Metaphor is the Magic of Music
Victor Kennedy University of Maribor
Music can evoke emotions, images, and imagined landscapes through sound effects, like onomatopoeia, which are common in classical and romantic compositions as well as in contemporary popular music. The flutes imitating baby chicks in Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition , and the (real) cannons written into the score of Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory , have modern popular music counterparts in instruments like the synthesizers and guitars mimicking the sounds of alien spaceships in Aerosmith’s “Spaced” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Third Stone From the
Sun”. Other effects, such as the shuffle drum or acoustic guitar pattern often used to evoke the image of train wheels passing over the joins in railroad tracks (as in Steve
Goodman’s “City of New Orleans” and Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “Freight Train
Blues”), and the harmonicas used to mimic the sound of train whistles in blues, folk, and country songs and ballads (as in Doc Watson’s recording of “Freight Train Boogie”), are similarly evocative. Combined with lyrics, they can have a powerful effect. 1
To illustrate the difference between sound effect and musical metaphor, compare
Robert Gordon’s “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die” to Ronnie Montrose’s “Bad
Motorscooter”. Both songs are about motorcyclists, but in the first, Gordon used the rercorded sound of his own Harley Davidson to highlight the lyrics, while in the second,
Montrose used the sound of his highly distorted, feedbacking electric slide guitar to imitate the sound of a motorcycle engine accelerating and even changing gears.
1 For an analysis of how sound effects and music coupled with action create metaphor in music, see (Kutnowski 2008). In addition to these auditory metaphors, music has an emotional effect that is difficult to explain or quantify. Google “music” and “magic” and you will turn up thousands of hits linking the two words in many ways.2 Not only are there thousands of songs about magic, with magic in their titles, or using magic as a metaphor for love and loss, but musicians, critics, teachers, and fans all talk about the magic of music itself.
Gary Tomlinson, in his book Music in Renaissance Magic: toward a historiography of others , points out the similarities in the etymology of the words “music” and “magic”, and further goes on to note that magic is “the art of manipulating natural or supernatural forces to produce desired results” while music is “the art of manipulating sounds to achieve desired expressive effects” (Tomlinson 1992) (p. 1). Such a similarity in basic structure lends itself to the use of either as a metaphor for the other, and by extension, of a musician as a metaphor for a magician, and vice versa.
Magical thinking has been defined as “the tendency to believe that wishing it so makes it so”(Paumgarten 2008). Magic, to most people, either implies a link with the supernatural, or the art of creating illusions. Magic can also be seen as the basis of ritual, knowing how to do something without knowing why it works. Rock guitarist Carlos
Santana said in an interview in Guitar Player magazine following the release of his 2002 album Shaman :3
GP - The dictionary defines a shaman as someone who uses magic to heal,
or reveal the hidden. How does this relate to your music?
Santana Absoluteness and totality that's the message of Shaman . If you
want to start healing yourself, you have to start feeling, because nothing is real to
2 On October 21, 2008, the search turned up 93,600,000 hits. 3 The follow up to his 1999 album, Supernatural .
2 you unless you feel it. There's something about bending a string that gets inside
your vitals your cojones and works its way to your brain. The next thing you
know, you feel like you're worth more than what's in your wallet or bank account.
Sometimes people get so intellectual, cute, and clever with music that only they
understand it. To me, music shouldn't be such a mystery. It should be something
that all humans can say, ''Wow, I feel it you're touching me in a place I haven't
been touched before.'' (Ellis 2003)
Clearly, for Santana, the main reason most people listen to music is that it makes them feel better. There are many ways it can do so, and he starts exploring the mystery by talking about technique. That “something about bending a string” is one of the bases of blues music; the other is the “blue notes”, the flatted third and seventh notes of the scale used by blues musicians, guitarists in particular, to create the “blues feel”. Here Santana is using technical terminology commonly used by musicians to describe the feelings produced by music. Scholars such as Doyle (2005) attempt to explain it in a different way using analogies and terminology from art, architecture, acoustics, and mythology.
Santana himself resorts to analogy to try to describe how the works of other musicians affect him:
GP - What do you listen for in others' music?
Santana You know “People are Strange,” the Doors’ song? Sometimes
you walk around, and it’s this weird day and people look like old potatoes or
apples. Their features are so exaggerated even if you’re straight. But then you
hear a certain kind of music, and it makes everything beautiful. You remind
yourself on a molecular level that there’s goodness in everyone. Beauty, elegance,
3 excellence, grace, and dignity—they’re more important than what key you’re in,
or what chord or what scale you’re playing. These qualities transcend what you
learn in music school. (Ellis 2003)
During the 1960s, drug trips were often used in conjunction with music to try to
“alter consiousness” and “raise awareness”(Lachman 2001). Here Santana points out that music by itself can have such an effect, if the listener is properly attuned to it, but he also implies that it is not a technical quality of music, or something that can be learned.
Rather, it is an innate ability of a listener who is able to appreciate good music.
GP - How do you translate these qualities into music?
