Almén - A theory of musical narrative

A Theory of Musical Narrative

MUSICAL MEANING AND INTERPRETATION

Robert S. Hatten, editor

Approaches to Meaning in Music

Byron Almn and Edward Pearsall

Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera

Naomi Andr

Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy

William Echard

Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert

Robert S. Hatten

Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation

Robert S. Hatten

Intertextuality in Western Art Music

Michael L. Klein

Is Language a Music? Writings on Musical Form and Signification

David Lidov

Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony

Melanie Lowe

The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral

Raymond Monelle

Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber

Jairo Moreno

Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Practice of Embodied Interpretation

Alexandra Pierce

Expressive Forms in Brahmss Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet

Peter H. Smith

Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethovens Late Style

Michael Spitzer

Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for La pellegrina

Nina Treadwell

Debussys Late Style: The Compositions of the Great War

Marianne Wheeldon

BYRON ALMN

A Theory of Musical Narrative

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bloomington & Indianapolis

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

First paperback edition 2017

2008 by Byron Almn

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:

Almn, Byron, [date].

A theory of musical narrative / Byron Almn.

p. cm. (Musical meaning and interpretation)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-35238-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. MusicPhilosophy and aesthetics. 2. Musical analysis 3. MusicSemiotics. 4. Music and literature. 5. Music theory. I. Title.

ML3800.A46 2008

581dc22

ISBN 978-0-253-03009-2 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-253-03028-3 (eb)

1 2 3 4 522 21 20 19 18 17

For

Phil Abalan

A. DeWayne Wee

J. Peter Burkholder

Robert S. Hatten

and, as always,

For Sarah

Contents

Preface

The inspiration for this project dates back to 1992, to the preliminary research period of my dissertation Narrative Archetypes in Music: A Semiotic Approach (1996), and to my near-simultaneous discovery of three books from disparate fields: Northrop Fryes Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Eero Tarastis A Theory of Musical Semiotics (1994), and James Jakb Liszkas The Semiotic of Myth (1989).

Fryes book, an acknowledged masterpiece, is a remarkable taxonomic rewriting of the principles of literary criticism; its most influential constituent essay, Archetypal Criticism, introduces his four mythoiromance, tragedy, irony, and comedythat represent fundamental, pregeneric patterns of narrative motion. This formulation has influenced countless scholars in many fields, most notably Hayden White, who has observed (1973) the tendency of historians to consciously and unconsciously emplot historical events according to temporal narrative schema. I had been acquainted with these mythoi since high school, but my first reading of the essay in 1992 convinced me that they are eminently applicable to music.

Tarastis book was very nearly my first introduction to the semiotic discipline. Although I was not then familiar with Charles S. Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, or Algirdas Julien Greimas, several aspects of Tarastis writing immediately appealed to me. First, it is systematic and thorough (although his writing style is quite expansive), but these qualities never unseat his sensitive musical insight. Second, his application of the notion of modality to music to account for the encoding of human values into musical discourse seemed to offer a way out of the arbitrary assignment of expressive characteristics to music. Third, his willingness to tackle a large conceptual terrain and a broad representation of musical literature was refreshingly ambitious and welcome. With respect to my own development, Tarasti was an important model for bringing together methodological rigor, solid musical intuition, and an eclectic breadth of interests. My choice of title for this book thus represents an acknowledgment of the debt I owe to his example.

Fryes deductive taxonomic system and Tarastis inductive analytical methodology embody balancing impulses that might work effectively together. The means to achieve this balance in the current volume is accomplished by The Semiotic of Myth. It does for the field of mythology what I am attempting to do for music: locate an analytically rigorous approach to narrative within a socially and psychologically methodological frameand it specifically invokes Fryes mythoi as its upper-level taxonomic principle.

Music, like mythology, is a temporal phenomenon, and both are amenable to narrative organization. Liszkas concept of narrative as transvaluationthe change in markedness and rank within a cultural hierarchy over timeis crucial for the understanding of musical narrative, not only because it sidesteps lengthy detours into literary narrative theory, but because it accounts for the social and psychological function of narrative: revealing the implication of the necessary conflict between the violence imposed by hierarchy and the violence required to counter it (Liszka 1989: 133). This factor informs critiques of musical discourse that reinforce the status quo (Adorno, McClary) and transformative approaches that implicate music as a vehicle of change and challenge (Schoenberg). It also allows the analyst to see music as a mirror of psychic processes of development and integration.

Understanding narrative as transvaluation also bridges the rhetorical gap between context-centered and structure-centered approaches to music. I suggest in this volume that it is both possible and desirable to balance careful attention to musical details with an attunement to musics location within a social and significatory network. Further, the recognitionfrom Fryethat there are multiple and functionally equivalent realizations of narrative conflict prevents narrative analysis from becoming a force either for reactionary repression or for the relativistic erosion of all stable value systems.

In the years since I encountered these works and began developing my approach, I have encountered other studies that have effectively investigated issues of expression in combination with analytical rigor and cultural insight. In particular, the research undertaken by Robert S. Hatten and Vera Micznik has proved very influential to me. To Hattens work I owe my integration of topic into the multi-leveled signifying network of musical narrative. In Miczniks narrative writings I found an effective methodology, entirely different in flavor from that of Tarasti, that supported the analytical eclecticism of this volume.