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 Ravels
orchestration of Mussorgskys Pictures at an Exhibition, and the (real) cannons written
into the score of Beethovens Wellingtons Victory, have modern popular music
counterparts in instruments like the synthesizers and guitars mimicking the sounds of
alien spaceships in Aerosmiths Spaced and Jimi Hendrixs 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
Goodmans City of New Orleans and Mississippi Fred McDowells 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 Watsons 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 Gordons Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die to Ronnie Montroses 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).
2
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.
3
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 its this weird day and people look like old potatoes or
apples. Their features are so exaggerated--even if youre straight. But then you
hear a certain kind of music, and it makes everything beautiful. You remind
yourself on a molecular level that theres goodness in everyone. Beauty, elegance,
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excellence, grace, and dignitytheyre more important than what key youre in,
or what chord or what scale youre 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 elses. They were using tiny little brushes and
doing watercolors, while he was painting galactic scenes in CinemaScope. Were
working in a field of mystical resonance, sound, and vibration. Thats 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
Hendrixs 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).
5
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 Burtons 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
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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
Willings 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 Monroes 1949 recording of Riders in the Sky, the same
effects were used to emphasize an impression of the uncanny associated with the songs
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).
7
Bill Cosby parodied this convention in his Noahs Ark routine, Noah: Right!, in
which Cosbys 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 Wolfs Chess recording of
Smokestack Lightnin. Here the famous Wolf falsetto moan is given an extra
boost of reverb. Given Howlin Wolfs 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 studios 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 hotso 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
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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 Watsons 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
9
performers 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.
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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.

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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. Nikevi-Batrievi. Niki: 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.