the Metaphoric Process as an Organizing Principle

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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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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

Introduction W h e n we talk about m u s i c , m e t a p h o r is inevitable. Right at the start some questions emerge: Is there really music that is "dark", " h e a v y " 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: [email protected]

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representation

,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: [email protected]

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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 m e t a p h o r s are only l i n g u i s t i c 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 d e s c r i p t i o n , not the a n a l y s i s 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 m e a n i n g 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: [email protected]

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 c o n s u m e d 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 6 Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 2001, 10(1)

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

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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 behaviourperformance 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 musicacoustical 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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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 m e t a p h o r s and images " d a r k " 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 o p e n e d a b r o a d field of a n t h r o p o l o g i c a l , 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 m e t a p h o r in c o m m u n i c a t i o n 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 8 Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 2001, 10(1)

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 o r d e r to d i s t i n g u i s h 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 w e r e applying metaphor theory to our understanding of musical experience because music usually is something that is flowing, p r o c e s s u a l , 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 c o n c e i v e 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 " S e l f . (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 musicrelated 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 Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 2001, 10(1) 9

HENRIK JUNGABERLE, ROLF VERRES & FLETCHER DUBOIS 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". Results: Evidence from within the And Katja told us: „I could go inside of my therapeutic context emotional world and push out what made me From the interviews we could formulate 40 suffer". metaphorical codes dealing with music in In the second group, MUSIC IS A MEANS general. 35 were concerned particularly with TO FIND ACCESS TO THE INNER WORLD, improvisation. Seven codes dealt with metaphors the main direction of the forces gets turned for instruments. As we coded 427 citations one around: "With the sound it comes that you go can see that some of the codes are not much in inside, that you listen inside and look for what's evidence. We could generate four "families" of happing there" says Daniel, and Lars observes codes. how "music penetrates and moves things inside Family 1 united metaphors having in common of me". that music was somehow treated as a force, a power, or an energy that could ,move' something Family 2: Interaction (be it feelings hidden deep within or the ,frozen More rich in imagery and context transference is feeling' of the group, see beneath). These are not the metaphor IMPROVISING IS COMBAT. so rich in (visual) imagery, but probably rich in Various clients described their experience in kinaesthetic representation. Adding to our certain musical scenes, as if they were explanation above, it is important to note that experiencing scenes of fight and struggle. elementary forms of ,thinking' are also treated Simone: "In my playing I wanted to crush her". as metaphors here. For example the so called ,UP- And Tanja: "There was a duel going on between DOWN-scheme' (SAD IS BEING DOWN and us. And we had to fight tooth and nail against HAPPY IS UP) or the CONTAINER-scheme (e.g. each other". We could observe many times that we experience our body as a container for the (self-rated) aggressive mood of some clients feelings). increased the probability that they would evaluate Family 2 combines metaphors for music as apiece of music itself as aggressive or the other interaction. Family 3 shows music as space and player as belligerent, while other group Family 4 sees music as an object, structure or participants wouldn't. In such an interaction living being. Finally there were some single metaphorical structures of fighting and struggling metaphorical concepts, the most prominent of are mapped on the interaction (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980). these was MUSIC IS A LANGUAGE. In another musical scene Gertrud played the Family 1: Forces, powers and energies piano. Describing what she had experienced, she The impact of music on things and processes simply said: "I produced piercing sounds". Asked inside or outside of the body is central here. In what she associated with that at the time, she said: the musical arena we also find what Johnson "I was imagining somebody to whom I did that." called the COMPULSION-Scheme: "Everyone Here we find somebody bringing a whole private knows the experience of being moved by external scenario into the musical scene. But could this forces, such as wind, water, physical objects, and be heard musically? Surely not with all the implications of Gertrud's image. As we observed other people" (Johnson 1987: 45).

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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.

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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 Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 2001, 10(1) 1 1

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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).

The other way around: Music as metaphor and the metaphorical circle We have discussed metaphorical transfer into m u s i c from c o n t e x t s o u t s i d e 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

Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 2001, 10(1)

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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. M a n y 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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