A Theory of Musical Narrative
168 pages
English

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168 pages
English

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Description

A compelling new consideration of musical narrative


Byron Almén proposes an original synthesis of approaches to musical narrative from literary criticism, semiotics, historiography, musicology, and music theory, resulting in a significant critical reorientation of the field. This volume includes an extensive survey of traditional approaches to musical narrative illustrated by a wide variety of musical examples that highlight the range and applicability of the theoretical apparatus. Almén provides a careful delineation of the essential elements and preconditions of musical narrative organization, an eclectic analytical model applicable to a wide range of musical styles and repertoires, a classification scheme of narrative types and subtypes reflecting conceptually distinct narrative strategies, a wide array of interpretive categories, and a sensitivity to the dependence of narrative interpretation on the cultural milieu of the work, its various audiences, and the analyst. A Theory of Musical Narrative provides both an excellent introduction to an increasingly important conceptual domain and a complex reassessment of its possibilities and characteristics.


Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part 1. A Theory of Musical Narrative
1. An Introduction to Narrative Analysis: Chopin's Prelude in G Major, Op. 28, No. 3
2. Perspectives and Critiques
3. A Theory of Musical Narrative: Conceptual Considerations
4. A Theory of Musical Narrative: Analytical Considerations
5. Narrative and Topic
Part 2. Archetypal Narratives and Phases
6. Romance Narratives and Micznik's Degrees of Narrativity
7. Tragic Narratives: An Extended Analysis of Schubert, Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960, First Movement
8. Ironic Narratives: Subtypes and Phases
9. Comic Narratives and Discursive Strategies
10. Summary and Conclusion

Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Informations

Publié par
Date de parution 04 septembre 2017
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9780253030283
Langue English
Poids de l'ouvrage 1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Theory of Musical Narrative
M USICAL M EANING AND I NTERPRETATION
Robert S. Hatten, editor
Approaches to Meaning in Music
Byron Alm n 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 Brahms s Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet
Peter H. Smith
Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven s Late Style
Michael Spitzer
Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for La pellegrina
Nina Treadwell
Debussy s Late Style: The Compositions of the Great War
Marianne Wheeldon
BYRON ALM N
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 Alm n
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 Sciences-Permanence 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:
Alm n, Byron, [date].
A theory of musical narrative / Byron Alm n.
p. cm. - (Musical meaning and interpretation)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35238-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Music-Philosophy and aesthetics. 2. Musical analysis 3. Music-Semiotics. 4. Music and literature. 5. Music theory. I. Title.
ML3800.A46 2008
581-dc22
ISBN 978-0-253-03009-2 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-03028-3 (eb)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
For
Phil Abalan
A. DeWayne Wee
J. Peter Burkholder
Robert S. Hatten
and, as always,
For Sarah
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART ONE: A THEORY OF MUSICAL NARRATIVE
1. An Introduction to Narrative Analysis: Chopin s Prelude in G Major, Op. 28, No. 3
2. Perspectives and Critiques
3. A Theory of Musical Narrative: Conceptual Considerations
4. A Theory of Musical Narrative: Analytical Considerations
5. Narrative and Topic
PART TWO: ARCHETYPAL NARRATIVES AND PHASES
6. Romance Narratives and Micznik s Degrees of Narrativity
7. Tragic Narratives: An Extended Analysis of Schubert, Piano Sonata in B Major, D. 960, First Movement
8. Ironic Narratives: Subtypes and Phases
9. Comic Narratives and Discursive Strategies
10. Summary and Conclusion
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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 Frye s Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Eero Tarasti s A Theory of Musical Semiotics (1994), and James Jak b Liszka s The Semiotic of Myth (1989).
Frye s 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 mythoi -romance, tragedy, irony, and comedy-that 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.
Tarasti s 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 Tarasti s 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.
Frye s deductive taxonomic system and Tarasti s 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 frame-and it specifically invokes Frye s mythoi as its upper-level taxonomic principle.
Music, like mythology, is a temporal phenomenon, and both are amenable to narrative organization. Liszka s concept of narrative as transvaluation -the change in markedness and rank within a cultural hierarchy over time-is 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 music s location within a social and significatory network. Further, the recognition-from Frye-that 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 Hatten s work I owe my integration of topic into the multi-leveled signifying network of musical narrative. In Micznik s narrative writings I found an effective methodology, entirely different in flavor from that of Tarasti, that supported the analytical eclecticism of this volume.
I have taken care to make the following theory of musical narrative as widely applicable as possible without sacrificing its necessary conceptual weight. One should not come away from this volume with a method for analyzing musical narrative. Instead, a theoretical basis for understanding the implications of narrative analysis is given, along with a range of analytical approaches that are methodologically suggestive rather than prescriptive. In that I am both engaging with the primary texts of musical narrative theory and presenting a flexible theoretical apparatus for investigating narrative, this book can serve as a graduatelevel text on musical narrative that does not unduly limit the student s latitude to move beyond the provided examples.
With respect to the field of music narrative theory, I have also been influenced by Carolyn Abbate, Edward T. Cone, Nicholas Cook, M rta Grab cz, Marion Guck, Peter Kivy, Michael Klein, Lawrence Kramer, Fred E. Maus, Susan McClary, Patrick McCreless, Raymond Monelle, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Anthony Newcomb, Jann Pasler, and many others. I hope that I have done justice to their ideas and to the spirit of their work in this volume.
A Theory of Musical Narrative casts a wide analytical net: the music analyzed in this volume features works from the early eighteenth century to the 1960s. My primary intent is to illustrate the breadth of focus of musical narrative as an analytical enterprise, and I hope that I will be forgiven for any overreaching that may result in the interests of promoting an eclecticism of approach.
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