Christopher Peacocke's 'The Perception of Music

Unlike the grasp of metaphor in natural language, there is in music a patent confusion of roles between the 'tenor' and 'vehicle' of a metaphor: the expressive content configures the metaphorical understanding of a musical moment as much as the experience of the musical moment shapes how we perceive expressive content. This observation prompts consideration of a model (different from Peacocke's) in which a spiralling reciprocity of invertible metaphorical operations gives rise to the specificity of the aesthetic experience. On this account ― it is argued ― metaphorical processes in music function much like those in other art forms

Aesthetics · Art · Perception · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Neuroscience · Psychology · Visual Culture and Art Theory