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ОглавлениеALTHOUGH MUSIC SCHOLARS HAVE PUT NARRATIVE THEORY TO many innovative uses, when it comes to defining what a narrative is, we have largely left the task to our colleagues in literary theory. Based on their stipulations about the necessary components of narratives, some, such as Carolyn Abbate, have even come to doubt that the category has much applicability to music. Others, such as Byron Almén, have resisted the hegemony of literature in narratology, proposing new ways of conceptualizing narrative that include not only operas and musicals but also most works of instrumental music. Despite their differences, both camps understand narratives as merely the products of composers’ labors (sound structures, in the case of instrumental works). Thus, narrative status depends primarily on the structural features of those products, such as contrast and discontinuity. In this chapter, I argue that works are better conceived as processes than as products alone, and I explore the consequences of this view for our definition of narrative.
Narrative in Music Scholarship
The first wave of work on narrative in music scholarship largely took their definitions from structuralist narratology, particularly Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1983; 1972 in the original French) and Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse (1978). Genette and Chatman argue that a narrative is not a mere sequence of events; it requires a narrator and the ability to distinguish the work’s story, the events of which it is comprised, from its discourse, the way in which the events are told by the narrator.
Applying this definition to music in Unsung Voices (1991), Carolyn Abbate observes the difficulty of making a similar sort of distinction, even in an opera. Most operas convey stories, but in few cases are we invited to imagine that there is a fictional entity responsible for presenting the entire story to us. Abbate concludes that operas are not narratives, but they may contain “moments of narration” where the story-discourse distinction can be perceived through discontinuities within the score or between the score and the libretto.1 The narrator of musical narratives remains unclear in Abbate’s account, however. As she repeatedly informs her readers, the voices of which she speaks are not those of the historical persons who created the work, nor the implied author, nor even the singers who make the work perceptually accessible.2 Through a process of elimination, these voices must refer to features of the work’s structure.
This suspicion is borne out in the evidence Abbate presents for or against a work being a narrative. Her argument that the epilogue to Paul Dukas’s symphonic poem L’apprenti sorcier (1897) constitutes a moment of narration rests on the appearance of the main theme in rhythmic augmentation. Abbate argues that the epilogue serves an analogous function to the quotation marks encasing the sorcerer’s words at the end of the poem on which Dukas’s work is based, Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling (1797). Both imply the presence of a “third person narrator” who recounts the events to us.3 This storyteller is internal to the work’s structure. Absent from Abbate’s discussion is any consideration of the work’s context of performance: what its storyteller (Dukas) was attempting to accomplish with L’apprenti sorcier, whether he was successful, and how his audiences interpreted his work. Did they imagine an apprentice sorcerer’s futile attempts to put a stop to his spell, or did they regard the work as a purely abstract composition?
In the wake of Unsung Voices and other high-profile rejections of the possibility that musical works could constitute narratives, music scholars treaded more cautiously with regard to the narrative-definitional question, typically avoiding it altogether.4 An exception is Byron Almén, a music theorist who is not merely content to say that musical works are like narratives or that we may gain insights about them by regarding them as such. In A Theory of Musical Narrative (2008), he argues that musical works are narratives and presents a new “medium-independent” definition to support this claim. For Almén, a narrative consists of a hierarchy, established within a system of signs, that is subject to change over time—change that a listener interprets as a change in a cultural hierarchy of some sort.5
Almén outlines a method for interpreting virtually any musical work as a narrative. The first step is to identify the salient features of the music (pitches, keys, themes, instruments) that are brought into conflict. One observes the hierarchy in which they are found at the beginning and tracks changes to that hierarchy throughout the composition. Next, one classifies one’s findings according to the narrative archetypes that the literary theorist Northrop Frye proposed in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957): romance, tragedy, comedy, and irony (resulting from the permutations of order/transgression and victory/defeat). Finally, the analyst interprets these musical conflicts as representing conflicts taking place within a single agent, between agents or groups thereof, or between an individual and a group.
To highlight how his theory builds on existing practices in music theory and musicology, Almén illustrates it with discussions of preexisting analyses representing a variety of interpretive approaches. One such example is Susan McClary’s interpretation of the first movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 (1721). McClary focuses on the relationship between the harpsichord and the rest of the players (the ripieno, or large ensemble, as well as the other soloists). Bach’s concerto initially appears to be for flute and violin, with the harpsichord performing its customary “service role” as part of the continuo. Before long, the harpsichord begins to assert itself beyond its station, eventually “hijacking” the piece by inserting an inordinately long solo capriccio in which it “unleashes elements of chaos, irrationality, and noise until finally it blurs almost entirely the sense of key, meter, and form upon which eighteenth-century style depends.”6 Only then does it deign to allow the ripieno to reenter and restore order with its performance of the final ritornello.
