The most significant periodical of musicological thought in Soviet Latvia was the yearbook Latviešu Mūzika (Latvian Music), of which 19 issues were published from 1958 to 1990. The yearbook consisted mainly of analytical essays, biographical studies, summaries of musical life, and chronicles. Meanwhile, a part of the Latvian musical thought was continued in another yearbook, published by the diaspora Latvians. Although many papers published in Latvian Music have become obsolete in terms of scholarly relevance, they still give a notion of how the musicological thought was contextualizing the musical experience through the years of the Soviet occupation. In this paper, I focus on the contextualization and representation of musical experience from the viewpoint of metaphor discourse, drawing from the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and cognitive semantics in a wider sense. Using content analysis, I have systematized a music metaphor corpus from the issues of the Soviet yearbook printed in the 1970s (6 issues, around 290,000 words). The first partial results show a quantitative prevalence of space metaphors in the source domains of music contextualization. These metaphors served for the Soviet era musicologists as a tool for evaluating new musical pieces and the presence or absence of philosophical, psychological, or emotional depth in them. Thus, they fulfilled one of the most important functions of a Soviet musicologist: explaining the musical meaning to the listeners. The meaning which – in the yearbook by the Soviet Latvian musicologists – is unraveled or revealed by the composer or music itself.
Keywords: Soviet Latvia, post-war Europe, conceptual metaphors, cognitive linguistics, periodicals, corpus study
Dāvis Eņģelis (2023). Music Metaphors in the Issues of the Almanac Latvian Music Published in the 1970s. Letonica, No.52. LU LFMI, 48–68
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