ABSTRACT
The content of a musical performance may engender different kinds of information dependent upon the perceiver. Leonard Meyer puts this most succinctly when he writes that ‘whether a piece of music gives rise to affective experience or to intellectual experience depends upon the disposition and training of the listener’. Rather than interpreting the content of a musical performance through an emotional or affective lens, performers may interpret the same content in a much more technical manner. Ostensibly nonmusical terminology serves as one method by which performers may describe musical content and experiences efficiently and effectively. However, it will become clear that metaphors are not limited to purely linguistic descriptions of musical content. Internal mental representations of musical content are grounded both in experience and imagination. Consequently, musical content may not only be understood through the linguistic metaphor of physical motion, but also through physical motion itself.