McClary interprets the conflict between the harpsichord and the rest of the instrumentalists as representing the conflict between the growing individualism of the bourgeoisie in Bach’s time and European society, which was still largely under absolute rule. As Almén observes, a more typical concerto from this period would represent individualism and social stability as co-realizable through either “the appropriate submission of individual aspiration for the good of society” or “the reconciliation of the apparently contradictory aims of the individual and society.”7 Bach’s concerto, McClary argues, represents individualism that exceeds social acceptability. That the harpsichord eventually yields to the ripieno may appear to represent the individual submitting to the greater good of society, as in Almén’s first scenario. Nevertheless, McClary observes that “the subversive elements of the piece seem far too powerful to be contained in so conventional a manner.”8
Since the narrative resulting from Almén’s method is largely the listener’s confection, many different narratives may result from the same conflict. “Another analyst,” he speculates, “might have viewed the intrusive harpsichord music as a threat that is ultimately excised by the final ritornello—a romance narrative of the successful quest, if you will, rather than a comic narrative of a blocked society renewed or an ironic narrative of a fractured society.”9
Almén’s stipulation that the work must establish a hierarchy that undergoes change specifies some structural features the music must possess in order to be considered a narrative. But unlike Abbate’s definition, Almén’s may not be solely dependent on the work’s structure. Although he rejects Abbate’s requirement of a storyteller, he affirms the importance of a listener who interprets the work as a narrative.10 Precisely what role listeners play in determining a work’s narrative status remains unclear, however. It may be that McClary, by interpreting Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 in the way she did, makes it a narrative. If that is correct, the work is a narrative for McClary, but it would not have been a narrative for Peter Kivy, who rejected the validity of such interpretations.11 Alternatively, Almén may be arguing that the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto is a narrative, even if certain listeners refuse to regard it as such, because it is a work to which it is appropriate to adopt a method like the one he outlines. Given Almén’s lack of interest in authorial intentions or historical practices of music listening, what makes this approach appropriate appears to be structural features capable of supporting such interpretations.
Texts and Works
To understand what separates the foregoing definitions from the one I will put forth in the following section, it will be necessary to expose some of the assumptions about the nature of musical works underlying these definitions. Inspired by French literary theory, particularly the work of Roland Barthes, New Musicologists such as Abbate and McClary moved away from regarding their subjects of study as works and began to think of them as texts. This is not to say that opera scholars abandoned the study of scores and focused instead on libretti. What Barthes seems to have meant by the work-text opposition was the difference between interpreting what one is reading or listening to in light of the historical circumstances of its production and approaching it as a mere sequence of words or sounds, which could be interpreted in any way one pleased.12
Another way of understanding the opposition between texts and works is through the contrast between products and processes. As a text or product, a work of instrumental music is merely a sound structure.13 As a process, by contrast, it also includes all factors that contributed to its production, such as the performers, instruments, and performing circumstances for which it was written, and influences both artistic and nonartistic (e.g., religious or philosophical beliefs or events in the composer’s private life).
Barthes preferred texts to works because of his interest in maximizing interpretive freedom. Reducing works to mere texts licensed musicologists to put forth interpretations that were implausible accounts of composers’ intentions. It is unlikely that Bach’s compositional choices were guided by the values of freedom and individualism underpinning McClary’s interpretation of Brandenburg Concerto no. 5.14 For those interested in understanding works in light of the actual historical circumstances of their creation, one is better off regarding them as processes—or at least as contextualized products—rather than as mere texts.15 If a work is a process, determining whether it is a narrative involves not only analyzing its structural features but also investigating how and why it was created, including whether its author intended it to tell or present a story.
The relevance of the composer’s intentions to interpretation remains a contentious topic in musicology and music theory. One of the larger aims of this study is to rehabilitate the figure of the author in music scholarship; depending on the object of appreciation, that may be the composer, librettist, director, or performer. As I have argued in more depth elsewhere, commitments to the “intentional fallacy” and the “death of the author” fostered the kind of interpretive freedom musicologists of the 1980s and 1990s were seeking but failed to align with the discipline’s renewed interest in history in the past two decades.16
One of the reasons for this incongruity between theory and practice is a lack of awareness of more sophisticated forms of intentionalism that have been proposed in response to the criticisms of Barthes and the authors of “The Intentional Fallacy,” William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. The most robust of these accounts have come from philosophers working in the analytic philosophical tradition. Paisley Livingston’s Art and Intention (2005) provides a clear and comprehensive discussion of what intentions are and the roles they play in the creation and interpretation of art. He defines an intention as an attitude one takes toward a plan of action. In contrast to desiring or wanting, intending involves being “settled upon executing that plan, or upon trying to execute it.”17 Even so, it is possible to be unaware of or mistaken about some of the intentions motivating one’s actions. As action plans rather than actions themselves, intentions are subject to revision. Even when we decide to act, we may be unsuccessful in realizing our intentions.
