
musical experience
is how the
whole organism
reacts
to
that stimulus, actively "composes"
its
subjective meanings out of it and how that process
is monitored
by the Self. To be
sure these
definitions
are
crude,
but
they make clear what
the musicologist Leonard Meyer (1994) already
has stated: there
is no
direct path from music
(the
sounds, rhythms, melodies
and
whole acoustics)
to musical experience.
In
fact
the
latter
can be
almost totally independent of the musical events,
as
in the
case
of
a listener associating chains
of
"private" memories
and
turning
her
attention
away from
the
musical events. Musical behavior
in therapy situations is partly
a
result of the plans,
goals and preferences that arise
in the
therapeutic
context
(cf.
Ruud 2000)
and in
turn provides
its
own special associative potential.
Are
we
analyzing music
or
musical scenes?
We
are in
need
of a new and
simple concept
of
6 Nordic Journal
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Therapy,
2001, 10(1)
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NEW STEPS IN MUSICAL MEANING - THE METAPHORIC PROCESS
the music-context relationship. Music can be
understood on the basis of a behaviour-
performance perspective (observation), from the
perspective of experience (report) and from the
point of view of musical structure, respectively
music's impact on physical structure (acoustical
patterns, musical notation; neurological patterns).
But all these keys open doors to something we
call the "musical scene" (for ,scene' see Goffman
1967;
1997/1959; Jungaberle 2000). A musical
scene is a situation that involves internal and
external stimulus patterns (Pennebaker 1995).
Internal patterns arc interozeptive perceptions
(the body) and mental structures (emotion,
thought, images). External patterns can be seen
as physics based (the musical acoustics), social
(group dynamics) and informative
(communication and meaning) structures and
events. Musical experience is always shaped
within such scenes. It is never generated by means
of the music as acoustical structure alone. In most
cases it is short cut or even reductionist to say
musical meaning develops solely out of music -
if by that we only mean the acoustic phenomenon
we can hear, for example on a CD-recording.
The above relates to the text-context debate.
Music becomes a meaningful event through the
body which senses and creates the internal and
external scene as components of
a
frame. This is
valid for active improvising and for receptive
music listening. Indeed it has often been
described both in music therapy and related
disciplines as well - without drawing all the
consequences (cf. Guck 1994; Kassler 1994;
Leppert 1994). From the viewpoint of music as
acoustical structure the following are frames:
instruments, their perceptible physics and
symbolic reference, the facial and bodily
expressions and the spatial distance between the
players. Internal frames are consensually defined
rules of the game, role definitions etc. (for a
systematic description see Jungaberle 2000).
Additionally the listener constructs transmodal
mental scenes out of the acoustical information.
These involve spatial information and often
mental imagery (Bondc 1997; Anderson 2000).
Every musical or environmental sound will be
mentally sketched by the mind. Erkkila (2000:
21) described his improvisation teaching
technique according to a scenic understanding
of
the
improvisational events. He encourages the
gathering of visual information, body language
and the execution of graphic notations using the
transmodally working Gestalt mechanisms (he
calls it dynamic forms). The term of a ,musical
scene' is also useful to integrate music
psychological and music ethnological
knowledge: Absolute and referential musical
meaning as defined by L. Meyer (1994) and
Bharucca (1994) coexist within such scenes. The
interplay of the musical elements (absolute
meaning) and the local, conventionalized signs
that are culturally associated to some musical
elements (referential meaning) can be interpreted
as elements of one united process. In the Belian
ritual practiced by the Petalagan Malay people
in Sumatra the call of very specific rhythms of
their drum ketobung is perceived as the
appearance of very specific spirits and ancestors
by the participants (Turner 1994). Strangers to
their cosmological world do not understand the
musical scene. Still they can hear the music and
maybe develop adequate musical expectations to
it - but they experience a different thing. Equally
in music therapy we have a keyboard of cultural
signs and extramusical event schemes by which
we interpret the musical scenes.
We mention this theory of musical scenes
because we can empirically observe that clients
do act and react within a network of sensory and
conceptual information from without and within
their bodies that transcends the purely music-
acoustical information. They say things like:
"Yes,
we were drumming together and looking
at the others, I could see, they had fun" (referring
to sense of sight) or: "Actively playing, hm, you
are really beating with your hands and sticks, (...)
but you are also feeling, sensing how that feels
when you beat the drum" (referring to
interozeption). The elaborated metaphors of
clients are drawn from their "holistic" perceptions
and interpretations of the whole scene.
