Lighting Metaphors in Music Criticism
Date
2009
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
What makes a particular guitar solo 'scintillating'? What musical characteristics of the guitar would need to be intensified or weakened before the same solo could no longer be called 'scintillating'? And where does the light come from? We explore the ways that music critics use crossmodal metaphors to describe particular aspects of musical sound, using conceptual metaphor theory as a basis for our study. Much of the way we that think about and talk about music is metaphorical. Some of these conceptual metaphors, like PITCH RELATIONSHIPS ARE RELATIONSHIPS ON A VERTICAL SCALE, have been conventionalized to the extent that they no longer seem metaphorical. These kinds of metaphors have been well-researched. Throughout our research, we seek to look at non-conventional metaphors, or 'imaginative' metaphors as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) term them. These kinds of metaphors are not nearly so well researched, especially as used by music critics when referring to musical events. We approach music critics as a subcultural group whose conceptualizations of music in particular differ from that of the rest of the culture. We argue that these metaphors are, in fact, conventionalized among the subculture to the extent that different people in the subculture seem to form the same kinds of linguistic metaphors in reference to the same kinds of musical events. Evidence for our argument comes is provided by a corpus study, in which we analyze the usage of lighting words, such as 'scintillating', as they are used metaphorically within the genre of music reviews.