The possibility of author failure is a serious problem for forms of intentionalism that equate the content and meaning of a work with authorial intentions (absolute or extreme intentionalism).18 One response to this problem is to eschew reference to the real author in favor of an implied author, an entity that is constructed by the reader or listener through his or her engagement with the work. The concept of the implied author originates from The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) by the literary critic Wayne C. Booth. In philosophy, this interpretive approach is commonly referred to as hypothetical intentionalism, a term coined by Jerrold Levinson.19 Hypothetical intentionalism may serve the purposes of some philosophers and theorists but is unable to explain the attention music historians pay to authors’ sketches, notebooks, letters, and interviews. Such sources inform us about the actual author’s intentions and actions, not those of the implied author. Throughout this study, the intentions to which I will be referring are those of the actual persons responsible for creating the works under consideration.20
Other philosophers, such as Livingston, have responded to the author fallibility problem by defining more moderate forms of real-author intentionalism. According to moderate actual intentionalism, authorial intentions determine meaning only in cases where they are successfully realized in the artistic product. Success is determined by assessing whether the intention and the features of the product “mesh.” Not only does meshing entail a degree of consistency, “but [it] also carries the implication of a stronger condition involving relevance and integration: if there is a sense in which an extraneous hypothesis is consistent with data, but bears no meaningful, integrative relation with them, we would say that the two do not mesh.”21
Another common objection to intentionalism is the putative impossibility of knowing another’s intentions, particularly if one’s subject died hundreds of years ago. In some cases, all we may have is a score. We may not even know who its author was. That there are limits to what may be known does not justify abandoning the search for what can be known. Inquiring into the artist’s intentions does not require mind-reading abilities but merely the sorts of activities musicologists routinely engage in: studying the finished product, evidence about how it was produced, and the various influences on its production, with an aim to understanding how and why it possesses the features it does.
One may also be concerned that a commitment to real-author intentionalism unduly restricts the creativity of the interpreter. If one’s primary aim in engaging with a work is to display one’s creativity or to maximize one’s enjoyment, one may wish to heed Barthes’s call to regard that work as a product rather than as a process. But if one wishes to understand the historical influences on its creation, inquiring into the actual author’s intentions ought to be a component of the interpretive process. Even so, not all questions about art require intentionalist explanations. One question that does, I argue, is the question of whether a work is a narrative, as this is a question of the work’s “category of art.”22
A Moderate Intentionalist Definition of Narrative
What separates Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) from Almén’s A Theory of Musical Narrative, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) from Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963), John Adams and Peter Sellars’s Doctor Atomic (2005) from Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (1976), Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote (1898) from Igor Stravinsky’s Octet (1923), a recounting of my failed attempts to make a Sachertorte from a recipe for this delicious but formidable dessert? Without much thought or deliberation, someone sufficiently knowledgeable about the above items will tend to categorize the former but not the latter in the class of narratives. One of the factors motivating such determinations is that the former items were intentionally made to communicate stories (and succeed in doing so), whereas the latter were not.23 Obviously, I have not gotten very far in determining what a narrative is. I have merely replaced the question “what is a narrative?” with “what is a story?”
Before addressing this question, it is worth interrogating the validity of the intuitive view that the former of each pair of items is a narrative. Not all narratologists agree. Genette, for instance, defines a narrative as an “oral or written discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or series of events,” a definition that would include Pride and Prejudice and, potentially, my story about my attempt to make a Sachertorte but exclude the cases in between.24 Theorists who have brought narratology to bear on cinema and theater have expanded the means of conveying story content to include showing by means of images and sounds. However, like Abbate, many have assumed that since fictional narrators are seemingly ubiquitous to literary narratives, they must be a component of narration in other media as well.25 A more complete response to such claims will need to wait until chapter 3, where I explore the role of narrators in opera and musical theater. For now, I will simply state my agreement with Abbate that narratives require storytellers, not mere sequences of events. The point on which we disagree is her insistence that these tellers be fictional. There is no fictional agent responsible for presenting the entirety of Vertigo, Doctor Atomic, Don Quixote, or my story about my culinary disaster. Nevertheless, these utterances have authors who, in authoring their utterance, also narrate it.26
Although there are many differences between telling a story and presenting one (e.g., through a theatrical performance), everyday use of the term narrative cuts across this divide.27 With regard to the question of whether a work is a narrative, I do not care how the story is conveyed, merely that the work was created to convey a story and that it succeeds in doing so. Thus, I will use narrate to describe any act of communicating narrative content and narrator to refer to any agent, fictional or real, engaged in such an act, regardless of whether it is conducted through language, music, sounds, gestures, pictures, or moving images.
Having clarified my position on the range of acceptable storytelling media, I now turn to the question of what a story is. Since most discussions in music scholarship focus on instrumental music, I will take as my central case studies the aforementioned pair of instrumental compositions, Strauss’s tone poem Don Quixote and Stravinsky’s Octet.
