Music as topographical depiction of a metaphor
Music is one of the few arts having legislated in its terminological glossary words such as “functional” in order to define its theoretical approach, as if it were possible for a “non functional” approach to be in existence, betraying in this manner the indirect admission that its approach is not functional by default. If music constitutes language, this terminological evidence provokes the same perplexity as in a prospective “functional” lingual syntax, through which the notional integrity of the narrative syntax would be put – in the same manner – under negotiation, transforming thus language into a haphazardly mutable signifier, resembling the dust raised by the wind in the inconsistent vastness of the steppe, not as natural phenomenon – that is, obeying physics – but as an – atmospheric – literary metaphor…
© Musicology