The fact that music as a purely-tonic phenomenon is not free from the verbal
medium of communication poses a question on which language signs are used to express
and describe music. The attempts to find an answer to the question constituted
the aim of the monograph. It dealt with the medium of communication within
the language system, the lexis of music, terminology, language expressions literally
and metaphorically connected to music and the sound of music which constitute
a variety of ways of describing the art of sound, as well as create inter-semiotic
‘translations’ consisting in composing poetical works according to the rules ascribed
to the music forms. An additional factor enriching this repertoire of the medium of
communication are more or less acquired descriptive and metaphoric structures determined
by the conceptualization and categorization processes based on a scheme of
notional metaphors. The structures were selected via an analysis of opinions on music
— definitions of the art of sound derived from the philosophical and musicological
source text.
In this work, the language is treated as an interpreter of culture. The observations
made make it clear that the study on ways of describing music in a natural
language is a way of interpreting the music itself
