Music as Narrative and Music as Drama

JERROLD LEVINSON

Abstract: In this paper I address the issue of narrativity in music. The central
question is the extent to which pure instrumental music in the classical tradition can
or should be understood as narrative, that is, as narrating a story of some kind. I am
interested in the varying potential and aptness for narrative construal of different sorts of
instrumental music, and in what the content of such narratives might plausibly be
thought to be. But ultimately I explore, at greater length, an alternative way of
construing musical process, namely, as dramatic rather than narrative in nature, follow-
ing the lead of two musicologists, Anthony Newcomb and Fred Maus. After a
comparison of the respective merits of narrative and dramatic construals of music, the
paper concludes with an illustrative reading, in dramatic mode, of part of the opening
movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 845.

1. Introduction

To what extent can instrumental music be viewed as narrative in character, or

understood to involve some sort of narrative? That is the central question of this
paper, but a number of subsidiary questions will also guide my reflections. I will be
interested in the varying potential for narrative construal of different forms of
music, some of which may invite, and some of which may resist, such construal.
I will be interested in what musical narrative, when present, might be a narrative
of. I will be interested in whether musical narratives can possess certain of the
features of standard narratives, such as literary or cinematic ones. But I will finally
also explore, at some length, the appeal of an alternate construal of music: as
dramatic, rather than narrative, in nature.
It is salutary to ask ourselves, at the outset of an inquiry like this, exactly how
often pure instrumental music impresses itself upon us as needing to be construed
narratively in order to be understood? The answer, it seems to me, is not very
often. This is, of course, not to deny that in appreciating such music we are made
to focus on sequence and progression, from note to note, phrase to phrase, and
section to section. For that is what following music by ear largely consists in. But it is
a large step from that to the claim that music is, in its sequence and progression,
narrating a story of some kind as it unfolds.
Still, the idea that instrumental music, and especially the extended musical essays
of composers of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, might be
understood as narratives is a staple of humanist music criticism, that exemplified by

Address for correspondence: Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College

Park, MD 20742, USA.
Email: jl32@umail.umd.edu

Mind & Language, Vol. 19 No. 4 September 2004, pp. 428–441.

# Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 Music as Narrative and Music as Drama 429

Donald Tovey, George Bernard Shaw, Leonard Bernstein, Antony Hopkins,

Charles Rosen, Andrew Porter, Alex Ross and others. It is, after all, not surprising
that music, as an intentionally arranged, temporally extended sequence of sounds,
one that often displays a character of utterance, is readily thought of as recounting
something or other, and likely something that is itself temporally extended, such as
a sequence of actions, events, or mental states.

2. The Concept of Narrative

How should narrative be characterized? For our purposes, the more simply the
better. One recent writer suggests that ‘a genuine narrative requires the representa-
tion of a minimum of two events and some indication of the ordering in time of
the events depicted’.1 If so, then there are three crucial elements to narrative:
representation, events, and temporal relations. Another recent writer has proposed
that a narrative must, in addition, indicate causal relations obtaining among
represented events: ‘the basis of the narrative connection is that earlier events
and/or states of affairs are at least causally necessary conditions, or contributions
thereto, for the occurrence of later events in the relevant stories’.2
Applying this to music, then, if music is to be narrative: a) it must represent; b) it
must represent events or states of affairs; and c) it must represent temporal and/or
causal relations among those events or states of affairs. Accepting these as the minimal
features of narrative, the task would then be to assess whether any pure instrumental
music—that is, music without program or text—in fact displays them. The prospects
do not seem bright. The third condition, in particular, seems especially hard to meet,
as it looks as if it would require the sort of temporal and singular referential devices
that language, but not music, possesses. Yet that is where the distinctive feature of
narration, as opposed to non-narrative representation, would seem to lie.3

3. Objects and Contents of Musical Narrative

If musical narratives narrate events, a question arises immediately as to whether those

events are musical or non-musical ones. In other words, one possibility is that music
somehow tells a tale of musical events, such as the inversion of a motive, or the arrival
of a cadence, or a modulation from B-flat to E-flat. Another is that music somehow
tells a tale of non-musical events. Presumably the narratives of interest in music are of