Metaphorical transference is based on the
sensation of the whole scene.
Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 2001, 10(1) 7
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HENRIK JUNGABERLE, ROLF VERRES & FLETCHER DUBOIS
A metaphor theory that goes beyond
linguistics
Depression is being down, love is madness and
time is money. Music appears as a mirror of the
soul and the soul itself is a bird that flies away
shyly if we scare it. "An image says more than a
thousand words", everybody knows this saying.
But are metaphors and images "dark" and
manipulative (as Aristotle believed), must they
therefore be avoided in scientific discourse? Or
are they an essential part of every day mental
processes?
The linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher
Mark Johnson developed cognitive metaphor
theory from the end of the 1970s on (1980; 1999).
With their publication Metaphors we live by they
opened a broad field of anthropological,
interdisciplinary oriented research. It is good to
keep in mind that they use the term metaphor in
a very similar sense to Piaget's use of the term
scheme.
Metaphor theories are numerous, are situated
in different scientific disciplines and focus on
contradictory characteristics of the phenomenon.
Linguists are mainly concerned with the formal
expression of metaphor, psychologists take an
interest in mental structures and processes
involved, sociologists relate to the interactive
force of metaphor in communication and
psychotherapists use its potential to evoke strong
emotional response and spontaneous insight
(Erickson, Rossi et al. 1978). Here we will not
present all these theories (for an overview see
Jungaberle 2000, Leary 1990, Ortony 1979) but
rather explain the core concepts of one of them:
cognitive metaphor theory. The six theses that
follow will make clear Lakoff and Johnson's
position and why this is so interesting for the
theory of musical meaning.
(1) Metaphors are ubiquitous and certainly not
only a phenomenon of poetics.
(2) Metaphors always consist of two domains,
X and Y. The target domain is the one we are
occupied with at the moment, for example TIME
in the metaphor TIME IS MONEY. Or MUSIC
in MUSIC IS VIBRATION. The source domain
is the one we take the image from: MONEY in
TIME IS MONEY or VIBRATION in MUSIC
IS VIBRATION. Formally conceptual metaphors
(the type) are signified by CAPITALIZATION
in order to distinguish them from single
expressions (the examples for the type).
X and Y are linked by the so called "mapping".
The mapping is the structure that we transfer form
Y to X: in TIME IS MONEY for example we
imply that time can be quantified as can money.
Some may use this metaphor in passing, but
others seem to be "living by that metaphor" and
organize their whole lives under the guiding light
of this little principle. One must also notice that
we can sense metaphors bodily because they
involve the potential for emotion, kinaesthetic
feeling and an attentional focus: in
DEPRESSION IS A HEAVY WEIGHT most of
us can feel depression weighing on our shoulders,
almost bearing us down.
(3) All metaphors are more or less embodied.
This means that the elementary starting point of
our structuring the world always is the body:
Feeling happy is feeling up and when we are
encouraging somebody who is frustrated we often
say "cheer up\ (or in German "Head
up\").
(4) The so called uni-directional thesis
predicates that usually rather unstructured or
diffuse domains, e.g. abstract and complex things,
get structured by something that is more simple
and more sensory. This is the actual reason why
we were applying metaphor theory to our
understanding of musical experience because
music usually is something that is flowing,
processual, diffuse, unshaped, and hardly
conceivable by a strictly categorizing mind, so
that we are using metaphorical concepts like
"hard sounds" (hard is a property of material
objects) and "interwoven melody patterns" to
conceive it (woven things can usually be
perceived visually and with the sense of touch).
In the same way a psychiatric client who is
experiencing a loss of the sense of self might say:
"I feel like water pouring in different directions".
Everybody has felt, heard and seen water, nobody
has ever seen a
"Self.
(5) A conceptual metaphor (the scheme) is
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NEW STEPS IN MUSICAL MEANING - THE METAPHORIC PROCESS ....
always a type, i.e. a family name for a class of
things. There must be several family members
for it to form a conceptual metaphor such as
"MUSIC IS A SPACE". This is where the
qualitative research aspect of metaphor analysis
comes in, because here we have to search for the
appropriate main category to cover a number of
diverse examples.