Santana You have to learn how to articulate emotion. When I first heard
Jimi Hendrix, I thought, “My God, this guy has a different kind of brush.” His
was much thicker than everyone else’s. They were using tiny little brushes and
doing watercolors, while he was painting galactic scenes in CinemaScope. We’re
working in a field of mystical resonance, sound, and vibration. That’s what makes
people cry, laugh, and feel their hair stand up. (Ellis 2003)
Jimi Hendrix was an innovative pioneer of a new kind of rock music in the 1960s.
Like the great classical composers, Hendrix has become revered as a genius who changed the way other people hear music and think about it. However, struggling to quantify
Hendrix’s genius, Santana falls back on visual metaphors, first from painting and then from film, and then falls further back to the word “mystical”. This is interesting, as
Santana himself is hailed as a pioneer of the new rock sound of the 1960s. As I argue elsewhere, the structure of magic is similar to the structure of metaphor; both are an attempt to understand one thing by means of comparison to another (Kennedy 2007).
4 The connection between music and magic goes back much farther than the hippie or New Age eras, however. In Restoration drama, music often accompanied scenes depicting magic: “in many cases, music was regarded as a critical element of the magic”
(Plank 1990) (p.397). That is, music not only accompanied scenes of magic, it was regarded as an integral element of the magic. For example, many scenes in Restoration dramas were accompanied by music featuring prominent pedal points accompanied by triadic outlining, especially in opening passages. The degree of dissonance invited by the pedal point heightens the strangeness of spirit, devil, and witch (p. 398). Also, certain instruments functioned as supernatural symbols in sound (p. 398).
In a similar way, the theramin, an electronic instrument developed in the 1920s, became the signature sound of disorientation and defamiliarization in connection with space aliens in science fiction movies of the 1940s and 50s, such as The Day the Earth
Stood Still (Wise 1951). Just as unidentified flying objects became alien spacecraft in the tabloid press and subsequently, and forever, in the popular imagination, the strange sound of the theramin became unworldly by reason of its association with Klaatu, and, more ominously, the blank, featureless, and menacing alien robot Gort. The pure, warbling sound of the theramin was certainly new in the decades following its development, but, perhaps because of its widespread use in science fiction movies, it still retains an
“otherworldly” connotation, recently renewed by Tim Burton’s use of the instrument in his 1996 parody of 1950s science fiction movies, Mars Attacks (Burton 1996) (Cortez
2004).
With the development of modern studio recording techniques, the studio itself became an instrument in the hands of innovative producers and engineers, and modern
5 electronic effects were used to create symbolic textures and soundscapes. In Echo and
Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording 1900-1960 , Peter Doyle provides a history of the use of modern recording techniques to provide space and depth in music. In some examples, such as western songs from the late 1940s including Foy
Willing’s recording of “Blue Shadows on the Trail”, echo and reverb were used to give an impression of open space on the range, thus providing an imaginary setting through aural cues, while in Vaughan Monroe’s 1949 recording of “Riders in the Sky”, the same effects were used to emphasize an impression of the uncanny associated with the song’s supernatural lyrics (pp. 105 113). Doyle points out that similar effects were used in
Hollywood films of the time to help create the impression of wide open spaces, as in
Shane (Stevens 1953) and High Noon (Zinnemann 1952), and in several horror films like
Cat People (Tourneur 1942), the effects were extended to provide a mood of mystery and foreboding (pp. 115 117).
Doyle traces the symbolic effect of echo back to the classical myth of Echo and
Narcissus, and points to its significance in the shifting perception between self and other.
He also traces changes in the literal meaning of echo and reverberation through the history of architecture, pointing especially to the significance of echoed voices in ancient and medieval courtrooms, government buildings, and cathedrals, and provides several examples of renaissance and baroque music that were composed specifically to take into account the effects of large reverberant indoor spaces. “It is more than likely that the
“aura” of reverberation in the ancient world was a quality much associated with the pronouncement from on high, be it from pharoah, emperor, king, priest, governor, satrap or magistrate” (p. 42).
6 Bill Cosby parodied this convention in his Noah’s Ark routine, “Noah: Right!,” in which Cosby’s Voice of God is distinguished from his voice of Noah by its heavy reverberation (Cosby 1963), but the convention goes two ways: R. Murray Schafer argues that cathedrals are “acoustic machines” designed to catch the attention of God and make
Him listen (Schafer 1977).
The use of sound effects like echo and reverberation to create supernatural effects in music was adopted in other genres besides Country and Western music in the 1950s, including the blues:
The effect was used as late as 1956 on Howlin’ Wolf’s Chess recording of
“Smokestack Lightnin’.” Here the famous Wolf falsetto moan is given an extra
boost of reverb. Given Howlin’ Wolf’s imposing physical presence well in
excess of six feet tall and extraordinarily athletic on stage well into his sixties—
and his frequent invocation of voodoo and supernaturalist tropes, it is not difficult
to read the reverb here as an intended reference to the supernatural. (Doyle 2005)
(p. 157)
Other blues players in the 1950s used studio recording techniques to enhance the supernatural aura of their songs:
The Chess repertory of idiosyncratic recording techniques grew to include
using the studio’s tile bathroom as a resonating chamber for guitar amps, mixing
the sound of a directly miked amplifier with room ambience, and recording both
guitar and lead vocal ‘hot’—so close to distortion on the VU meter that the very
loudest notes push the needle just a shade into the red. The records created in this
way jumped out at you. They were scary enough as songs, with their tales of
7 hoodoo hexes and gypsy fortune tellers. Everything about the production
amplified and focused that scariness. (Palmer 1996) (pp. 200 201)
Doyle also provides a thorough analysis of Johnny Guitar Watson’s instrumental
“Space Guitar” (1954) in which he argues that the use of reverberation and unconventional playing techniques on an electric guitar is a sonic trope that can suggest the feeling of outer space, prefiguring the Tornados’ instrumental “Telstar” (1962). In
“Space Guitar”, the reverb effect on the guitar fades in and out, emphasizing its effect.
