Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

Narratology, narrativity.

Terms referring respectively to the study and intrinsic quality of narrative; recently, and especially from the 1980s on, these concepts have been applied to musical studies in various ways.

Narratology, the study of narrative, is associated historically with east European formalism and European structuralism, intellectual movements that borrowed tools from social science, especially linguistics, for the study of many aspects of culture. Formalists and structuralists studied different kinds of story-telling such as myth and literary fiction in order to discover recurring patterns, much as grammarians study a language to discover the principles of its well-formed utterances. (Barthes, Chatman, Genette, Greimas, Propp and Todorov provide characteristic examples of these approaches; classic surveys include Ehrlich and Culler.) Narrativity is the quality of some artefact that makes it an example of narrative or, in some usages, a quality that creates a resemblance to narrative.

Formalist and structuralist work emphasized that story-telling follows norms of which story-tellers and audiences may not be conscious, just as speakers of a language unconsciously follow grammatical norms. These norms of story-telling constitute a layer of intervention, perhaps of arbitrary or mutable convention, that shapes individual narrative representations. When a story seems like an accurate account of the world, or a satisfying fiction, this is partly because it meets the appropriate norms of story-telling; some of these may be general constraints on narrative, others may be specific to certain times and places. Thus, as writers in formalist and structuralist traditions maintained, it can be important to recognize and perhaps question the narrative norms that shape historical or biographical story-telling, and to discern the recurring patterns that make fictional works seem whole.

This general awareness of story-telling as a patterned activity has had broad implications for the epistemology of historical knowledge (White), the philosophy of temporality (Ricoeur) and the notion of philosophical inquiry (Rée). The tradition of narratology orientated to social science is, of course, not the only interpretive approach to narrative literature or other forms of narrative, but it has had a strong influence on certain musicologists. Some (Treitler, DeVeaux, Pederson) have identified narrative conceptions that shape histories of music; heightened consciousness of these narrative devices has led them to challenge familiar accounts of music history. Others have studied relations between types of narrative genre and related compositions (Schrade on tragedy, Tarasti on myth, 1978). Within a texted musical genre one might identify a plot pattern that invites interpretation, as when Clément recognizes the pattern of leading female operatic characters dying; or one might study the role of moments of story-telling within operatic drama (Abbate, Hudson).

Beginning in the late 20th century, music theory and criticism often explored the possibility of narrativity in non-texted, non-programmatic music from European concert traditions. These studies lie at the intersection of many disciplines, not just narratology and music criticism, but historical interpretation, technical music theory, philosophical study of expression and representation, and semiotics. The attractive but problematic conception that shapes much recent work is that an individual composition – whether a single movement or a multi-movement work – sometimes resembles, or simply is, a narrative, and that recognition of this is important for critical interpretation. Some studies of this type have drawn directly on existing theories of narrative, applying them to musical instances (McCreless, Tarasti, 1994). Others have worked from within existing traditions of music criticism, moving from critical issues about individual compositions to comparisons with narrative. Often the interpretation of musical narrativity has been offered as an alternative to purely technical description and as a key to musical meaning (as in Guck and, by strong implication, Randall).

One recurring issue in such discussions of narrative and music concerns the identification of agents or actors. Ordinary story-telling normally concerns characters, and musicologists who explore analogies to narrative often identify fictional agents such as themes or instruments; Cone's discussion (1974) of persona and agent is an influential model. Maus argues that agency is often indeterminate in instrumental music, but some genres, such as the concerto or chamber music, seem to depend for their effects on the interplay of distinct characters. Kerman (1992, 1999) has given sustained interpretation to the dramatic exchanges in concertos. McClary (1991) argues that sonata-form compositions typically imply masculine and feminine antagonists through their main themes.

Another recurring issue concerns plot, a central concern of classic narratological work. Musicologists have proposed various plot archetypes for instrumental music, sometimes very broadly (as in Todorov's sequence of equilibrium–disequilibrium–equilibrium), sometimes more specifically. McClary's claim about the subordination of feminine themes to masculine ones is an example of a plot archetype, drawing on de Lauretis's feminist narratology; another example is Newcomb's argument that a number of 19th-century multi-movement pieces follow the archetype of suffering leading to triumph or redemption (as in Beethoven's symphonies nos.5 and 9).

Analogies between music and narrative, or stronger claims that instrumental music can be narrative, raise issues about the relevant description of the events of a piece. Descriptions offered in support of a narrative analogy may remain close to ordinary technical analysis, but often they become anthropomorphic and sometimes, as in Newcomb's account of Mahler's Symphony no.9, musical events may be translated into a detailed, almost novelistic story about an individual protagonist. A writer may abandon conventional musical terms altogether, moving into a purely literary style (Randall). Anthropomorphic descriptions raise complex questions: Are they metaphorical, or should they be understood in terms of some theory of imagination or fiction? What are the constraints on such descriptions, and how do such descriptions contribute to knowledge about music? These questions are not trivial; the answers affect the status of scholarly claims about music and narrative.