1
George Wilson, 2003, p. 393.
2
Noël Carroll, 2001, p. 133.
3
An alternate tack would be to locate the specificity of narrative representation in there being a
discernible narrator internal to the representation, who tells or recounts the events and relations in
question. But since a number of philosophers have argued for the possibility of ‘narratorless
narratives’ (Walton, 1990; Currie, 1990; Wilson, 1997), it is not a tack to be taken lightly.
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430 J. Levinson

the second kind, for those of the first kind, to the extent they could be made out,
would seem redundant. Since the sequence of musical events is directly present and
immediately heard, what would be the point of its being narrated as well?
In order to locate more plausible objects of musical narration, it will be helpful to
offer a brief sketch of the musical apprehension of the ordinary, though musically
sensitive and practiced, listener, at least as other than a strict formalist would conceive
it. The experience of apprehension can be seen as comprising different stages or
levels, though it is a mistake to suppose that these are either entirely separable or
clearly sequential. In any case, first there is the level at which the most elemental
properties of tones, such as pitches, durations, and timbres, are perceived. Then,
following immediately upon that, is the level at which rhythms, motives, phrases,
melodies and harmonies, the fundamental building blocks of music, are perceived;
note that that level involves the hearing of motion in music, rather than mere
succession or alteration. Those two, perhaps not fully distinguishable, stages might
be labeled the configurational level of musical apprehension. Next there is the level of
gesture or action, that at which one hears the music doing something, something it is
not literally doing. Note that the sense of the real gestures of the performers who are
performing the music enters into the gesture—call that musical gesture—that one hears
the music to be engaged in, but the musical gesture and the conjectured or imagined
performing gesture are not the same. We can label that the gestural (or actional) level
of musical apprehension. Next there is the level of states of mind heard behind the
gestures or actions perceived at the preceding level of which those gestures or actions
are the expression; that is the expressive level of musical apprehension.
Assuming this rough picture of musical experience, what then are the possible
narrative objects of music? They would seem, at a minimum, to be these: a) gestures;
b) actions; c) expressions; d) mental states. As for the content of a musical narrative,
it would presumably be some sort of sequence of the preceding. Suppose for the sake
of argument we focus on option d), and construe the narrative content of music to
be a sequence of mental states. A typical specimen would then go something like
this: ‘First S1, then S2, then S3 . . . ’, where the Sns are mental states, plus whatever
relations among the Sns might be implied, such as ‘S1 evolves into S2’, ‘S2 results
from S1’, ‘S2 is a reaction to S1’, and the like. So, does expressively varied music
indeed relate such a narrative? Do we, at any rate, hear such a narrative in such
music? Agnosticism about that seems highly warranted, to say the least.
We should observe, in addition, that certain features central to standard narra-
tives of a literary or cinematic sort, even if not accounted essential to narrative,
seem virtually impossible to locate in instrumental music. These include the
capacity to predicate of a subject, the capacity for reflective self-commentary,
and the capacity to clearly signal pastness or futurity.4 To those three features

4
See Maus, 2003. Indication of pastness may not, for all that, be beyond the powers of music to
achieve. The most promising case is probably be the emergence of nostalgia in music,
whereby a passage of music appears to relate regretfully to an earlier one, or to the
sentiment or action with which the earlier passage was associated.
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 Music as Narrative and Music as Drama 431

difficult to imagine pure music exhibiting, we can add others, such as narrative
voice, narrative point of view, and narrative true-to-lifeness.5

4. Musical Representation

We need to examine more closely the idea of representation presupposed in the

foregoing discussion. Taking representation to be a sine qua non of narration, if
instrumental music is to count as narrative we will have to establish, first, that such
music does indeed represent, second, that it represents non-musical events and third,
that such music represents in a narrative mode, that is, by somehow conveying or
recounting temporal or causal relations among those non-musical events.
But with the very first task we confront an obstacle. Even if expressive music,
according to the sketch of musical experience offered above, readily induces
appropriately backgrounded listeners to hear gesture and expression in it, is that
quite enough to say that the music represents those things? Unfortunately not. For
artistic representation, as exemplified most clearly by pictorial representation, is a
strongly intentional notion. Thus, for a picture to represent an oak tree an oak tree
must be seeable in it, to be sure, but the maker of the picture must also actually
have intended such seeing-in. Artistic expressiveness, on the other hand, is not a
strongly intentional notion, nor is that of gestural content; a passage of music might
be expressive of an emotion or might embody musical gestures, without its com-
poser having intended the hearing of those gestures or that emotion in it, and in
some cases, without the composer even having foreseen or anticipated such hearing.
In light of that, it may be that the relation between music and the gestures and
expressions it induces us to hear in it is more properly one of suggestion, rather than
representation. Be that as it may, I will put aside this reservation for present purposes,
and continue to speak of expressive music as representing the gestures, actions, and
expressions that it perhaps strictly speaking only suggests. That will allow the
question of music’s narrativity to remain open.

