Music: A Very Short Introduction by Nicholas Cook

Author:Nicholas Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 1998-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

Metaphor is built into our language, and so deeply that we usually don’t even notice it is there. And along with the metaphors of music being a drawer or a forest, these embedded metaphors all illustrate what might be called the underlying, root metaphor of Western musical culture: that music is some kind of object. Mozart and Beethoven, or rather Rochlitz and Schlösser, expressed this very clearly when they spoke of it as a painting or statue. But the metaphor of music as object goes much deeper than the myth-making process of nineteenth-century musical aesthetics; you simply can’t get away from it, unless you are prepared to stop talking about music altogether (and people will never stop talking about something they care about as much as music). The whole idea of writing music depends on it: Western staff notation shows music ‘moving’ up and down and from left to right on the page. But what is it that actually does the moving? Literally, nothing; as Roger Scruton has made clear, when we say the music moves, we are treating it as an imaginary object. The same applies when you flick back in a score, comparing two passages of the music side by side. After all, you can’t fold time like paper; when you compare the earlier passage with the later one, you are in effect peeling the music away from the passage of time and so transforming a temporal experience into an imaginary object. That is one of the things that scores are for.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.