As Strauss’s title advertises, his work is modeled on the characters and events of Cervantes’s novel. Strauss begins with a character sketch of the protagonist (ex. 1.1). One of the more striking features of the first dozen measures is their unusual harmonic plan. Strauss establishes the key of D major with a cadence in measure 4, but only four bars later, he is tonicizing A♭ major, a tritone away, subsequently returning to D major by measure 12. Even in the context of late-Romantic harmonic practice, the establishment of tritone key relations within such a compressed time span is unorthodox. Yet the passage is stylistically unperturbed. The lilting rhythms and graceful, if exaggeratedly Romantic, swooping gestures in the strings create a sense of complacency, minimizing the effect of the unstable harmonic terrain being traversed. In just these twelve measures, Strauss has communicated a great deal about his protagonist, depicting him to be a romantic of questionable psychological stability, but whose eccentricities remain largely hidden at this point. Many may be fooled into thinking Don Quixote entirely normal, just as he does himself. This belief becomes increasingly unsustainable, however, as Strauss’s harmonies become even more outlandish later on in the introduction.
Strauss then introduces Don Quixote’s sidekick, Sancho Panza (ex. 1.2). The ungainly leaps in the tenor tuba and bass clarinet parts—so unidiomatic as to be impossible to execute with grace—are appropriate to his humble occupation as a farmer. Suddenly, a viola enters with a jittery, oscillating figure. After the first motive is repeated, the viola takes over, imitating, if wanly, the flamboyancy of Don Quixote’s musical gestures and the noble heroism he espouses (rehearsal numbers 15 and 16, respectively). Strauss presents Sancho Panza as a country bumpkin, initially reticent of his friend’s proposal (hence the oscillation between the bumbling-farmer and quasi-heroic-viola motives and the nervousness of the latter), who quickly becomes intoxicated by delusions of grandeur and agrees to play along.
Example 1.1. The harmonic eccentricity of Don Quixote, opening of Strauss’s tone poem
Example 1.2. Character sketch of Sancho Panza
Having introduced his characters, Strauss proceeds to represent them undertaking purposeful actions. They combat windmills Don Quixote believes to be giants (variation 1) and sheep he mistakes for an army (variation 2). In variation 4, they attempt to halt a procession of penitents with a portrait of the Virgin Mary, believed to be a damsel in distress. To provide comfort to his friend and perhaps some personal amusement, Sancho Panza attempts to pass off a peasant as Don Quixote’s beloved Dulcinea (variation 6). They take an imaginary trip through the air (variation 7), followed by a real voyage by boat, which concludes with the capsizing of their vessel (variation 8). In variation 9, they attack a group of monks believed to be evil magicians. Finally, Don Quixote stakes his knighthood against the Knight of the Shining Moon and loses, which causes him to come to his senses and return home, where he dies (variation 10).
Although one may accept that my description of Strauss’s Don Quixote is a narrative, one may still doubt that Strauss’s music is responsible for conveying this story. Without Strauss’s title and program, I would have had no hope of divining what his music was intended to represent. Jean-Jacques Nattiez has verified this hypothesis with an experiment involving playing L’apprenti sorcier to hosts of Montréal schoolchildren who had never heard it before and who were not provided with its program. They were merely told that the music conveys a story and were instructed to write down what they thought the story was. Nattiez received all sorts of responses—stories about battles, revolutions, animals, mountain climbing, espionage, medieval chivalry, even the life of Beethoven—but none even remotely resembling a story about a wizard in training with a procreating-broom problem.28
That is not to say that music is incapable of representation without extramusical aids. If one’s target is an aural phenomenon, one could certainly expect more success. Nevertheless, the intended referent of even the most infamously onomatopoeic passages of Don Quixote (e.g., the sheep’s distressed bleating in variation 2, represented by winds and brass performing dissonant chords while flutter-tonguing) are difficult to determine without extramusical cues. But although extramusical, Strauss’s title and program are part of his work.29 Accordingly, it is appropriate that I relied on them in my discussion.
A more serious objection is that my description went beyond the skimpy details Strauss provided in his score and program. I also relied on knowledge of Cervantes’s novel. Unlike the novel, Strauss’s tone poem does not bring into existence the characters Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Rather, it is designed to put listeners who already have knowledge of the novel in mind of its characters and their adventures. Some narrative theorists may wish to place more stringent demands on the act of telling or presenting a story, claiming that simply pointing to a preexisting narrative is insufficient.30 I suggest that such inclinations are predicated on too narrow a focus on linguistic narratives. In this regard, I agree with Almén that a consideration of musical works has something to teach us about narratives more generally.
In my discussion of Don Quixote, I have focused on Strauss’s representation of agents and their goal-directed activities, both of which I take to be essential components of stories, at least within the context of humanist discourse.31 These agents may not be human, but they must be represented as at least humanlike in their sentience, possession of beliefs and desires, and ability to perform self-impelled actions. But if representing an agent capable of action were sufficient, Strauss’s opening character sketch of Don Quixote would be just as much a narrative as the ensuing representation of his and Sancho Panza’s adventures. To exclude mere character sketches, the agent not only must be capable of action but also must exercise that ability.