5. Music as Externally Narrative vs. Music as Internally Narrative

A distinction regarding music’s narrativity that will prove to be of some use is that
between music as externally narrative—as something that is being told, by the

5
This is not to deny that point of view, one attributable to the implied composer, plays a role in
music involving humor, parody, allusion, and the like. Examples include Mozart’s ‘Musical
Joke’, Bartok’s Sixth Quartet, Haydn’s ‘Joke’ Quartet, and parts of Ives’s symphonies. Such
cases typically involve implicit commentary on something musically referenced then and there.
Despite such examples, it is hard to see how there could be scope for the operation in music of
full-fledged narrative point of view.
As for true-to-lifeness in music, for an attempt to theorize that in regard to facts concerning
the realm of emotions, see Levinson, 1990a. Though I would not entirely repudiate it, I am
now less sanguine about the approach taken there.
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432 J. Levinson

composer—and music as internally narrative—as something that is telling of some-

thing else. In the first case, the sequence of musical events is the ‘story’; in the
second case, the ‘story’, if any, is what the musical events are about. Of course,
where music can be made out to be both externally and internally narrative, the
responsibility for the internal narrative ultimately rests with the composer as well,
the composer being the teller, in the first instance, of the sequence of musical
events, and in the second instance, though sometimes unknowingly, of the
sequence of non-musical events the musical sequence represents.
In connection with music’s external narrativity—that is, the idea that the events
of which the music consists are themselves being narrated—there is also the role of
the performer to consider. The performer might be thought of as occurrently
narrating the events the composer has only standingly narrated, or alternatively as
the only proper narrator of musical events, on any occasion of performance, the
composer then not being a narrator of any sort, but only the designator in the
abstract of events for narration.
Having for the moment gone as far as I can with the idea of music as narrative, I
want now to consider an alternative idea, that of music as drama.

6. Maus and Newcomb on Drama in Music

In this section I summarize two analyses of musical compositions by philosophically

informed musicologists that can be seen as recommending a dramatic, as opposed
to narrative, model of the events musical compositions appear to image forth. The
first is due to Fred Maus, and concerns the opening movement of Beethoven’s
Quartet in F minor, Op. 95; the second is due to Anthony Newcomb, and
concerns the scherzo of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.
Maus’s analysis, which focuses rather minutely on the arresting first eighteen
measures of Beethoven’s quartet, identifying in it individual gestures standing in
certain relations to one another, issues in the following general conclusion:

It would be natural to call the quartet a conspicuously dramatic composition.

The analysis makes the sense of drama concrete by narrating a succession of
dramatic actions: an abrupt, inconclusive outburst; a second outburst in
response, abrupt and coarse in its attempt to compensate for the first; then a
response to the first two actions, calmer and more careful, in many ways more
satisfactory.6

Maus notes that his analytical description of the passage explains events by
regarding them as actions, and by venturing motivations for those actions. But to whom,

6
Maus, 1997a, pp. 118–9. Note that although Maus invokes narrating in this quotation, the
narrating is being done by the analysis, not by the music being analyzed.
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 Music as Narrative and Music as Drama 433

