ABSTRACT
During the seventeenth and the first part of the eighteenth century, music was consciously modelled on language, but language understood in terms of rhetoric rather than syntax. If music was a language then it did not require the props of text, stage, or other extra-musical content; in this way the metaphor of syntax served the purposes of the latter-day musical absolutist. Equally, a composition that embodied its own language, its own system of signification, acquired the autonomy sought by the musical modernist; the syntax metaphor articulates the same values as other varieties of modernist formalism. The value of a metaphor for music emerges not from its ‘truth’ or the lack of it, but from the cultural work that it accomplishes. In the way aesthetic prescriptions have been misread as descriptions of ordinary experience, explanatory metaphors as statements of fact.
