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Performing Metaphoric Creativity across Modes and Contexts
Edited by Laura Hidalgo-Downing and Blanca Kraljevic Mujic
[Figurative Thought and Language 7] 2020
► pp. 43–69

Chapter 3
Music, metaphor, and creativity

| University of Chicago, Department of Music

This chapter explores the resources for meaning construction provided by music and how musical communication exemplifies creativity. Using two short passages from Haydn’s The Creation as examples, the chapter investigates how musical sounds are correlated with nonmusical phenomena through analogy, a cognitive process related to but distinct from metaphor. The relationship between analogy and metaphor is considered in some detail and connected to explanations of musical meaning construction that draw on semiotics and conceptual metaphor theory. This explanatory framework is extended to musical metonymy, illustrated by an example from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. The chapter proposes that nonlinguistic forms of communication like music provide important insights into analogy, metaphor, and metonymy, and thus into the study of human creativity.

Keywords: music, analogy, Haydn, nonlinguistic communication, meaning construction
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1A musical bestiary
    • 1.2Sine-wave speech and words about music
    • 1.3Metaphor, analogy, and metonymy
    • 1.4Music, metaphor, and creativity
  • 2.Analogical thought and musical understanding
    • 2.1Another animal in the bestiary
    • 2.2Research on analogy
    • 2.3Analogical thought and tone painting
  • 3.From musical analogy to musical metaphor
    • 3.1Analogy and metaphor
    • 3.2Musical topics and musical meaning
    • 3.3Conceptual metaphor theory and music
      • 3.3.1The metaphor of the pastoral
      • 3.3.2Music and conceptual metaphors
      • 3.3.3Summary
  • 4.Music and Metonymy
  • 5.Creativity in and around musical utterances
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.7.03zbi
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