The importance of agents to narratives is confirmed by the methodologies that have been employed in narrative-based analyses of instrumental music.32 What is required to understand musical events as constituting a narrative is to regard them as representing one or more agents and their actions. The first step is to identify some salient musical features (themes, motives, keys, instruments, pitches) and anthropomorphize them, regarding them as agents, fleshing out their characteristics, and attributing to them beliefs and desires that serve to motivate their actions. As illustration, I will perform an analysis of this type on the beginning of variation B of the second movement of Stravinsky’s Octet (ex. 1.3).
I take as the agents of my narrative the instrumental parts trumpet 2 and trombone 2. Trumpet 2 performs a solo march accompanied by the bassoons and trombones, which I interpret as a fictional act of marching, one that is curtailed by the crass glissando trombone 2 performs two measures before rehearsal 29. So far, I have some agents performing some actions. Almén may be inclined to regard my description as a narrative. Others may harbor doubts on this score. The problem, I suggest, is that neither trumpet 2 nor trombone 2 scores very high on the scale of particularity. Who are they? Why is trumpet 2 performing a march, and why does trombone 2 interrupt it? Narratives in other media provide answers to such questions.
Suppose I were to provide some. Since the musical topic of this passage is a march, a military setting seems apropos. The homophonic texture and regular pulse of the accompaniment suggest a scenario of a platoon going on a march with trumpet 2 as its leader—the corporal, let’s imagine. Based on the brisk tempo and dry accompaniment, the rigid dotted rhythms of trumpet 2’s part and its relative loudness, and even Stravinsky’s very choice of instrument, I could attribute to my corporal the character traits of seriousness, formality, arrogance, a need for control, and a desire to be the center of attention. The measure of triple meter (which would derail any attempt to march to this music) suggests that trumpet 2 is not as competent a leader as he thinks he is. Within the context of Stravinsky’s rhythmic practice, however, the metric abnormality is slight (compare the march at the Allegro moderato of the first movement). Perhaps it is not appropriate to think of the corporal as entirely incompetent, merely inexperienced and overconfident.
Example 1.3. Stravinsky, Octet, movement II, variation B
Within this framework, trombone 2 may be cast in the role of a private with a chip on his shoulder. Fed up with taking orders, he cracks a rude joke. The vulgar sound of his glissando might even suggest the target of his joke: the corporal’s sexual potency. Noticing the ensuing behavior exhibited by the other members of the platoon—the circus-like bassoon ostinato accompanying the flute, who lackadaisically mocks trumpet 2’s dotted rhythms—we may conclude that the private’s prank succeeded in putting a halt to the march, undermining the corporal’s authority and causing a ruckus.
By now, my remarks on the Octet do constitute a narrative, based on my earlier stipulations, but a narrative of my making, not Stravinsky’s.33 One might argue that the same is true of my description of Don Quixote, but that would be to elide crucial differences between these two cases. Although my discussion of Strauss’s work did involve creative extrapolations on my part, these were invited by Strauss and guided by features of his work—namely, its title and program.
Stravinsky’s work may be an apt prop for imaginings that constitute narratives, but there is no indication that Stravinsky invited such imaginings. Its title as well as the titles of individual movements (Sinfonia, Tema con variazioni, Finale) do not recommend extramusical associations. Stravinsky’s statements about his work provide further evidence that he did not intend it to present a story. The first sentence of an article he published shortly after the work’s premiere is “My Octuor is a musical object.” He elaborates that it “is not an ‘emotive’ work but a musical composition based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves.”34 In his ghostwritten autobiography, Stravinsky sanctioned Walter Nouvel to publish the following aesthetic credo on his behalf: “I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. . . . Expression has never been an inherent property of music.”35 Such a claim is, of course, dubious in the extreme, as it is not even supported by the composer’s own works, including the passage under consideration. Nevertheless, it does suggest that Stravinsky did not intend the Octet to represent a story.
At this point, one might object that I have chosen decidedly cut-and-dried examples. A more challenging case would be Mahler’s Todtenfeier, which originated as a symphonic poem but eventually became the first movement of the composer’s Second Symphony (1895). Adam Mickiewicz’s verse drama Dziady (Todtenfeier in Siegfried Lipiner’s 1887 German translation) served as inspiration for Mahler’s compositional activities, but, unlike Strauss, he never made this fact public.
