Telling Tales: A Survey of Narratological Approaches to Music (original) (raw)

Narrative as a term in narratology and music theory

Rasprave Instituta za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje, 2018

The paper compares the term narrative as it is used by narratologists, and as it is used by music scholars, to establish whether these two disciplines use the term in the same way, or as two homonyms. Narratological studies in medium-specific models of narratives apply the term to different kinds of discourses, i.e. different media. Music theoreticians and musicologists consider its application in music scholarship with a theory of the musical narrative in view. This analysis shows that in the general theory of the narrative the concept includes both story and discourse, based on the referentiality of the discourse, which necessarily evokes a storyworld. Narratologists generally find music to be incapable of producing a narrative in this sense. Musicologists and theoreticians of music generally acknowledge the limitations of the referentiality of musical discourse, yet they often discover specific, usually abstract, narrative meanings there. Therefore, despite common starting points...

Music as Narrative and Music as Drama

Mind & Language, 2004

In this paper I address the issue of narrativity in music. The central question is the extent to which pure instrumental music in the classical tradition can or should be understood as narrative, that is, as narrating a story of some kind. I am interested in the varying potential and aptness for narrative construal of different sorts of instrumental music, and in what the content of such narratives might plausibly be thought to be. But ultimately I explore, at greater length, an alternative way of construing musical process, namely, as dramatic rather than narrative in nature, following the lead of two musicologists, Anthony Newcomb and Fred Maus. After a comparison of the respective merits of narrative and dramatic construals of music, the paper concludes with an illustrative reading, in dramatic mode, of part of the opening movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 845.

New Sounds, New Stories: Narrativity in Contemporary Music

When listeners talk about their listening experiences, they often refer to music as if it were a narrative. But can music actually tell a story? Can music be narrative? Traditionally, narrativity is associated with verbal and visual texts, and the mere possibility of musical narrativity is highly debated. In this study, Vincent Meelberg demonstrates that music can indeed be narrative, and that the study of musical narrativity can be very productive. Moreover, Meelberg even makes a stronger claim by contending that contemporary music, too, can be narrative. More specifically, Meelberg suggests considering contemporary musical narratives as metanarratives, i.e. narratives that tell the story of the process of narrativization.

Music as Narrative

Exploration of "narrative" as a way of understanding non-programmatic classical instrumental music. Surveys other approaches from the time (up to 1991); develops the position stated in author's "Music as Drama."

Music and Narrative since 1900

2013

This comprehensive volume offers a wide-ranging perspective on the stories that art music has told since the start of the 20th century. Contributors challenge the broadly held opinion that the loss of tonality in some music after 1900 also meant the loss of narrative in that music. To the contrary, the editors and essayists in this book demonstrate how experiments in approaching narrative in other media, such as fiction and cinema, suggested fresh possibilities for musical narrative, which composers were quick to exploit. The new conceptions of time, narrative voice, plot, and character that accompanied these experiments also had a significant impact on contemporary music. The repertoire explored in the collection ranges across a wide variety of genres and includes composers from Charles Ives and the Pet Shop Boys to Thomas Adès and Dmitri Shostakovich. [Table of contents etc: http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product\_info.php?cPath=1037\_5718\_5753&products\_id=806644 ] [Sample chapter: http://www.academia.edu/749803/Agency\_Determinism\_Focal\_Time\_Frames\_and\_Narrative\_in\_Processive\_Minimalist\_Music ]

Approaches to Narrative in Acousmatic Music

Acousmatic works tend to operate on two simultaneous planes: a more abstract, musical level of gesture, phrase, colour, texture, and motion; and a more literal, narrative level, which references real-world objects, actions, contexts and environments, either more directly – for example through the direct reproduction of such sonic objects and actions – or in a more distanced, mediated manner. These two layers interact and intertwine, in a relational web of simultaneities, cooperations, and parallels. Where instrumental music, broadly speaking, accesses this narrative level primarily through the use of metaphor, acousmatic music, through the explicit use and application of real-world sound and motion, has the capacity to enact experience much more directly. This alone, perhaps, is not so remarkable; what is perhaps more unique is the pairing of this narrative immersion with the simultaneous, and much more abstract, musical experience of the work. It can be argued that the force of the acousmatic listening experience stems primarily from this dual experience – of the worldly and embodied sensation of objects and movements on the one hand, and the abstract sense of phrase, gesture, contour, rhythm, timbre and texture, with all of the learned and culturally coded senses of form and constructed meaning that these entail, on the other. This paper will first explore some approaches to acousmatic narrative, ranging from relative abstraction, to works which explicitly opt for a 'storytelling' approach, with a range of options – programmatic, essayistic, poetic, etc. – in between. Next, we will consider some perspectives on the balance and relationship between narrative and musical properties in acousmatic music, from heavily biased approaches – in which narrative arises, if at all, solely as an artefact gleaned from the work's musical qualities, or vice versa – to approaches offering a negotiated balance of the two, further on to methodologies which rely on the active engagement of musical properties with narrative, towards a range of goals and intentions. Finally, we will consider some of the pedagogical opportunities offered by a narrative perspective on acousmatic music, and on electroacoustic music in general, and a possible diversification of pedagogical approach which may have practical applications in the classroom, and beyond.

Klang, Kar, und Melodie: a Crash Course on Musical Narrative

2007

Recent scholarship challenges the notion of musical narrative by attempting to establish a parallel with literary narrative. In calling attention to the absence of a narrating voice, the inability of music to narrate in the past tense, and inconsistencies about agency, criticism on musical narrative erroneously sought to equate music with language based on epistemological correspondences rather than structural ones. Mark Wingate's award-winning piece Klang, Kar, und Melodie, serves as a point of departure to: 1) rethink and clarify linguistic terminology and methodologies while adapting these to musical analysis; 2) propose a taxonomy that helps identify the features that contribute to the perception of narrative qualities in music; 3) establish an inter-disciplinary and inter-analytical approach applicable to musique concrète. This article concludes by introducing the narrative cube: a three-dimensional model that evaluates, comparatively, the musical parameters that generate narrative interpretations.

“So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte”: Some Remarks on Narrativity in Music

2016

In literary studies, according to Wolf Schmid, there exist two distinct concepts of narrativity. On the one hand is a strand from “classical narrative theory” which focuses on the “mediator between the author and the narrated world” as “the defining feature of narrativity” Schmid (2003: 17–19; cf. Schmid 2010: 1–5). On the other is a concept, developed by the structuralist study of narrative, which focuses on “temporal structure” and the representation of “changes of state” (Schmid 2003: 17– 18; cf. Schmid 2010: 2).1