Roger Scruton has argued that the point of metaphors is “not to describe an object, but to change its aspect, so that we respond to it in another way.” Scruton contends that we have to use metaphoric language when we talk about music: “To describe it we must have recourse to metaphor, not because music resides in an analogy with other things, but because the metaphor describes exactly what we hear, when we hear sounds as music.”

In this paper I will discuss the necessity of using metaphors and the powerful roles they can play in the twentieth-century music theory sequence. Many students feel alienated from the music, due to previous training emphasizing music exclusively as a carrier of beauty.

I will describe my work in Music Theory IV, which draws on use of comparisons between music and other art forms, including minimalistic and expressionistic visual art, and film. The goal is to increase the students’ understanding of the repertoire through emotional means before addressing the technical aspects: a typical example includes the use of modernistic music in film, particularly as in horror movies, such as in the use of Penderecki’s and Bartók’s music in The Shining, but also in the opposite context: beautiful music used in the context of horrific sequences, such as the use of Barber’s Adagio in Platoon. My goal is to encourage students to relate technical details of musical structure to the associated mental images, and to make them verbalize these images through accurate technical descriptions.