There were two actions Strauss performed that contributed to Don Quixote being a narrative. First, he modeled his composition on the characters and events of Cervantes’s novel such that appropriately informed listeners could hear those characters and events in his work. Second, he took steps to ensure that listeners would be appropriately informed by gesturing to Cervantes’s work in his title and indications in his score and by sanctioning Arthur Hahn to publish a more detailed program in his guidebook to the symphony.36
Mahler’s decision not to publicize the story on which his Todtenfeier was based suggests that he did not intend it to be taken as a representation of Mickiewicz’s story. Due to the substantial formal changes that occurred during the compositional process, there is also reason to doubt that Mahler’s compositional activities were guided by an intention to achieve a high degree of correspondence between the musical form of his composition and the plot of Dziady.37
Even if Mahler did not intend for listeners to think about Dziady while listening to his Todtenfeier, one could still argue that he intended them to invent their own stories while listening to his work. Such an argument would find support in Mahler’s decision to categorize his Todtenfeier as a symphonic poem, a genre of program music often used to tell stories. Furthermore, the musical features of the work all but demand extramusical explanations, and narrative listening was a part of the culture of music listening and criticism in Mahler’s sociocultural context. Nevertheless, for my purposes, I will reserve the category of narrative to works that tell or present particular stories.38 Since particularity admits of degrees, the question of the requisite degree of particularity arises. As sketchy as Strauss’s musical representations are in comparison with Cervantes’s novel, I suggest that they are sufficiently particular to qualify as a narrative. But to preserve a distinction between Strauss’s Don Quixote and Stravinsky’s Octet, I am disinclined to lower the bar such that any work that is conducive to narrative imaginings is able to clear it.
What about works that fall in between these two extremes, such as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? In a famous scene from E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End (1910), the Schlegel siblings attend a performance of the symphony. While Margaret and Tibby concern themselves with the “music itself,” Helen imagines “a goblin walking quietly over the universe” who is dispelled in the final movement with “gusts of splendour, gods and demigods contending with vast swords, colour and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death!” Her more sober siblings dismiss the legitimacy of her response to the symphony. In Margaret’s words, “she labels it with meanings from start to finish; turns it into literature. I wonder if the day will ever return when music will be treated as music.”39
In response to the interpretive flights of fancy that characterized much music criticism of the Romantic era, many twentieth-century critics harbored similar doubts about the appropriateness of responses like Helen’s. In philosophy, Peter Kivy has been one of the most outspoken opponents of narrative-based interpretations of instrumental music.40 I take a more moderate view. The struggle-to-victory narrative Helen and many nonfictional interpreters have heard in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is insufficiently particular to ground it as a narrative, in my view. Who is struggling? What is the nature of his struggle? With Don Quixote, there are answers to such questions. With Beethoven’s Fifth, there are not.
Yet, like Forster himself, I am disinclined to agree with Margaret that her sister failed to treat Beethoven’s music “as music.”41 The impulse to imagine fictional scenarios while listening to music is a natural one, born of our tendency to anthropomorphize objects and make sense of events in our lives with narratives. Narrative listening is not merely a way to make works of instrumental music accessible to children or members of the laity but can also benefit musicians and music scholars. Narrative-based analysis can be a powerful tool for understanding music because it draws attention to conflicts and discontinuities that may be overlooked by other analytical methods.
Almén is right to be skeptical of many of the stipulations about the necessary ingredients of narratives put forth by literary theorists. However, if they can be faulted for their failure to consider dramatic or musical narratives, an analogous complaint can be laid at Almén’s feet, since his definition is plausible only in the context of instrumental music. Music scholars concerned that our field is a perennial outsider within broader discourses in the humanities ought to consider whether idiosyncratic definitions of shared concepts are apt to bring us closer to or further away from colleagues tackling similar questions in other fields. My motive for proposing a more circumscribed definition of narrative is to facilitate dialogues between music and other disciplines and between music scholars, performers, and members of the general public.
If works are more akin to processes than products alone, determining whether a work is a narrative involves more than merely studying its structural features. One must also consider the way it was made (was it modeled on a preexisting or composer-authored story?), its intended mode of reception (did its composer intend for listeners to hear this story’s characters and events in the work?), and whether the composer was successful in achieving the desired response (are listeners able to hear the music as presenting this story?). Thus, I propose that a narrative is an utterance intentionally made to convey a story.
In defining what a story is, I have taken an agent-oriented approach, rather than one focused on the representation of events, because it directs our attention to one of the chief reasons for our interest in narratives: the agents at their center. These agents need not be human, but they do need to perform intentional actions. Comparing Strauss’s Don Quixote to Stravinsky’s Octet, I argued that narratives concern particular agents performing particular actions. As such, themes, pitches, and instrumental parts are not strong candidates to be the agents of narratives, but they may be rendered more particular if listeners use their imaginations. Composers of works of instrumental music express their intention that their work presents a story by inviting listeners to imagine that musical features, such as themes or instruments, represent agents. In most cases, this invitation is made through extramusical means, such as the work’s title and accompanying program or pictures, which serve to guide listeners’ imaginative escapades.42
Putting it all together, I propose the following definition: A narrative is an utterance intended to communicate a story, which necessarily involves representing particular agents exercising their agency through particular intentional actions. Due to music’s lack of semantic specificity in comparison with literature or theater, successfully conveying a story in a work of instrumental music typically involves a suggestive title and a program that clarifies what the music is intended to represent. Thus, the category of narrative music overlaps with that of program music—music intended to represent or evoke extramusical phenomena—but not precisely. Debussy’s La mer (1905) and Honegger’s Pacific 231 (1923) both fall into the latter category but not the former. Although both are representational and, furthermore, represent a change in state—of the sea and of a train gradually picking up speed, respectively—they do not represent any sentient beings and thus are not narratives under the proposed definition.43
In the next chapter, my focus shifts from instrumental music to opera and musical theater, exploring what is involved in conveying a story in a musical drama.