This trope would be later used to similar effect by 1960s bands such as Pink Floyd, the
Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Five Man Electrical Band, and many others (Doyle
2005) (pp. 158 159).
The magic of music, then, is similar to the magic of art and literature. Artists, poets, and musicians are well aware of the potential, powerful effects of the tools of their trade, but are sometimes uncertain of the efficacy of those effects. Basic elements of sound, such as intervals, can be combined with various playing techniques such as vibrato, variations in volume and pitch, sliding notes, new instruments, and manipulation of sounds by physical and electronic recording equipment, to create a varied palette for the musician. A musician could write a song with some spooky lyrics, throw in a little theremin and reverb, and hope that the recipe yields a hit, just as a witch or wizard could cook up a potion and hope that it works, but in the big business of commercial recording, professional artists and producers plan their effects more carefully. It may be tempting to think that effects and associations are inherent in music, or that reaction to and interpretation of such effects can be taken for granted in the listener, but a survey of western music over the last few centuries shows a development of the composer and
8 performer’s vocabulary, including a powerful set of visual and auditory metaphors, and a strong tendency of audiences and listeners to associate sounds with visual effects originally created in theaters and films that soon take on their own, mostly permanent, connotations.
9 Discography
Aerosmith. Spaced. Columbia, 1974. Beethoven, Ludwig van. Wellington's Victory, 1813. Burnett, Chester (“Howling Wolf”). Chess Records. Smokestack Lightning, 1956. Doors. People Are Strange. Elektra, 1967. Goodman, Steve. City of New Orleans. Buddah, 1972. Gordon, Robert. Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die. One Way Records, 1982. Hendrix, Jimi. Third Stone from the Sun. Reprise, 1967. McDowell, Fred. Freight Train Blues. Southern Folk Heritage Series, 1960. Monroe, Vaughan. Riders in the Sky. RCA Victor, 1949. Montrose, Ronnie. Bad Motorscooter. Warner Bros, 1973. Mussorgsky, Modest. Pictures at an Exhibition, 1874. Santana, Carlos. Shaman. Arista, 2002. Santana, Carlos. Supernatural. Arista, 1999. Tornadoes. Telstar. Decca, 1962. Watson, Arthel Lane “Doc”. Freight Train Boogie. Tomato Records, 1972. Watson, Johnny “Guitar”. Space Guitar. Keen Records, 1954. Willing, Foy. Blue Shadows on the Trail. Capitol, 1947.
10 References
Burton, Tim. 1996. Mars Attacks! USA: Warner Bros. Cortez, Joe. 2008. From Elfman to Theremin: The Sonic World of Tim Burton 2004 [cited October 15 2008]. Available from http://www.timburtoncollective.com/sonic.html . Cosby, Bill. 1963. Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow Right! : Warner Bros. Doyle, Peter. 2005. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900-1960 . Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press. Ellis, Andy. 2003. Music of the Spheres: Santana Conjures 6 String Hit Magic with "Shaman". Guitar Player , January 70 78. Kennedy, Victor. 2007. Myth, Magic, and Metaphor in Literature and Popular Culture. In New Perspectives: essays on language, literature and methodology , edited by A. a. M. K. Nikčević Batrićević. Nikšić: Faculty of Philosophy. Kutnowski, Martin. 2008. Trope and Irony in The Simpsons' Overture. Popular Music and Society 31 (5):599 616. Lachman, Gary. 2001. Turn Off Your Mind: the Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius . New York: The Disinformation Company. Palmer, Robert. 1996. Dancing in the Street : a rock and roll history . London: BBC Books. Paumgarten, Nick. 2008. Wiz Bucks. The New Yorker , September 29. Plank, Steven E. 1990. 'And Now About the Cauldron Sing': music and the supernatural on the Restoration stage. Early Music 18 393 407. Schafer, R. Murray. 1977. The Tuning of the World , Borzoi books . New York: Knopf. Stevens, George. 1953. Shane. USA: Paramount Pictures. Tomlinson, Gary. 1992. Music in Renaissance Magic: toward a historiography of others . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tourneur, Jacques. 1942. Cat People. USA: RKO Radio Pictures. Wise, Robert. 1951. The Day the Earth Stood Still. USA: Twentieth Century Fox. Zinnemann, Fred. 1952. High Noon. USA: Stanley Kramer Productions.
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