Music and narrative revisited: Degrees of narrativity in Beethoven and Mahler

Journal of the Royal Musical Association

Volumn 126, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 193-249

  Micznik, Vera ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949739309     PISSN: 02690403     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jrma/126.2.193     Document Type: Review

References (104)

1. Hayden White, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality', On Narrative, ed. W. J. Thomas Mitchell (Chicago, IL, and London, 1981), 1-23 (p. 1)
2. Leo Treitler, 'What Kind of Story is History?', Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1989), 157-75 (p. 173)
3. Roland Barthes, 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives', Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), 79-124 (p. 79)
4. See, for example, Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln, NE, 1987), 58
5. and idem, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin, New York and Amsterdam, 1982), 4
6. See, for example, Seymour Chatman, 'What Novels Can Do that Films Can't (and Vice Versa)', On Narrative, ed. Mitchell, 117-36 (p. 118)
7. and his book on narrative, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1978)
8. Shlomit Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London and New York, 1989), 44: 'time in narrative fiction can be defined as the relations of chronology between story and text [i.e. discourse]'
9. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY, 1980), 33 (quoting Christian Metz: 'one of the functions of narrative is to invent one time scheme in terms of another time scheme'); and so on. As is well known, the terms 'story' and 'discourse' are transformations of the Russian Formalists' original distinction between 'fabula' and 'sjužet'
10. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 34
11. Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, 44
12. Nelson Goodman, 'Twisted Tales; or Story, Study, and Symphony', On Narrative, ed. Mitchell, 99-115 (p. 111)
13. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, 'Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories', On Narrative, ed. Mitchell, 209-32 (pp. 224, 213-14)
14. Frank Kermode, 'Secrets and Narrative Sequence', On Narrative, ed. Mitchell, 79-97 (p. 82)
15. and Paul Ricoeur, 'Narrative Time', ibid., 165-86 (pp. 174-5). Both arguments are much more complex, but I have selected here minimal information related to the topic of the double-time structuring
16. See his chapter entitled 'Voice' in Narrative Discourse, 212-62
17. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto, 1985; 2nd edn, 1997), 142-3, 157-8
18. See Karol Berger, 'Diegesis and Mimesis: The Poetic Modes and the Matter of Artistic Presentation', Journal of Musicology, 12 (1994), 407-33 (pp. 431-2)
19. Anthony Newcomb, 'Narrative Archetypes in Mahler's Ninth Symphony', Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge, 1992), 118-36 (pp. 118-19)
20. For Adorno's formulation, see Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik (Frankfurt am Main, 1960), 100-1
21. trans. Edmund Jephcott as Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (Chicago, 1992)
22. Fred Everett Maus, 'Music as Narrative', Indiana Theory Review, 12 (1991), 1-34 (p. 14)
23. Robert Samuels, Mahler's Sixth Symphony: A Study in Musical Semiotics (Cambridge, 1995), 155
24. Robert Samuels, 'Music as Text: Mahler, Schumann and Issues in Analysis', Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge, 1994), 152-63 (p. 153)
25. Carolyn Abbate, 'What the Sorcerer Said', Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 30-60 (p. 52)
26. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, 'Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?', trans. Katharine Ellis, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 115 (1990), 240-57 (p. 257)
27. originally published as 'Peut-on parler de narrativité en musique?', Canadian University Music Review: Alternative Musicologies/Les musicologies alternatives, 10 (1990), 68-91. Samuels 'flatly contradict[s] one of Carolyn Abbate's best-known and most productive observations that music "seems not to have a past tense"' by citing Mahler's Fourth Symphony, which Adorno hears 'in the past tense'
28. See Samuels, 'Music as Text', 154
29. The past tense as essential for narrativity has also been questioned by certain literary critics. Prince observes that 'the preterit in a fictional narrative is not primarily an indicator of time', since the 'past tense in which the events are narrated is transposed by the reader into a fictive present' (cited from Mendilow). See Prince, Narratology, 28-9
30. Abbate, 'What the Sorcerer Said', 48
31. and 'Music's Voices', Unsung Voices, 3-29 (p. 29)
32. Lawrence Kramer, '"As if a voice were in them": Music, Narrative, and Deconstruction', Music as Cultural Practice 1800-1900 (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1990), 176-213 (p. 189)
33. Lawrence Kramer, 'Dangerous Liaisons: The Literary Text in Musical Criticism', 19th Century Music, 13 (1989-90), 159-67
34. Nattiez, 'Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?', 244