Maus asks, are those actions and motivations being ascribed? Neither the composer
nor the performers, it seems, for though they are the authors of certain music-
related actions, namely, composing and performing, they are not comfortably
thought of as the authors of the actions heard in the music, actions such as
asserting, objecting, responding. Rather, such actions, and associated motivations,
are to be ascribed to a persona, or person-like agent, who is imagined as present,
performing those actions in real time. ‘In listening to a piece’, Maus observes, ‘it is
as though one follows a series of actions that are performed now, before one’s ears,
not as though one merely learns of what someone did years ago.’7
Maus proposes that a piece of instrumental music such as the quartet movement
he analyzes be assimilated to a play, and thus seen to have an essentially dramatic
character, rather than assimilated to a narrative form like the novel. Plays have a
number of salient features which music can share. They present a series of actions,
which are the actions of fictional characters or personae, which actions are
experienced as occurring as they are perceived, and which form a plot, or at
least, make some kind of sense as a whole. Of course the actions heard in music
are not as concrete or detailed as the actions of a stage play, which more nearly
approximate those of life. The agents, objects, and motivations of musically
embodied actions remain much more indeterminate. Music is, as Maus suggests,
‘a kind of drama that lacks determinate characters’8 This difference in degree of
indeterminacy of the characters or personae involved in music and in theater
should not be thought to undermine the validity of the analogy. For, after all,
playwrights such as Strindberg and Beckett have created stage plays, such as End-
game and The Ghost Sonata, whose personae are almost as indeterminate as those to
be heard in the expressive instrumental music with which we are concerned.
Anthony Newcomb, for his part, maintains that music is heard is a ‘reenactment
of a complex pattern of intentional human action’9, and his analysis of Mahler’s
movement is designed to illustrate that.10 According to Newcomb, the imagination
of agency in music, in schematic form, goes as follows: ‘[first] the selection of [or
focusing on] musical attributes . . . the interpretation of these musical attributes as
attributes of human character or behavior . . . the combination of these human
attributes in various configurations as possible or plausible human agencies . . . [and
finally] the understanding of . . . these fictional agencies as relevant in the unfolding
of a plausible chain of human actions and events’.11
Newcomb locates in Mahler’s scherzo three dances of different character, which
are introduced individually, and then interwoven as the movement proceeds. The

7
Maus, 1997a, p. 121.
8
Maus, 1997a, p. 128.
9
Newcomb, 1997, p. 131.
10
He hastens to add this qualification: ‘It is important to realize that in music, as in other
arts. . .aspects of agency are not continuously displayed . . . Even the most ‘expressive’
music . . . at times simply swirls or dreams or chugs along in its decorative function’
(Newcomb, 1997, p. 133).
11
Newcomb, 1997, p. 135.
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434 J. Levinson

first is a medium Landler (A), the second a fast Waltz (B), and the third a slow
Landler (C). When the second dance first appears, it suggests an agency distinct
from that of the first dance, but there are two reasonable possibilities for what that
agency is: either a second, entirely distinct persona, or else an element within the
personality of the first persona. The cultural-historical context of early twentieth
century Vienna, awash in the ideas of Schopenhauer and Freud, and sympathetic to
the notion of hidden sides of the human psyche, favors the latter way of reading the
contrast between the agency embodied in dance A and that embodied in dance B.
Overall, Newcomb suggests, the movement offers a picture of a clumsy and
coarse rustic personality swept away by a sophisticated and confident urban one,
followed in due course by a sober and reflective personality, associated with
dance C, who serves to rein in the second and perhaps restore, in some measure,
the honor of the first.
In the remainder of this paper I attempt to bring into relief further aspects of the
dramatic and narrative models of musical content, and to weigh the respective
merits of those models in regard to music of different kinds.

7. Music as Dramatic vs. Music as Narrative

Music is expressive, I maintain, when it prompts us to hear the music as animated

by agency of a certain sort, more specifically, when it induces us to hear the music
as expressing a mental state, or perhaps equivalently, when it induces us to imagine
a persona expressing a mental state through the vehicle of music. I call this the
ready-hearability-as-expression view of musical expressiveness.12 But is a sequence
of passages that are expressive of a sequence of states of mind thereby an emotional
narrative? Only, it seems, if we have the sense that the first sequence involves acts
of relating or telling, ones attributable to an agent who stands apart from the
imagined agent or agents who are the subjects of the mental states and acts of
expression that constitute the music’s expressive substance.13 Otherwise, as the
analyses of Maus and Newcomb suggest, we would seem more justified in con-
struing the music according to a dramatic model, on which personae and their
expressive actions appear directly on the musical stage, than according to a
narrative model, on which those personae and expressive actions are instead
being recounted to us by a narrative agent.
The locus classicus of the distinction between the narrative and the dramatic is
Aristotle’s Poetics, the first serious attempt in Western thought to offer a taxonomy
of the arts. Aristotle invokes the distinction to explain how epic and tragedy are
distinct. He notes that though they have the same objects of imitation, namely,
noble human beings in serious situations, and roughly the same means of imitation,

