Musical Narratology - An Outline: Ałgorzata Awłowska
Musical Narratology - An Outline: Ałgorzata Awłowska
Musical Narratology - An Outline: Ałgorzata Awłowska
Explosion
Musical narratology is currently undergoing a phase of dynamic
development. It is part of the expansion of narratology that we have
observed within the last few years in the interdisciplinary sphere that has
resulted, among other things, in the creation of the European
Narratological Network and the organization of its conferences. As Anna
ebkowska, a Polish author, wrote in 2006: the ubiquity of narrative has
become fact (181). Mrta Grabcz, a musicologist who has worked on
musical narratology since the early 1990s, observed in 2008:
Today () I find myself confronted with the problem or rather exceptional
opportunity that narrative studies encounters: namely an e x pl os io n , a
lightning renaissance of narrative theory and analysis. (19, my emphasis);
topics
modalities
intonations
Musical signifi ?
Musical gestures, modalities, topics etc. refer, after all, to meaning which is
not purely musical. It is rather abstract meaning which, however,
indicates some semantic fields. Marie-Laure Ryan recalls an anecdote
about the composer Aaron Copeland, who was reportedly once asked:
Does music have meaning? Absolutely, he replied. Can it be put into
words?; Absolutely not (2004: 267). If we agree that semantization can
be a phenomenon of various degrees and does not have to represent
specific objects which have names, faces and shapes, but just general
phenomena which can but do not have to undergo specification or
elaboration in the mind of the listener, we will have to admit that music
can tell a story.
Semantics in music is like an algebraic formula, giving possibilities for
the substitution of particular elements with more or less strictly specified
designators. The ones specified will be a result of the cognitive process of
the music perceiver, in the form of a construction of images. But the most
general ones are intersubjectively verifiable and encoded and present in
the very music, whether based on natural or cultural musical signs. As
Werner Wolf argues:
Narrativity is () considered to be a gradable quality whose constituents ()
and characteristic features can be best illustrated with verbal stories (be they
factual or fictional) as prototypical narratives. But narrativity is, of course, by no
means restricted to such stories. (2008: 324)
See footnote 5.
Eero Tarasti adapted the Greimasian concept of modality to the analysis of musical
discourse in the interpretation of Frdric Chopins Ballade in G minor, Op. 23 (Tarasti
1995). The general translations of respective modalities into music are quoted after
Tarasti above in the section Narratological perspective in music analysis. The intensity of
each modality in the course of the work is indicated as follows: ++ means excessive, +
sufficient, 0 neutral, - insufficient, and -- deficient.
11
These original words by Tarasti refer to the opening of Bedrich Smetanas Ma vlast.
Almn takes over the concept of transvaluation from James Jakb Liszkas The Semiotic of
Myth: A Critical Study of the Symbol, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Quoting
Liszka, Almn agrees that transvaluation is a rule-like semiosis which revaluates the
perceived, imagined, or conceived markedness and rank relations of a referent as delimited
by the rank and markedness relations of the system of its signs and the teology of the sign
user (Almn 2008).
A quoi bon ces accords assens dans les dernires mesures ? Cest contraire au sens du
drame, autant quinesthtique ; a letter from 22 January 1871, quoted after Sophie
man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds
the key to their progress (in Rieger 2009).
13
Gerald Prince writes about the degrees of narrativity: The degree of narrativity of a given
narrative depends partly on the extent to which that narrative fulfills a receivers desire by
representing oriented temporal wholeness (), involving a conflict, consisting of discrete,
specific, and positive situations and events, and meaningful in terms of a human(ized)
project and world () (2003: 65). Vera Micznik in her article (2001) claims that in music
we also deal with different degrees of narrativity; she compares the first movement of the
Pastoral Symphony by Beethoven with the first movement of the Ninth Symphony of
Mahler to draw the conclusion that Mahlers piece is more narrative than Beethovens.
Christian Metz on Genettes theory, quoted after: Micznik 2001: 194.
List of references
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Agawu, Victor Kofi
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Almn, Byron
2003 Narrative Archetypes: a Critique, Theory, and Method of
Narrative Analysis, Journal of Music Theory 47(1), 1-39.
2008 A Theory of Musical Narrative, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press.
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