(6) Finally, no matter what metaphorical
concepts
we
use:
Every concept allows us to focus
only on certain perceptions, motivations or
thoughts. This is called hiding and highlighting:
if we say MUSIC IS A LANGUAGE, we
highlight the communicational aspect of it, but
we possibly hide for example its non-discursive
potential to evoke Altered States of Mind. The
focussing quality of metaphorical images is used
for example in Guided Imagery and Music (GIM).
It makes a difference if you walk out on to a
summer meadow in your fantasy or if you
mentally investigate a dark cave, because both
images evoke different associated concepts, or
to use the language of neuroscience: different
representational units. In psychotherapy we find
metaphors on different levels of the therapeutic
system: in theory, in dialogue and in the form of
skilful interventions. But our focus here is not to
emphasize what we can do with metaphor in
language, how we can actively use it, but to
discuss how it spontaneously occurs in music
perception.
If we keep the following definition of a
metaphor in mind, we will understand the music-
related examples in the next paragraphs: "The
essence of metaphor is understanding and
experiencing one kind of thing in terms of
another" (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5).
Methods
Focussed Guideline Interviews
Our data comes from 21 focussed guideline
interview we conducted after conclusion of the
therapy period (see Merton and Kendall in Flick
1995:
94). We asked the clients to subjectively
evaluate their therapy, for the role of group in
their process and most important for the meaning
of the musical scenes. As part of the interview
process we played three video sequences of
musical experiments from their therapy. For
metaphor analysis we coded all music-related
statements of the group clients who had
participated in an outpatient 12-session music
psychotherapy (see Jungaberle 2000).
Metaphor analysis is qualitative research
The body of the interview transcriptions was then
analyzed applying the basic methods and rules
of Content Analysis and Grounded Theory
(Jungaberle 2000; Glaser and Strauss 1967;
Mayring 1993). The goal of this qualitative
research is to construct a systematic network of
terms which describe a subject in an innovative
and comprehensive way. In metaphor analysis
verbal data is analyzed in order to formulate
.conceptual metaphors' that are to be closely
connected to the data. In general the kind of
evidence one can get from verbal data is based
on the so called "cognitive turn" in psychology:
that through verbal utterances we can detect
underlying cognitive processes. There have only
been a few systematic examinations of the topic
of metaphor and music (Kassler 1994; Cox 1999;
Johnson and Larson 1999). To first establish a
rather general overview we started with
investigating journalistic texts on pieces of music
(forthcoming publication) before we analyzed our
client interviews .
Our goal was to find conceptual metaphors in
the description of musical experience. As
metaphors we counted all components of speech
that weren't used literally regardless of their
grammatical form. The analysis was conducted
with the qualitative research program ATLAS/ti
(Muhr 1997). There were three main steps: first
establishing the basic codes by reading through
the interviews, second testing the codes with a
group of other qualitative researchers and third
deciding on the final form of
codes.
At this point
we divided the codes into groups which we called
,families' (=more abstract codes). Metaphorical
concepts could be concurrently members of more
than one family. The families themselves and the
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HENRIK JUNGABERLE, ROLF VERRES
&
FLETCHER DUBOIS
members (=subcodes) can be found at different
levels of abstraction: space is very abstract, a
knife is very concrete. For a detailed description
of the methodological issues and sequences of
analysis see Jungaberle 2000.
Results: Evidence from within the
therapeutic context
From the interviews we could formulate 40
metaphorical codes dealing with music in
general. 35 were concerned particularly with
improvisation. Seven codes dealt with metaphors
for instruments. As we coded 427 citations one
can see that some of the codes are not much in
evidence. We could generate four "families" of
codes.
Family
1
united metaphors having in common
that music was somehow treated as
a
force, a
power, or an energy that could ,move' something
(be it feelings hidden deep within or the ,frozen
feeling' of the group, see beneath). These are not
so rich in (visual) imagery, but probably rich in
kinaesthetic representation. Adding to our
explanation above, it is important to note that
elementary forms of ,thinking' are also treated
as metaphors here. For example the so called ,UP-
DOWN-scheme' (SAD IS BEING DOWN and
HAPPY IS UP) or the CONTAINER-scheme (e.g.
we experience our body as a container for
feelings).