12
See Levinson, 2004.
13
That is, in the terms introduced earlier, if the music appears internally, and not just externally,
narrative.
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 Music as Narrative and Music as Drama 435

namely, persons uttering words, they differ nonetheless in the manner of imitation:
whereas epic speaks of the events with which the epic is concerned, tragedy
presents those events directly. Alternatively, the epic reciter describes the events of
the story, while tragic actors enact those very events.
Again, on the view of musical expressiveness I hold, we hear expressive music
precisely as if it were an expression of mental states. More generally, we hear such
music, and much not specifically expressive music, as imbued with action. That is,
we standardly hear music as acting in ways it is not literally acting, or doing things
it is not literally doing, or gesturing in ways it is not literally gesturing. In the case
of expressive music, the actions are, naturally, expressive actions, but in other cases
they are actions of other sorts. From such a perspective, clearly, the most natural
way to view instrumental music is as dramatic, that is, as offering a sequence of
actions to be directly imagined, rather than as narrative, that is, as offering a
sequential relating of such actions.

8. Conditions Favoring Narrative Construal of Music

When are we inclined to regard the actions that we hear in music as directly
present to us, enacted by personae as we listen, and when as matters that are not
directly present, but instead represented in a narrative conveyed to us by a narrating
agency, whether the composer, the performer, or a narrator internal to the music?
A most difficult question. Let me, then, pose a simpler version of it. When do we
have the sense that unadorned instrumental music is relating a story to us, that such
music is, in terms invoked earlier, narrating, and not just being narrated?
I suggest, first, that the music must have a marked character of utterance, of
seeming to speak, if that sense is to emerge. And not all music displays that. But
second, there must also be a character more specifically of storytelling. What I mean
by that is a measured, deliberate, reflective character, such as is conjured by phrases
like ‘once upon a time’ or ‘long ago and far away’. Music of storytelling character
recruits features traditionally associated with the storytelling mode of discourse,
one we think of perhaps above all as unhurried. Thus slowish tempo, relaxed
rhythm, and restrained dynamic are among the musical features conducive to the
emergence of a storytelling character. An example of music with something like
this storytelling character would be the opening of Smetana’s Ma Vlast. This is,
admittedly, an explicitly programmatic work, but nonprogrammatic examples may
also be found. The openings of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, Franck’s Sym-
phony in D minor, or Dvorak’s ‘New World’ Symphony will perhaps serve.
Another generalization we might try on for size is this: The more music strikes
us as a direct utterance from the composer, the more we are likely to construe it as
narrative, as in effect the composer testifying to or recounting something in sound;
and the more music strikes us as constituting a world of its own, in which events
occur independently of a guiding force, the more we are likely to construe it as
dramatic, that is, as involving agencies that appear, interact, and depart before our
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436 J. Levinson

