Abstract
This chapter aims to elucidate the relationships between design and music, appealing to the conceptual metaphor debate. It considers the epistemological importance of George Lakoff’s invariance hypothesis on conventional metaphors to criticize the labor of historians of culture who focus on design, visual arts, and music connections. Given that many relevant cultural historians interpret entire historical intervals as epochal units by crossing through heterogeneous practices and assuming their discursive identity, this chapter intends to point out how methodologically conduct the historian across the study of trans-disciplinary connections. As an example, this chapter examines the String Quartet op. 7 composition process by Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg’s musical compositions were constituted by a music theory and also by epistemic virtues based, in turn, on a metaphysical conception of art whose mayor principle is reducible into the following primary metaphor: an artwork is an organism. That metaphysical metaphor was precisely the link among different heterogeneous practices as design and music. The famous rejection of “decoration” by rejecting ornaments was founded in Schoenberg’s Vienna in that particular metaphor.
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Notes
- 1.
Holly Watkins has written two excellent texts on the current topic (Watkins, 2008; Watkins, 2011). Both are extremely relevant to complete the main theses of this chapter, because his interest domains—in a technical sense—are the metaphors of DEPTH associate with those of INTERIOR and EXTERIOR in music.
- 2.
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Without the patient and lovely help offered by Luísa Flores Somavilla this chapter would have been just a forgotten possibility in a PC folder.
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Maciel, W.M. (2021). Notes on the Relationships Between Design and Music. In: Correia Castilho, L., Dias, R., Pinho, J.F. (eds) Perspectives on Music, Sound and Musicology. Current Research in Systematic Musicology, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78451-5_21
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