Cross-posted to Alan Coady’s Musical Blog

While revisiting V. S. Ramachandran’s 4^th 2003 Reith Lecture on synaesthesia, I was struck by the term synaestheticmetaphor. This was raised as one of four possible causes for this neurological phenomenon – which affects 1 in 200.

Artists of all sorts, whose currency is metaphor, constitute 1 in 8 of famous synaesthetes. The example given in the lecture, “this cheese is sharp,” illustrated use of a touch adjective to describe a taste sensation. No doubt you can think of countless examples is everyday use. Naturally, the word sharp caught my attention and, before long, I was considering words in the musical lexicon whose primary meaning either resides elsewhere or approaches the opposite of how we use it.

Take for example the word rest, normally regarded as the opposite of activity. On many instruments, the action required to produce a rest (silence) is no less demanding than the one required to produce a note. The term sharp can be associated with ascendancy in everyday speech e.g. a sharp incline but, given that sharpening a note is the smallest possible increase in pitch, the comparison is not really helpful.

The evolution of music can explain away some of our odd terms:

a semibreve (half-short) is the longest surviving note

quavers are no longer regarded as especially quick

A sense of history can explain some of our anomalies e.g. the fact that four people are required to play a trio sonata.

I think it would be interesting and possibly useful to compile a list of words whose appearance in musical concepts differs from their primary use in everyday speech and, when current pressure to produce ensemble music subsides, I hope to make a start on it.

In the meantime I’d be interested in anyone’s views on the following questions:

1. Is the vocabulary of other subjects in the same boat?
2. Do you think it is helpful or merely distracting to point out such things in a lesson?

Categories: History, Languages, Music