ears. Or again: The more the agents imagined in connection with expressive music
seem autonomous or self-directed, the more apt is a dramatic construal of the
music; and conversely, the more the agents imagined seem framed or subject to
outside control, the more a narrative construal of the music recommends itself.
In any event, plainly not all instrumental music displays narrative character or
lends itself to narrative interpretation. The extent to which it does seems to depend
to a fair degree on the genre of music involved. With minuets, scherzos, toccatas,
études, canons, variations, and the like, the form of such pieces dictates certain
structural repetitions or certain kinds of ‘musical filler’ which tend to block
narrative suggestion or undercut narrative momentum, whereby such pieces
come close to fitting Peter Kivy’s characterization of instrumental music as ‘sonic
wallpaper’.14 With sonata movements, by contrast, internal narrativity has more
purchase, sonata form being inherently progressive and developmental, and so
more susceptible to narrative construal.15
Still, the most natural construal of a sonata movement is as dramatic rather than
narrative. Sonata movements generally come across like a stage on which actors
appear, directly express their emotions, and move on. (Alternatively, a single actor
may be thought present who passes through a sequence of states something in the
manner of a soliloquy.) In the opening movement of Charles-Valentin Alkan’s
little-heard Symphony for Piano, for example, one readily hears a protagonist,
embodied most clearly in a particular five-note motive, express its peculiar mixture
of yearning and suspicion. But one does not seem to hear a voice that tells of a
third party. One does not have the sense of a mediator between oneself and the
expressive gestures that one perceives in the music.
Perhaps it would be best to admit that music can generally be heard as either
strictly narrative or strictly dramatic, even if most music lends itself more readily to
the latter. When music is regarded as the utterance or voice of the composer, then
construing it as a narrative, one whose content consists of the gestures, actions, or
emotions of the composer’s alter ego, is natural enough. On that model, the
composer is analogous to a lyric poet, and the performer to a reciter or rhapsode.
When music is regarded rather as the organized product of creative activity offered
for our engagement, then construing it as a drama, one whose content consists in
the gestures, actions, or emotions of various shifting personae, is arguably more
natural. On that model, the composer is analogous to a playwright, and the
performer to a director or producer.
In the last analysis, construing music either narratively or dramatically, and not
simply expressively, might best be regarded as an appreciative option, not something

14
Kivy, 1993.
15
A similar claim could be made for fugue, which also avoids strict repetition, and which one
could hear as relating a story consisting in the vicissitudes of its theme, and for jazz improvising
on standard tunes, given such improvising is often understood as at least in part a kind of
commentary on the tune or its associated chord progressions. (For interesting reflections on the
narrative dimension of jazz improvisation, see the third part of Elster, 2000.)
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 Music as Narrative and Music as Drama 437

correct appreciation absolutely enjoins. Even when the option is exercised it is

often irresolvable whether the music in question is better construed one way or the
other. One likely source of this irresolvability as between narrative and dramatic
construals of music is the fact that there are so many different candidates in the
domain of articulate actions for what a given passage of music might be heard as
fictively engaged in: monologue, dialogue, recitation, aside, soliloquy, meditation,
diatribe, ballad, chronicle, report, confession, exhortation, peroration, elegy,
admonition, and so on, some of which are dramatic actions, and some of which
are narrative ones.

9. Narrow and Broad Senses of Narrative in Music

Experienced from within, so to speak, a sonata movement strikes us as a drama,

with actors corresponding to themes or motives. This is the way sonatas are usually
experienced, as illustrated by the Alkan example above. Yet experienced from
without, as the deliberate product of a creator, a sonata movement may take on the
aspect of a narrative being related by the composer through the musical drama more
immediately apprehended in listening. Thus, though not narrative in the narrow
sense in which it contrasts with dramatic, the music of a sonata can be considered
narrative in a broad sense, one in which narration is effected by means of drama.
Consider an army commander narrating a past battle, using actors or puppets
with recognizable identities or powers. This looks to be analogous to the stage-
managing a composer engages in regarding his musical material and the personal
agents such material gives rise to for imaginative hearing. What this amounts to,
then, is the conveying of a narrative by the creating of a drama. Of course in this
broad sense of narrative playwrights, who directly fashion dramas for enactment,
are also engaged in narrative, even more clearly than are composers. Macbeth, for
instance, certainly conveys a story, and there seems no objection to thinking of
Shakespeare as, in some sense, the conveyer of that story. But neither in theatre nor
in music does this amount to narrating in the stricter sense that applies to, say,
literary fiction, in which a narrator can be identified in the fiction, in which there is
a discernible narrative voice, in which narrative point of view is robustly present,
and in which there is a clear distinction between narrative discourse and narrated
story.

