‘Flow Like a Waterfall’: The Metaphors of Kaluli Musical Theory

Abstract

Relations between language and music have traditionally been addressed at two distinct levels of discourse. One is phenomenal and often taxonomic, addressing the boundaries of speech and song, prosody and intonation, text and tune, paralanguage and vocables, sprechgesang and sprechstimme , and motivation toward signifier or signified. The other level is analytical and sometimes abstract, addressing the adaptation of phonological and syntactic linguistic models to features of musical structure (a review and critique is Feld 1974).