Music and Narrative Since 1900: The Hermeneutic Challenge of Contemporary Analysis

This paper takes up the vexing questions around music and narrative since 1900 and argues that rather than become enmeshed in the ontological status of music as narrative, we should consider what it means to do a narrative analysis of music. In order to illustrate such an approach, the paper begins with a classic distinction in narrative theory between discourse and story, where discourse is the way that a narrator puts together a tale, and story is the tale itself. Discourse lends music analysis a number of metaphors, among are agency, temporality, plot, and the narrating voice. The paper takes each of these metaphors in turn, using four pieces to elucidate the analytical use of each metaphor: Debussy’s “La flûte de Pan” (1898), Schoenberg’s Little Piece, Op. 19 no. 2 (1911), Arlen and Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Lutoslawski’s Jeux vénitiens (1961).

Agency involves hearing music unfold with an inner urgency or an act of will rather than a mechanistic process. Through an analysis of the melody in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the paper shows how music can seek a goal even after suffering a number of setbacks. In this famous melody, the first interval sets up an upper limit, which most of the rest of the song seeks to recapture. The way in which the melody takes different routes to regain that upper pitch shows us that the musical agent is persistent, like Dorothy in the movie. Through an analysis of Schoenberg’s Little Piece, the paper argues that harmony and voice leading are not necessary for a concept of agency in music. In this piece, the repeated thirds, the rolled chords, and the short melodies all act as musical agents. If we restrain ourselves from collecting these agents into a controlling consciousness, we gain a glimpse of subjectivity that is multiple and disperse instead of singular and focused.

Temporality is time as signified rather than time as measured by the ticking clock or the pulsing meter. Music may advance through time without pause, but its temporality includes more than the present tense. The paper illustrates musical temporality in Debussy’s “La La flûte de Pan,” which begins with an antiquated past, moves to a narrative past (as the singer recounts her first kiss) and on to an anticipatory present before arriving at an ecstatic suspension of time. From this analysis, the paper moves to a consideration of the temporality in Lutoslawski’s Jeux vénitiens, which moves back and forth between a chaotic surface and a serene one. The alternations between these two kinds of material are abrupt, suggesting a cinematic temporality that cuts abruptly between scenes.

Plot is the logical sequence of events that make a satisfying whole. The paper argues that while harmony and form may stand in for plot, a musical plot can arise even without a harmonic trajectory. In Schoenberg’s Little Piece, for example, the listener can interpret the first melodic gesture as interrupting the steady thirds that start the music on its way. In addition, a combination of diminished-seventh chords sounds like a crisis in the piece, which is answered by the cryptic chord that concludes the work. Notions like crisis, interaction, transformation, and reaction are plot objects that can be present with or without harmony and form. In the case of Lutoslawski’s Jeux vénitiens, the cinematic logic that moves from section to section suggests that the music acts like a hidden camera moving from scene to scene and pulling together a plot from the threads of a non-linear story.

Finally, the narrator in music is signified by disjunctions, and reductions of musical forces (as in the narrations in Wagner’s Ring Cycle). Ironically, a musical narrator is often present at just the moment when a harmonic and formal logic appear to be missing. In Lutoslawski’s Jeux vénitiens, percussive jabs mark the moments when the music moves from one scene to another. Thus the percussion acts like a narrator who decides which scenes we will see at what times. A performer can also act as a narrator, which the paper shows by considering Keith Jarrett’s performance of “Over the Rainbow,” filmed at a 1984 concert in Tokyo. In this performance, Jarrett starts tentatively, as if he is trying to remember the song (the story) that he has to tell. The paper argues that Jarrett narrates “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as an act of remembering the past.

Before moving to the problem of musical story, the paper summarizes the issues around musical discourse. These include the idea that discourse lends us metaphors of agency, temporality, plot, and a narrator; that these metaphors may use tonality as a signifier but tonality is not necessary as a signifier; that discourse does not lead directly to musical story; and that telling a musical story is a hermeneutic act.

The paper concludes by creating a story around Lutoslawski’s Jeux vénitiens. That story involves a hermeneutic process, which includes a consideration of the cultural and historical issues at play during the time that Lutoslawski wrote the piece. The analysis argues that the first section of Jeux vénitiens signifies chaos, while the second section signifies order. One problem with this opposition is that the order of the second section includes anxious tremolos that mar the otherwise serene surface of the music. Thus chaos is already a part of order in the first place. That is, the music cannot keep chaos out of the frame of order. The analysis suggests that the music has made a kind of discovery in which order and chaos are always intermixed. The happy thoughts of the Enlightenment are far behind us. And this is a story that only music after 1900 can tell. The conclusion of the paper argues that music is one of the witnesses to history and culture, and that analysts should not be afraid to tell the stories that music suggests to us.