Embedded blends and meaning construction in Modest Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition

Abstract

Conceptual blending is a cognitive theory positing the combination of diverse conceptual spaces for the creation of novel blended spaces. Musical conceptual blending can be intra-musical, pertaining to the combination of diverse structural elements for the creation of new melodies, harmonies or textures, as well as cross-domain, involving the integration of musical and non-musical spaces for the creation of novel analogies or metaphors. This article presents a structural and hermeneutical analysis of “Il vecchio castello” and “Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuÿle” from Modest Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in an attempt to disclose both the intra-musical (combination of modal, tonal or coloristic harmonic spaces and rhythmic/textural structure) and extra-musical (contextual, symbolic and programmatic aspects) conceptual blending that the works incorporate. The reductional/prolongational analyses provide input for two distinct Conceptual Integration Networks, the first describing the intra-musical blending of melodic harmonization and the second proposing the cross-domain blending of the musical and pictorial input spaces into a blended hermeneutical space that projects the works’ narrative/programmatic/emotional potential. The proposed analyses show how musical structure promotes creative listening and meaning construction through complex cross-domain integration. This research suggests that conceptual blending theory as an analytical tool can promote a richer structural interpretation and experience of music, even in cases of instrumental, non-vocal compositions.

Keywords

conceptual blending cross-domain mapping meaning in music music analysis Musorgsky

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Antokoletz

(1984). The music of Béla Bartók. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bache

(2005). Constraining conceptual integration theory: Levels of blending and disintegration. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 1615–1635.

Brown

(2002). Musorgsky: His life and works. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Bruhn

(2000). Musical Ekphrasis: Composers responding to poetry and painting. New York, NY: Pendragon.

Cambouropoulos

Kaliakatsos-Papakostas

Tsougras

(2015, August). Structural blending of harmonic spaces: A computational approach. In Proceedings of the 9th ESCOM Conference. Retrieved from http://users.auth.gr/emilios/papers/2015-Cambouropoulos-StructuralBlending-ESCOM.pdf

Cook

(1998). Analysing musical multimedia. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Cook

(2001). Theorizing musical meaning. Music Theory Spectrum, 23(2), 170–195.

Dennett

D. C.

(1991). Conciousness explained. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co.

Fauconnier

Turner

(2002). The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. New York, NY: Basic Books.

10.

Frankenstein

(1939). Victor Hartmann and Modeste Musorgsky. The Musical Quarterly, 25(3), 268–291.

11.

Goguen

J. A.

(2004). Musical qualia, context, time and emotion. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11(3–4), 117–147.

12.

Grabócz

(1996). Morphologie des Oeuvres pour Piano de Liszt: Influence du Programme sur l’Evolution des Formes Instrumentales. Paris, France: Edition Klime.

13.

Hatten

(1994). Musical meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, correlation, and interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

14.

Kaliakatsos-Papakostas

Cambouropoulos

Kuhnberger

K.U.

Kutz

Smaill

(2014, December). Concept invention and music: Creating novel harmonies via conceptual blending. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference in Interdisciplinary Musicology – CIM14. Retrieved from http://users.auth.gr/emilios/papers/coinventCIM14.pdf

15.

Kaliakatsos-Papakostas

Makris

Zacharakis

Tsougras

Cambouropoulos

(2016). Learning and blending harmonies in the context of a melodic harmonisation assistant. In Iliadis

Maglogiannis

(Eds.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations [AIAI] 2016 (pp. 520–527). Berlin, Germany: Springer.

16.

Lakoff

Johnson

(1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

17.

Moore

A. F.

(2012). Song means: Analysing and interpreting recorded popular song. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

18.

Oldani

R. W.

(2001). “Musorgsky, Modest Petrovich”. In Grove Music Online. Retrieved from http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.19468

19.

(2014, November). Analogy and conceptual blending are part of a visualization toolkit for artists and scientists: Introducing the cognitive space transfer. In Proceedings of the IEEE VIS2014 Arts Program VISAP’14: Art + Interpretation. Retrieved from http://visap.uic.edu/2014/papers/10_Ox_ConceptualBlending_VISAP2014.pdf

20.

Puffet

(1990). A graphic analysis of Musorgsky’s “Catacombs”. Music Analysis, 9(1), 67–77.

21.

Russ

(1990). The mysterious thread in Musorgsky’s “Nursery”. Music Analysis, 9(1), 47–65.

22.

Russ

(1992). Musorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

23.

Schiavio

van der Schyff

(2016). Beyond musical qualia: Reflecting on the concept of experience. Psychomusicology: Music, Mind and the Brain, 26(4), 366–378.

24.

Schmidt

(2012). Some remarks concerning the Generative Theory of Tonal Music, conceptual metaphors and conceptual blending in music. Unpublished manuscript. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271130855_Some_Remarks_Concerning_the_Generative_Theory_of_Tonal_Music_Conceptual_Metaphors_and_Conceptual_Blending_in_Music

25.

Spitzer

(2004). Metaphor and musical thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

26.

Stefanou

(2004). Placing the musical landscape: Performance, spatiality, and the primacy of experience (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of London, UK. Retrieved from http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.406939

27.

Tarasti

(1994). A theory of musical semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

28.

Taruskin

(2009). On Russian music. Berkeley: University of California Press.

29.

Taruskin

(2010). Oxford history of Western music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

30.

Tsougras

(2009, August). Analysis of early 20th century chromatic modal music with the use of the Generative Theory of Tonal Music: Pitch space and prolongational issues in selected modal idioms. In Proceedings of the 7th ESCOM Conference (pp. 531–539). Retrieved from https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/handle/123456789/20927

31.

Turner

(2003). Double-scope stories. In Herman

(Ed.), Narrative theory and the cognitive sciences. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

32.

Turner

(2010). Blending box experiments, Build 1.0. Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1541062

33.

Zbikowski

L. M.

(2002). Conceptualizing music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

34.

Zbikowski

L. M.

(2008). Metaphor and music. In Gibbs

R. W.

(Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.