Music analysts of the 19th century consistently used figurative language to evoke their perceptions of the music when conveying the experience of hearing the music to those who had not heard it. We selected a corpus of 30 different 19th century music periodicals and collected figurative language describing orchestral, chamber music, and piano solo compositions. After collecting about 160 pages, we performed a content analysis to sort the metaphorical language based on three different modes: (1) the metaphor types based on J. M. Williams’ (1976) proposed model of metaphorical transfer across modalities; (2) the musical arrangement types of orchestral, chamber, and solo piano compositions; (3) personifications of music. Williams, J. M. (1976). Synaesthetic adjectives: A possible law of semantic change. Language, 32(2), 461-478.