35. See Maus, 'Music as Narrative', and Leo Treitler, 'Language and the Interpretation of Music', Music and Meaning, ed. Jenefer Robinson (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1997), 23-56 (esp. pp. 45-50)
36. See, for example, Samuels, Mahler's Sixth Symphony, 135
37. but also Hayden White, 'The Value of Narrativity', and Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago, IL, 1988)
38. Abbate, Unsung Voices, xi
39. Lawrence Kramer, 'Musical Narratology: A Theoretical Outline', Classical Music and Post-modern Knowledge (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 98-121 (p. 101)
40. Nattiez, 'Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?', 245
41. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, 'Romantic Music as Post-Kantian Critique: Classicism, Romanticism, and the Concept of Semiotic Universe', On Criticizing Music: Five Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Kingsley Price (Baltimore, MD, 1981), 74-98 (pp. 84-5)
42. For other analyses of the variety of topics present in Mozart's, Beethoven's and Haydn's music, see Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form and Style (New York, 1980)
43. Wye J. Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (Chicago, IL, 1983)
44. and Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 1994). The difference, as I see it, between Mahler's and Classical music's referentiality is that while most topics in Classical music are an intrinsic part of the contemporary vocabulary, and therefore their recognition and interpretation are most often direct and univalent, some of the topics used by Mahler are anachronistic within the prevalent contemporary musical styles, so that their relationship with their context is more complex and thus generates multivalent levels of semantic meanings
45. Carl Dahlnaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, CA, 1989), 256
46. Subotnik, 'Romantic Music as Post-Kantian Critique', 82, 84
47. In what I see as an argument akin to Subotnik's observation of a 'shift' to a 'linguistic ideal of musical meaning', Daniel K. L. Chua traces the origins of the turn of 'music into language' to the end of the sixteenth century in the shift of music from the 'quadrivium to the trivium, that is, from the immutable structure of medieval cosmos to the linguistic relativity of rhetoric, grammar and dialectics'. This, in turn, he states, led the 'Romantics to reverse the process by turning language into music', thus establishing the new ontology of instrumental (absolute) music. It was the 'stylistic relativity inherent in the trivium' and the 'heterogeneous form of discourse' of instrumental music that prompted Friedrich Schlegel's analogy between 'the method of the novel' and 'that of instrumental music'. See Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), 34-5, 68-72
48. This dichotomy originates in the work of the Russian Formalists. For various definitions see, for example, Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (The Hague, 1965)
49. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse
50. Prince, Narratology and A Dictionary of Narratology
51. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY, 1981), esp. Chapter 9, 'Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Literature', 169-87
52. Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction
53. and Bal, Narratology
54. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, 171. An example of events in the 'story' would be: mother kills father; mother is arrested; son commits suicide. It can be argued that composers themselves conceive thematic materials as the basic events from which they build a narrative, as often they sketch those materials and then work out how to present them in sequence
55. and Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik, 87ff
56. Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, ed. Gerald Strang and Leonard Stein (Boston, MA, and London, 1967), 8ff
57. For further discussions of the principle of developing variation, see Walter Frisch, Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1984)
58. and Michael Musgrave's review of the same book in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 38 (1985), 631
59. Schoenberg, Fundamentals, 103
60. Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik, 117, 118
61. For definitions of denotation and connotation in the sense used here see, for example, Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York, 1967), 89-94
62. idem, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1974), 6-11
63. and Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN, 1976), 54-7
64. For other views on semantic signification in music see, for example, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, 'Y a-t-il une diégèse musicale?', Musik und Verstehen, ed. Peter Faltin and Hans-Peter Reinecke (Cologne, 1973), 247-57
65. Monroe C. Beardsley, 'Understanding Music', On Criticizing Music, ed. Price, 55-73
66. and Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs, 23-5. Agawu's concept of 'introversive semiosis' (borrowed from Jacobson) would correspond to my morphological and syntactic (denotative) levels, while his 'extroversive semiosis' would correspond to my semantic (connotative) level
67. Barthes, S/Z, 8