Another kind of description, the historically based identification of ‘topics’ deriving from Ratner's work, seems closely related to the issues of music and narrative, especially when critics write about the succession of topics within pieces (Agawu, Allenbrook, Hatten). If topical description is important, the succession of topics in a piece must affect the narrative interpretation of that piece.

Several writers have challenged the assertion that instrumental music can be narrative. Kivy argues that instrumental music cannot narrate a story but can, at most, illustrate a story (as do pictures that accompany a prose narrative). Various writers have pointed out features that are central to narrative but seem to be absent from most instrumental music: for instance, the distinction between subject and predicate (Nattiez), the capacity for various kinds of reflexive self-commentary (Kramer, 1990), the existence of a past tense and the resulting space between story and story-telling (Abbate). Such failures of analogy have led Kerman, Maus, Newcomb and others to suggest that instrumental music may often be closer to drama than to prose narrative, offering enactments of stories rather than story-telling in the most literal sense. This links narrative interpretation of music to the traditional conception of sonata form and Classical style as ‘dramatic’ (Tovey, Rosen).

The taxonomic and rule-orientated qualities of formalism and structuralism already seemed dated to many literary and cultural scholars by the 1980s, and the subsequent promotion of narratology by musicologists may have been untimely. The same aspects of classic narratology that suggest an affinity with music theory and analysis may also, in applications to literary and musical examples, invite simplification and reduction. On the other hand, the deconstructive habit of identifying gaps and discontinuities in interpreting narrative, exemplified by some writings of Abbate and Kramer, has also lost some of its allure in recent years.

Contemporary interpretation of culture often emphasizes historical and social context, and casts suspicion on approaches that adopt the traditional self-limitations of textual analysis. From this perspective, music criticism based on narrative analogies may share with the arguments against those analogies a dubious attachment to the critical tradition of commentary on isolated musical works. The exploration of instrumental music as narrative remains a tantalizing, confusing, problematic area of inquiry.

See also Criticism, §I.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A General studies. B General music studies. C Studies on individual composers.

a: general studies

V. Propp: Morfologya Skazki (Leningrad, 1928; Eng. trans., 1958, as Morphology of the Folktale, 2/1968)

V. Erlich: Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (The Hague, 1955; 2/1965/R)

R. Barthes: S/Z (Paris, 1970; Eng. trans., 1974/R)

T. Todorov: Poétique de la prose (Paris, 1971; Eng. trans., 1977)

H.V. White: Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973/R)

J. Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London and Ithaca, NY, 1975)

S. Chatman: Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY, 1978)

A.J. Greimas: Du sens: essais sémantiques (Paris, 1979–83; Eng. trans., 1987)

G. Genette: Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY, 1980); Fr. orig. in Fugues III (Paris, 1972)

P. Ricoeur: Temps et récit (Paris, 1983–5; Eng. trans., 1984–9)

T. de Lauretis: Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, IN, 1984)

J. Rée: Philosophical Tales: an Essay on Philosophy and Literature (London, 1987)

b: general music studies

D.F. Tovey: Essays in Musical Analysis, iii: Concertos (London, 1936/R)

D.F. Tovey: ‘Sonata Forms’, Musical Articles from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ed. H.J. Foss (London, 1944/R)

L. Schrade: Tragedy in the Art of Music (Cambridge, MA, 1964)

E.T. Cone: The Composer's Voice (Berkeley, 1974)

J.K. Randall: ‘How Music Goes’, PNM, xiv/2–xv/1 (1976), 424–516

C. Clément: L’opéra, ou, La défaite des femmes (Paris, 1979; Eng. trans., 1988)

L.G. Ratner: Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York and London, 1980)

P. Kivy: ‘Music as Narration’, Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation (Princeton, NJ, 1984/R)

F.E. Maus: ‘Music as Drama’, Music Theory Spectrum, x (1988), 56–73

P. McCreless: ‘Roland Barthes's S/Z from a Musical Point of View’, In Theory Only, x/7 (1988), 1–29

L. Treitler: Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1989)

L. Kramer: ‘“As if a Voice Were in Them”: Music, Narrative, and Deconstruction’, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley, 1990)

J.-J. Nattiez: ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?’ JRMA, cxv (1990), 240–57

Indiana Theory Review, xii (1991) [narrative isssue; incl. F.E. Maus: ‘Music as Narrative’, 1–34]

C. Abbate: Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1991)

V.K. Agawu: Playing with Signs: a Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, NJ, 1991)

