The Metaphor of Musical Space

Abstract

Pitch space and Riemannian space offer divergent perspectives on tonal space in general. This article suggests that cognitive metaphor theory offers a means of understanding Riemannian space as a metaphorical mapping from pitch space; as an extension from a “deontic” to an “epistemic” musical category. My approach differs from other theorists of musical metaphor in considering mappings not between musical structure and extra-musical “real” space, but rather mappings between musical categories themselves. I illustrate this claim by reviewing recent writings both on pitch-space and Neo-Riemannian theory, and an analytical example by Chopin.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 65 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.