Family 2 combines metaphors for music as
interaction. Family 3 shows music as space and
Family 4 sees music as an object, structure or
living being. Finally there were some single
metaphorical concepts, the most prominent of
these was MUSIC IS A LANGUAGE.
Family 1: Forces, powers and energies
The impact of music on things and processes
inside or outside of the body is central here. In
the musical arena we also find what Johnson
called the COMPULSION-Scheme: "Everyone
knows the experience of being moved by external
forces, such as wind, water, physical objects, and
other people" (Johnson 1987: 45).
We
have two groups of opposing metaphorical
images within this family: MUSIC IS A MEANS
OF BRINGING INNER THINGS OUT INTO
THE OPEN versus MUSIC IS A MEANS TO
FIND ACCESS TO THE INNER WORLD.
Guido said: „when
I
played, with music
I
could
bring my rage, tensions and whatever was inside
of me outside, simply by means of the sounds".
And Katja told us: „I could go inside of my
emotional world and push out what made me
suffer".
In the second group, MUSIC IS A MEANS
TO FIND ACCESS TO THE INNER WORLD,
the main direction of the forces gets turned
around: "With the sound it comes that you go
inside, that you listen inside and look for what's
happing there" says Daniel, and Lars observes
how "music penetrates and moves things inside
of
me".
Family 2: Interaction
More rich in imagery and context transference is
the metaphor IMPROVISING IS COMBAT.
Various clients described their experience in
certain musical scenes, as if they were
experiencing scenes of fight and struggle.
Simone: "In my playing I wanted to crush her".
And Tanja: "There was a duel going on between
us.
And we had to fight tooth and nail against
each other". We could observe many times that
the (self-rated) aggressive mood of some clients
increased the probability that they would evaluate
apiece of music itself as aggressive or the other
player as belligerent, while other group
participants wouldn't. In such an interaction
metaphorical structures of fighting and struggling
are mapped on the interaction (see Lakoff and
Johnson 1980).
In another musical scene Gertrud played the
piano. Describing what she had experienced, she
simply said: "I produced piercing sounds". Asked
what she associated with that at the time, she said:
"I was imagining somebody to whom
I
did that."
Here we find somebody bringing a whole private
scenario into the musical scene. But could this
be heard musically? Surely not with all the
implications of Gertrud's image. As we observed
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NEW STEPS IN MUSICAL MEANING - THE METAPHORIC PROCESS ....
from the group dialogue about that scene, others
heard and saw basic characteristics of an
energetic, and "aggressive" movement. Musically
most prominent was Gertrud's staccato play. We
coded her ,piercing sounds' also among family
4 where music is conceptualized as an object. In
this example perceived features of the musical
process can gain characteristics of every day
objects like knives. Yet if
we
include the context
of
her
statement in the coding, it fits even better
into the combat metaphor.
Family 3: Space
We shall now focus briefly on musical space.
Spatial metaphors are in fact the most frequent
in musical description. Musical events are
constructed as a space in which "objects"
approach', move, combine and split up in distinct
ways.
Yet they are not only used to describe
musical-acoustical perceptions, but also to
specify psychological or interindividual relations.
Standing far away from the other means being
unfamiliar, being "distancing". We find these
spatial qualities all over in the musical scene: The
instruments or their sounds and with those their
players can be "far away from each other".
But in another sense the musical acoustics
itself can be "seen" as some kind of container
like in MUSIC IS A SURROUNDING SPACE:
One can be "right in the middle of music", "I
could dive right into music" or "I could let myself
fall into music". Being "within" music often is a
felicitous sign for the unrestricted ability to take
part within the scene, to be part of the event.
Family 4: Objects, structure, living being
A
re-constructive process by which we "test" the
qualities of
an
utterance or musical event can be
observed when clients give simple, human-like
qualities to music: "this music was somehow
aggressive" or "the sounds were somehow more
gentle, sensitive and more in contact". Actually
this is what human beings can say about their
relation to and interaction with others. Kirstin:
"the music, it sounded so witchlike". If such a
concrete, context-bound image occurs while
playing or in the active process of listening, it
can determine the way the musical events
progress. It can also make the music related
experience "branch out" in such a way that future
associations, from that point on, may be more
related to the image than to the music that follows
(e.g. in this case the witch).