68. See Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley, CA, 1977), 89, 158. Chomsky's concepts of competence/performance coincide with those of langue/parole used by Saussure in his linguistics
69. For definitions and applications of intertextuality, see, for example, Julia Kristeva, Semiotike: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Extraits) (Paris, 1968), 52-5
70. Michael Riffatterre, 'Intertextual Representation: On Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse', Critical Inquiry, 11 (1984), 141-62
71. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, 100-18
72. George Grove, Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies (3rd edn, London, 1898; repr. New York, 1962), 192-3
73. In fact, such associations are not 'iconic' or 'isomorphic', in the sense that the shapes of the music do not correspond somehow to actual objects in nature (the closest Beethoven gets to iconic signs is through the birdcalls and the thunder and lightning imitated later in the symphony). They, too, depend on a process of conventionalization, whose origins might be found in older 'pastoral' music. The most immediate associations, then, are of music with other music; in other words, they are intertextual connotations. Beardsley, following Nelson Goodman, pointed out that music exemplifies properties rather than objects. See Beardsley, 'Understanding Music', 68, and Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN, 1968), 52
74. My understanding of the pastoral topic corresponds closely to that discussed by Hatten in Musical Meaning in Beethoven, 91-111. For definitions of topics, see the references to Agawu, Ratner and Webster, in note 32 above
75. Diether de la Motte, 'Das komplizierte Einfache: Zum ersten Satz der 9. Sinfonie von Gustav Mahler', Musik und Bildung, 3 (1978), 145-51 (pp. 145-6)
76. See also Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik, 201 (trans. Jephcott, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, 155): 'Telling of the past, the wholly epic voice is heard. It begins as if something were to be narrated, yet concealed.'
77. Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik, 85 (Jephcott's translation emended)
78. Prince, Narratology, 149
79. Chatman, Story and Discourse, 19, and, for example, Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, 3
80. 'the symbolic presentation of a sequence of events connected by subject matter and related by time' and 'a text which refers, or seems to refer, to some set of events outside itself (Robert Scholes, 'Afterthoughts', On Narrative, ed. Mitchell, 200-8 (p. 205))
81. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago, IL, and London, 1968), 99
82. Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, IL, and London, 1956), 151
83. See Barthes, 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives', 93-7
84. See Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, NJ, 1974), 542
85. Barthes, 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives', 95
86. Fred Maus seems to make a similar point when he writes: '[Jonathan] Kramer's gestural-time, the order that can be reconstructed from the qualities of musical actions, amounts to ordering in a story, piece-time is ordering in the discourse.' See Maus, 'Music as Narrative', 31
87. He is referring to the terms employed by Jonathan Kramer in his article 'Multiple and Non-Linear Time in Beethoven's Opus 135', Perspectives of New Music, 11 (1973), 122-45
88. Newcomb, 'Narrative Archetypes', 123
89. Hayden White, 'Commentary: Form, Reference, and Ideology in Musical Discourse', Music and Text, ed. Scher, 288-319 (p. 296)
90. repr. as 'Form, Reference, and Ideology in Musical Discourse', Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, MD, and London, 1999), 147-76 (pp. 151-2). The page numbers in subsequent references refer to the first publication
91. For a detailed discussion of the layers of meaning informing this ending, see my 'Is Mahler's Music Autobiographical? A Reappraisal', Revue Mahler Review, 1 (Paris, 1987), 47-63 (pp. 52-3, 60, and Examples 2-4)
92. White, 'The Value of Narrativity', 1
93. White, 'Commentary', 294
94. White, 'Commentary', 293
95. Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology, 64
96. Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago, IL, 1988), 9. For ways of articulating the degree of narrativity, see, for example, Prince: 'a passage where the signs of the narrated [the story] are more numerous than the signs of the narrating [the discourse] should have a higher degree of narrativity than a passage where the reverse is true' (Narrativity, 146)
97. and A Dictionary of Narratology, 76
98. Barthes's ideas appear in 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives', 98-100
99. Barthes, 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives', 98
100. See my 'The Farewell Story of Mahler's Ninth Symphony'
101. Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik, 86: 'Nicht Musik zwar will etwas erzählen, aber der Komponist will Musik machen, wie sonst einer erzählt.'
102. See Herrnstein Smith, 'Narrative Versions', 213-14
103. Julian Johnson, 'The Status of the Subject in Mahler's Ninth Symphony', 19th Century Music, 18 (1994-5), 108-20 (p. 109)
104. Kramer, 'Musical Narratology', 99