Editorial: Music / language: a metaphor

Abstract

This text tries to discover the ground of the metaphor associating music with language.
The original fusion of music and language, present in many civilisations and
aptly illustrated in Orpheus’s myth, is the mythical ground outlined in many metalanguages
that describe and analyse music, especially tonal music. The music/language
metaphor drawn out trough these discourses may be precisely and logically
analysed according to the technical principles of poetic rhetoric, an analysis that will
be put in the general frame of aesthetic symbols.