Notes
1. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), ch. 1, 48–56.
2. Ibid., x, xii–xiii, 11–13.
3. Ibid., 57–60.
4. Another scholar who is dismissive of music’s narrational abilities is Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “Can One Speak of Narrative Music?” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 115, no. 2 (1990): 240–57.
5. Byron Almén, A Theory of Musical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 40. Almén’s definition is based on James Jakób Liszka, The Semiotic of Myth: A Critical Study of the Symbol (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
6. Susan McClary, “The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during a Bach Year,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, ed. Susan McClary and Richard Leppert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 25, 28, 36.
7. Almén, Theory of Musical Narrative, 25.
8. McClary, “Talking Politics,” 40.
9. Almén, Theory of Musical Narrative, 39.
10. Ibid., 32–35, 41.
11. Peter Kivy, “Action and Agency,” in Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 119–56.
12. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image—Music—Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 155–64.
13. Some music scholars treat the score as the composer’s product (e.g., Michael Talbot, “Introduction,” in The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? ed. Michael Talbot [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2000], 6), but if that were true, music appreciation would bear greater similarity to the appreciation of literature than it does.
14. For an interpretation that is more firmly grounded in the historical influences on Bach’s work, see Michael Marissen, The Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), ch. 3. I contrast McClary’s and Marissen’s interpretations in Nina Penner, “Intentions in Theory and Practice,” Music & Letters 99, no. 3 (2018): 452–53.
15. David Davies defends a process-based understanding of works in Art as Performance (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), which focuses on visual art. There are other accounts that recognize aspects of a work’s context as integral to work identity. Concerning music, the most influential of these was proposed by Jerrold Levinson, “What a Musical Work Is,” in Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 [1980]), 63–88, who includes the composer’s identity and the date of composition as part of work identity. I share Davies’s concern that Levinson’s account does not import enough contextual information into work identity. For a proposed synthesis of Davies’s and Levinson’s views, refer to Andrew Kania, Review of Art as Performance by David Davies, Mind 114, no. 453 (2005): 140–41. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) has been influential in encouraging music scholars to consider the process of composition (what he calls poiesis), not merely the finished the product (the trace or neutral level). Nattiez’s inclusion of the process of reception (esthesis) as part of work identity is one major difference between his position and the foregoing philosophical ones.
16. Penner, “Intentions in Theory and Practice.” The quotations refer to William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 (1946): 468–88; Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–48. Another recent musicological critique of anti-intentionalism is Edmund J. Goehring, Coming to Terms with Our Musical Past: An Essay on Mozart and Modernist Aesthetics (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2018), ch. 3.
17. Paisley Livingston, Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 7. Livingston’s account is based on Alfred R. Mele, “Deciding to Act,” Philosophical Studies 100, no. 1 (2000): 81–108; Alfred R. Mele, Springs of Action: Understanding Intentional Behaviour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
18. Absolute intentionalists include E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); William Irwin, Intentionalist Interpretation: A Philosophical Explanation and Defense (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999); William Irwin, “Authorial Declaration and Extreme Actual Intentionalism: Is Dumbledore Gay?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73, no. 2 (2015): 141–47; P. D. Juhl, Interpretation: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 723–42; Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction,” Critical Inquiry 14, no. 1 (1987): 49–68. Kathleen Stock, Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), defends extreme intentionalism but only with respect to fictional content (what one ought to imagine is true in the story).
19. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 70–71; Jerrold Levinson, “Intention and Interpretation in Literature,” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 175–213. Although Edward T. Cone does not use the term implied composer in The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), he has acknowledged that his concept of the “complete” or “implicit musical persona” is “something very like Booth’s implied author.” Fred E. Maus et al., “Edward T. Cone’s The Composer’s Voice: Elaborations and Departures,” College Music Symposium 29 (1989): 77. The implied composer is often invoked by music semioticians; for example, Eero Terasti, Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics (Berlin: Mouton, 2002), 73–76. See also Seth Monahan’s discussion of the “fictional composer” in “Action and Agency Revisited,” Journal of Music Theory 57, no. 2 (2013): 239–32. I discuss some differences between the foregoing accounts in “Intentions in Theory and Practice,” 455–58.
20. In chapter 4, I will return to the concept of the implied author, addressing concerns that it is required to appreciate multiauthored works and cases where there is a disjuncture between the person who appears to have authored the work and facts about its actual author.
21. Livingston, Art and Intention, 142–43, quotation from 199. For a more extended discussion of moderate intentionalism and its congruence with current musicology, refer to Penner, “Intentions in Theory and Practice,” 458–64.
22. Here I am referring to Kendall L. Walton, “Categories of Art,” Philosophical Review 79, no. 3 (1970): 334–67. Even philosophers who are opposed to intentionalism as a general account of interpretation agree on the relevance of intentions to categorization. See, for example, David Davies, Art as Performance, 84–89; Levinson, “Intention and Interpretation,” 188–89.
23. Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5, also begins from this premise.
24. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 25.
25. For arguments that films invariably have narrators, see Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 115–16; Jerrold Levinson, “Film Music and Narrative Agency,” in Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 149–50. On theater, see Manfred Jahn, “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama,” New Literary History 32, no. 3 (2001): 674.
26. Currie, Narratives and Narrators, 65, puts forth an argument to this effect.
27. Others who have made similar observations include ibid., 28n3; Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 177; Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996), 349–51; James R. Hamilton, “Mimesis and Showing,” in Mimesis: Metaphysics, Cognition, Pragmatics, ed. Gregory Currie, Petr Kotatko, and Martin Pokorny (London: College Publications, 2012), 355.
28. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “Y a-t-il une diégèse musicale?” in Musik und Verstehen, ed. Peter Faltin and Hans-Peter Reinecke (Cologne: Arno Volk Verlag, 1973), 247–57. An English summary of this study may be found in Nattiez, “Narrative Music?” 246–48.
29. For arguments in favor of treating titles as part of the work, refer to Hazard Adams, “Titles, Titling, and Entitlement To,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46, no. 1 (1987): 7–21; Jerrold Levinson, “Titles,” in Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 159–78. I see no reason why the same logic could not be applied to programs and pictures intended to accompany musical works.
30. I am grateful to Trevor Ponech for raising this objection.
31. Others who make similar claims include Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 48–53; Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image—Music—Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 105; Noël Carroll, “On the Narrative Connection,” in Beyond Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 126; Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 12; Jerry R. Hobbs, Literature and Cognition (Stanford: Centre for the Study of Language and Information, 1990), 39–40; Trevor Ponech, What Is Non-Fiction Cinema? On the Very Idea of Motion Picture Communication (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), 128; Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), ch. 1; Paul Woodruff, The Necessity of Theatre: The Art of Watching and Being Watched (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 68–72.
32. See, for example, Almén, Theory of Musical Narrative, ch. 4; Cone, Composer’s Voice, ch. 5; Marion A. Guck, “Rehabilitating the Incorrigible,” in Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 57–73; Robert S. Hatten, A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 32–34, ch. 7, 287–88; Gregory Karl, “Structuralism and the Musical Plot,” Music Theory Spectrum 19, no. 1 (1997): 13–34; Fred E. Maus, “Music as Narrative,” Indiana Theory Review 12 (1991): 1–41; Fred E. Maus, “Music as Drama,” in Music and Meaning, ed. Jenefer Robinson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 105–30; McClary, “Talking Politics”; Monahan, “Action and Agency Revisited”; Anthony Newcomb, “Action and Agency in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Second Movement,” in Music and Meaning, ed. Jenefer Robinson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 131–53; Philip Rupprecht, “Agency Effects in the Instrumental Drama of Musgrave and Birtwistle,” in Music and Narrative since 1900, ed. Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 189–215.
33. Jerrold Levinson, “Music as Narrative and Music as Drama,” in Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 134n6, also makes this distinction.
34. Igor Stravinsky, “Some Ideas about My Octuor,” in Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, 2nd ed., by Eric Walter White (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 574, 575. Stravinsky’s essay was originally published in The Arts in January 1924.
35. Walter Nouvel, Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), 83 (ellipsis in the original).
36. Walter Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen von Richard Strauss (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1996), 147–56, 543–44; James Hepokoski, Review of Die Tondichtungen von Richard Strauss by Walter Werbeck, Journal of the American Musicological Society 51, no. 3 (1998): 608–9.
37. Stephen E. Hefling, “Mahler’s Todtenfeier and the Problem of Program Music,” 19th-Century Music 12, no. 1 (1988): 43. In a letter to Max Marschalk after the premiere of his Second Symphony, Mahler stated that he “was never concerned with the detailed description of an event, but to the highest degree with that of a feeling.” Quoted in ibid., 41.
38. Particularity is also stressed by Currie, Narratives and Narrators, 11; Woodruff, Necessity of Theatre, 98–101.
39. E. M. Forster, Howard’s End (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 30, 31, 36. I thank Linda Hutcheon for recommending this example.
40. Kivy, “Action and Agency.”
41. Michelle Fillion, Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E. M. Forster (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 83, notes that Margaret’s and Helen’s responses dramatize the two modes of listening Forster juxtaposes in his 1939 essay “Not Listening to Music”: “music itself” and “music that reminds me of something.” Although Forster cautions that the latter approach may lead to “inattention,” he also states that “only a purist would condemn all visual parallels, all emotional labellings, all programmes.” E. M. Forster, “Not Listening to Music,” in Two Cheers for Democracy, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 122, 123.
42. A musical work with accompanying pictures is Biber’s “Mystery” Sonatas (1676).
43. If Honegger had represented an athlete running a race, it is possible that this hypothetical work would be a narrative. The train, however, does not have desires or aims.
