On Narrativity in Music: Expressive Genres and Levels of Discourse in Beethoven (original) (raw)

Narrative literature assumes two fundamental notions, the tale and the teller. Music could be said to share these aspects, to the degree one may speak of a sequence of musical events as akin to a story, or plot, and the composer-or better, his persona (Cone 1974) as implied narrator. Closer correspondences may be seen in opera or song, where recitative or speech-like passages typically accompany the more literal narration of events. But in "absolute" music the analogy appears a little more tenuous, since often a sequence of emotional states, rather than referential events, appears to be pnmary. Nevertheless, I find the analogy ofnarrativity in the "absolute" music of Beethoven to be helpful, and I will illustrate why with a brief survey of two areas corresponding to the tale and the teller, respectively. The first concerns what I call expressive genres that coordinate larger scale organization of the expressive "plot" of a movement. Since expressive genres are negotiated with formal schemes such as sonata, they can help explain events and formal departures that might appear incompletely motivated from a purely formalist perspective.

Sign up for access to the world's latest research.

checkGet notified about relevant papers

checkSave papers to use in your research

checkJoin the discussion with peers

checkTrack your impact