In teaching music students to perform expressively, many instructors use imagery and metaphors to call attention to the emotional qualities of music. This article examines existing theories of emotion, imagery and metaphor in music performance, and reviews empirical studies of expressive performance that have considered these topics. Also presented are the results of a small-scale study of the imagery and metaphors used by college music instructors. Several conclusions are drawn. First, motional aspects of music, seen in imagery using terms such as ' owing' or 'bouncy', are considered crucial in the connection between performed music and felt emotion. Additionally, among advanced musicians, there appears to be a shared and relatively limited affective vocabulary used to elicit expressive performance, perhaps largely drawn from the compositional structure of the piece of music being performed.