Le 30 juin 2017
de 17h00 à 17h45
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre Cavaillès
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Michael Spitzer
The scholarly literature on conceptual blending and emotion is very scant. One exception is a short section in Fauconnier and Turner (2002) focused on the emotion of anger. Fauconnier and Turner refer to the cross-cultural research of Lakoff and Kövecses (1987) on the anger script. My talk takes the dialogue on anger as a starting-point to develop two separate yet interlinked matters. First, to open up a perspective on emotion from the standpoint of conceptual blending; second, to apply this perspective to the analysis of music’s structural features. I begin by reviewing Juslin and Timmers’ (2010) model of the expressive character of acoustic features and proceed to assess Lakoff and Kövecses’s theory of emotion as cognitive metaphor. Reconciling the cognitive metaphor of anger with the theory of conceptual blending allows us to analyze anger in two pieces, respectively by Vivaldi and Haydn. The analysis throws into relief issues which arise when we apply conceptual blending to aesthetic objects in general, and musical works in particular. One key concept here is Fauconnier and Turner’s notion of time compression. Finally, I examine Brandt’s (2006) useful ideas on blending in art as a way of further clarifying the special status of emotion in music, as distinct from utilitarian emotion in everyday life. I conclude that a synthesis of conceptual blending and cognitive metaphor provides a useful tool for analyzing musical emotion.