S. DeVeaux: ‘Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography’, Black American Literature Forum, xxv (1991), 525–60

L. Kramer: ‘Musical Narratology: a Theoretical Outline’, Indiana Theory Review, xii (1991), 141–62; repr. in Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, 1995)

S. McClary: Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991)

K. Berger: ‘Narrative and Lyric: Fundamental Poetic Forms of Composition’, Musical Humanism and its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Claude V. Palisca, ed. N.K. Baker and B.R. Hanning (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992), 451–70

G. Karl: Music as Plot: a Study in Cyclic Forms (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1993)

M.A. Guck: ‘Rehabilitating the Incorrigible’, Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. A. Pople (Cambridge, 1994), 57–73

E. Tarasti: A Theory of Musical Semiotics (Bloomington, IN, 1994)

G. Karl: ‘Structuralism and Musical Plot’, Music Theory Spectrum, xix (1997), 13–34

F.E. Maus: ‘Narrative, Drama, and Emotion in Instrumental Music’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, lv (1997), 293–303

S.P. Keefe: ‘Koch's Commentary on the Late Eighteenth-Century Concerto: Dialogue, Drama, and Solo/Orchestra Relations’, ML, lxxix (1998), 368–85

J. Kerman: Concerto Conversations (Cambridge, MA, 1999)

c: studies on individual composers

C. Rosen: The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York, 1971/R, enlarged 2/1997)

E.T. Cone: ‘Three Ways of Reading a Detective Story – or a Brahms Intermezzo’, Georgia Review, xxxi (1977), 554–74; repr. in Music: A View from Delft, ed. R.P. Morgan (Chicago, 1989), 77–93

E. Tarasti: Myth and Music: a Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music, especially that of Wagner, Sibelius and Stravinsky (Helsinki, 1978; The Hague, 1979)

E.T. Cone: ‘Schubert's Promissory Note: an Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics’, 19CM, v (1981–2), 233–41

J. Webster: ‘Brahms's Tragic Overture: the Form of Tragedy’, Brahms: Biographical, Documentary, and Analytical Studies, ed. R. Pascall (Cambridge, 1983), 99–124

A. Newcomb: ‘Once More Between Absolute and Program Music: Schumann's Second Symphony’, 19CM, vii (1983–4), 233–50 [Kerman Festschrift]

E.T. Cone: ‘Beethoven's Orpheus – or Jander's?’, 19CM, viii (1984–5), 283–6

O. Jander: ‘Beethoven's “Orpheus in Hades”: the Andante con moto of the Fourth Piano Concerto’, ibid., 195–212

S. McClary: ‘A Musical Dialectic from the Enlightenment: Mozart's Piano Concerto in G. Major, K. 453, Movement 2’, Cultural Critique, iv (1986), 129–69

A. Newcomb: ‘Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies’, 19CM, xi, (1987–8), 164–74

O. Jander: ‘The “Kreutzer” Sonata as Dialogue’, EMc, xvi (1988), 34–49

S.F. Pederson: ‘On the Task of the Music Historian: the Myth of the Symphony after Beethoven’, Repercussions, ii/2 (1988), 5–30

J. Webster: Haydn's ‘Farewell’ Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition Cyclic Integration in his Instrumental Music (Cambridge, 1991)

W.J. Allenbrook: ‘Two Threads through the Labyrinth: Topic and Process in the First Movements of K. 332 and K. 333’, Convention in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Music: Essays in Honor of Leonard J. Ratner, ed. W.J. Allenbrook, J.M. Levy and W.P. Mahrt (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992), 125–72

J. Kerman: ‘Representing a Relationship: Notes on a Beethoven Converto’, Representations, no.39 (1992), 80–101

A. Newcomb: ‘Narrative Archetypes and Mahler's Ninth Symphony’, Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. S. Scher (Cambridge, 1992), 118–36

J. Parakilas: Ballads without Words: Chopin and the Tradition of the Instrumental Ballade (Portland, OR, 1992)

E. Hudson: Narrative in Verdi: Perspectives on his Musical Dramaturgy (diss., Cornell U., 1993)

S. McClary: ‘Narrative Agendas in “Absolute” Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms's Third Symphony’, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. R. Solie (Berkeley, 1993), 326–44

R.S. Hatten: Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington, IN, 1994)

A. Newcomb: ‘The Polonaise-Fantasy and Issues of Musical Narrative’, Chopin Studies II, ed. J. Rink and J. Sampson (Cambridge, 1994), 84–101

G. Karl and J. Robinson: ‘Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony and the Musical Expression of Cognitively Complex Emotions’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, liii (1995), 401–15

A. Newcomb: ‘Action and Agency in Mahler's Ninth Symphony, Second Movement’, Music & Meaning, ed. J. Robinson (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 131-53

FRED EVERETT MAUS