Sometimes people talk about music as if it
were some kind of creature, having the
characteristics of a human for example. There we
can see another interesting, Gestalt-like meaning
generation in a musical scene. The frequency of
this in our material was overwhelming. We
interpreted it in accordance with Arnie Cox's
"mimetic thesis": "we understand the sounds
made by others in comparison with the sounds
we have made ourselves" (1999: 4).
Single metaphorical concepts: Music as
language
Of the many music related metaphorical concepts,
the metaphor MUSIC IS A LANGUAGE is the
metaphor which has the greatest tendency to be
unconsciously used. Whether music is a language
and what it may communicate has of course been
a central question in academic discussion on
musical meaning (see Aiello 1994; Kassler 1994;
Jungaberle 2000). Concepts like that inhere
scenic knowledge about situations and processes,
e.g. about turntaking in dialogues.
The ability to face music flexibly and playfully
contributes to the successful use of music as
therapeutic medium. Clients who could apply the
concept MUSIC IS A LANGUAGE to
improvisation or pieces of music, i.e. those who
felt that they could "say something with music"
and that others did as well, could easily make
sense of the improvisation process. In accordance
with that, for many clients dialogical forms of
improvisation were easier to "understand" than
the less language related group forms.
"Understanding" things is part of our every day
concept of language and likewise is the turntaking
of one "speaker" and one "listener", which is
easier when you have two people playing. Group
improvisation process requires however a
willingness to expand normal turntaking
expectations. The latter shows us the shadow or
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HENRIK JUNGABERLE, ROLF VERRES & FLETCHER DUBOIS
hiding side of the metaphorical concept MUSIC
IS A LANGUAGE: people who stick to it too
closely, intently looking for "a meaning" in what
is happening, are less flexible in experiencing
unstructured aesthetical processes. The metaphor
MUSIC IS A LANGUAGE underlies statements
such as: "it seemed to me that everybody was
talking simultaneously and confused" (about a
group improvisation).
Metaphor theory also maintains: to really
experience a subject or process, we need more
than one concept, more than one metaphor. While
MUSIC IS LANGUAGE may lead clients to
make sense of improvising, it also conceals some
of the most interesting features of music (the
synchronous and complementary aspects of
events for example). It makes us assume, that we
have language-like structures in musical events
with a sender, a message and receptor. But this
assumed structure is itself highly metaphoric (see
the CONDUIT-Metaphor, Reddy 1979).
Nordic Journal of Music
Therapy,
2001, 10(1)
The other way around: Music as
metaphor and the metaphorical circle
We have discussed metaphorical transfer into
music from contexts outside of it. This
perspective is only part of the picture. Mainly
we argued that musical issues get treated like
issues of life by infusing extramusical contexts
to the acoustical processes. Here the categories
of our "natural" and social environment are used
to understand music.
However on the other hand the intramusical
Gestalts and music as a whole can become
metaphors. Then the issues of life are treated as
if they were issues of music. These are in an actual
sense musical metaphors. In this case the primary
musical experiences (including experiences of the
musical scene) become the source target of the
metaphorical transfer (Fig.l). "Rhythm" lends
itself to describing physiological processes like
biorhythms, "good vibrations" stand for positive
Fig. 1: The metaphorical circle: Extramusical structures influence the experience of music,
while also the experience of intramusical structures can be transferee to subjective life worlds
outside of the narrower realm of music
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NEW STEPS IN MUSICAL MEANING - THE METAPHORIC PROCESS
emotional contact, and musical "harmony"
functions as an example for peaceful coexistence
of
people.
The detailed investigation of meaning
generation in the improvisational process is
illuminated here. BEING AGGRESSIVE IS
PLAYING LOUD is a simple and frequently
occurring metaphor. Why should there be
metaphorical structure in it? Because this
experience depends highly on the musical and
scenic
context. Playing loud could just as well
be an expression of self-confidence and
powerfulness, it may show a lack of contact with
the environment, or it can be an expression of
joy.
This
process of nonverbal, context dependent
"evolution and selection" of metaphors is
constantly going on in a therapy situation which
in itself stimulates it.
Thus,
much like reading something into a text,
there are metaphorical concepts that allow a
process of "hearing things into" the music. There
we have
extramusical context transferred into the
perception and interpretation of music. And on
the other hand there are elements of the vague
and fluid intramusical world transferred into our
life worlds: that means we are "hearing things
out of music and into the every day realm. If the
experience coming from the musical scene is
transferred to every day life, music may become
a metaphor we learn by.
Conclusion and outlook
We hope to have shown, how metaphor plays a
larger and more complex role in musical meaning
than is usually assumed. Metaphorical images
want to be seen. Music has to be heard. Music
related metaphors want to make visible what one
hears.
The musical scene stimulates the
generation of acoustic related imagery.
Participants in such scenes tend to translate the
acoustical processes into highly individualized
meaningful experiences (see Bonde 1997).
Obviously metaphoric processes are not all that
is involved in generating musical meaning (see
Bharucha 1994 on musical schemes and
McAdams in Guski 1996 on auditive
identification). But music related conceptual
metaphors do connect the intramusical world with
cultural and biographical patterns and help to
organize a broader meaning of
music.
Metaphor
theory is one path of knowledge that leads to a
more complete theory of musical experience.
Music therapy clients travel in distinct ways
through musical landscapes. This is not only due
to their singular personalities, but also depends
on the context of fundamental clinical
assumptions and rituals that they and the
therapists share. Being able to apply more than a
single, stereotypical image, metaphor or
interpretation to musical events is one of the main
competencies of more successful clients. The
therapeutical challenge is to encourage flexibility
and so reduce rigidity of interpretation. An area
of future research would be how to best promote
this kind of encouragement.
Cognitive metaphor theory confirms that
musical experience is a subjective formation
process, but also insists that there is order in it.
This order is due to the conceptual structure of
our minds. There are concepts like MUSIC IS
SPACE that rest on basic perceptual abilities. And
there are more culturally elaborated concepts that
bring music into contact with our individualized
life worlds. This is a constructive and "poetic"
process in the original sense of the word. As we
can already see from examples we have given,
some of the conceptual metaphors used by clients
refer to music-acoustical events, but even more
refer to the subjective world of the listener with
little grounding in sensory musical information.
Why is this so?
A model from perception psychology may help
(Goldstein 1999). The processing of musical
information (or better: of information coming
from the musical scene) employs interpretation
of bottom-up information to which the organism
applies the laws of encoding (e.g. pattern
recognition involving Gestalt mechanisms). On
the other hand there are top-down processes that
handle the incoming information in accordance
with expectancy, motivation and knowledge. We
are suggesting that the bottom-up processes are
Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 2001, 10(1)
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HENRIK JUNGABERLE, ROLF VERRES & FLETCHER DUBOIS
involved in the generation of the more descriptive
metaphors. These indicate directly perceivable
musical features, about which consensus can be
relatively easily established. Many of the
musicological notions like "melodic arches" or
"tension" are such descriptive metaphors. The
top-down processes, on the other hand, play a
key role in forming ascriptive metaphors which
are more expansive, evocative, and sometimes
require a leap of imagination to be understood.
Here it is not unusual that a whole scenario is put
into music, as in the case of clients "discovering"
their family relationships within the events of a
musical improvisation.
For example there are metaphors that simply
describe an over-all "effect" music had (forces,
powers and energies). Clients merge their notions
about music and how music can have healing
power with their belief about how and why ,good
therapy works'. There is almost no way to talk
about emotion without metaphorical images
(cool, hot, dark etc.). When a client's subjective
,theory of cure' includes her emotions being
numb and ,frozen to ice', it is likely that music
plays the role of a source of "warmth". Some of
these subjective theories can be beneficial, others
hinder musical experience and the therapeutic
process. Our purpose in this article was mainly
descriptive. Important questions remain. If
"framing" in musical experience is so central to
the therapeutic process: Do we as therapists
recognize facilitating mental and social frames?
How do we foster our abilities to influence these
frames? Exactly how do the metaphorical images
we use in order to introduce music influence the
experience of the listener? How do we sensitize
our clients to both the hiding and highlighting
nature of metaphor? What metaphors used in
which contexts enable us to communicate with
and help our clients and teach students the vivid
process of listening and playing music?
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