10. Musical Personae

What disposes us to think of a musical persona heard in one stretch of music or

portion of the musical fabric as the same as the musical persona heard in another
such stretch or portion? It is very hard to generalize here, but perhaps at least a
contiguous series of musical gestures of similar character will be interpreted, ceteris
parabis, as the gestures of a single, continuing persona.
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438 J. Levinson

Yet there is very likely ineliminable indeterminacy in such matters. Speaking of

the dramatic personae hearable in the opening of Beethoven’s Op. 95, Fred Maus
observes that ‘ .. nowhere is it clear whether the response to the first outburst is
made by the same agent or agents. If the continuity in the performing forces
suggests continuity of the musical agency, the registral discontinuity and utterly
different treatment of the ensemble may suggest that a distinct agent or agents have
entered to respond . . . . . The actions that a listener follows in listening to the
Beethoven passage do not belong to determinately distinct agents . . . . [At different
points] various discriminations of agents will seem appropriate, but never with a
determinacy that rules out other interpretations’.16
Nevertheless, music for a single performer is more often than not heard as
communicating a slice of the psychological life of a persisting persona. Even
where there is a clear melody and accompaniment structure, or a contrapuntal
texture with several distinct lines, one generally has the impression of a single
expressive agency, at the service of which are the various distinguishable musical
components. By contrast, in certain genres, such as that of the concerto, with its
manifest oppositional structure, playing off soloist against orchestra, the presump-
tion of single expressive agency is just as clearly overridden. And duo sonatas and
trios may also often invite the kind of hearing normative for concertos, in which
different instruments or performing forces are heard as vehiculing different
personae.

11. A Sonata of Schubert

I end with a musical example, the first movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A
minor, D. 845 (the opening of which is reproduced below). It is instructive to trace
the experience of gesture, expression, and action in this stretch of music, one that,
like most movements in sonata form, sustains hearing in dramatic mode rather
better than it does hearing in narrative mode. A pragmatic difficulty looms,
though, in the effort to convince an audience of this through description of
what appears to be going on in the music. For in doing so one is inevitably
involved in narrating the succession of agents and actions that one hears.17 Still,
the fact that in making a brief for the dramatic content of the music one perforce
narrates one’s experience of that content does not turn the music itself into a
narrative rather than a kind of drama.
Three contrasting themes or theme groups—call them A, B, and C—can be
discerned in this movement, with which three personae or personality aspects can
be readily associated. The opening motive, A, is of a grim, inward character, while
the next, B, is of restless character overall, consisting of three sub-motives of

16
Maus, 1997a, p. 123.
17
See note 6 for the same wrinkle.
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 Music as Narrative and Music as Drama 439

rocking, flowing, and declamatory nature. The next motive, C, has a martial and
strutting character, which is then succeeded by a fusion of C and B that, though
still vigorous, assumes a more lyrical character than anything that has come before,
and suggests in its fusion of motives a kind of rapprochement between them.
Eventually C drops out and the flowing, arpeggiated sub-motive of B predomi-
nates, until the return of A in a key a third above the tonic. From there until the
end of the exposition, another twenty or so measures, there is an alternation
between A and C which has the air of a dialogue, one concluded gently by C.
The beginning of the development section sees an alternation of A with itself,
distinct contrasts of register and dynamic demarcating the two guises of A, giving
the passage the sense of a soliloquy in which different sides of a question are being
weighed. This is followed, after two held chords serving as a transition, by a section
of more pronounced fantasy character: here the persona of A, though shadowed by
the rocking, syncopated sub-motive of B in the bass, takes wing, ventures into
unknown regions, and beginning around measure 120, wrestles with doubts, the
upshot of which is by no means clear. Dark thoughts continue to accumulate, and
the sense of crisis is accentuated by the fragmentation of A, reduced to its last four
descending notes, which plunge somewhat desperately, again and again. This
eventually subsides, allowing A to reassert itself once more in full, though now
uncertain, spent of energy, and winding in on itself in a series of remote and
inhospitable keys. There I shall leave our motives and their associated personae,
though a return to the initial order, in the recapitulation, is still some sixty
measures off.
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440 J. Levinson

In the foregoing narrative of a listener’s experience—or at any rate, this listener’s

experience—of this music, I have mixed technical, expressive, and agential voca-
bulary. But the technical bits in the narrative serve only to pinpoint what is going
on in the music on the other two levels, that of expression and agency. And what is
going on, I would hope your experience confirms, is not so much doings that
occurred in another place and time, of which one is receiving an report, but a
drama of events happening here and now, with indefinite personae who are the
shifting loci of the emotions and actions encountered throughout.18

Department of Philosophy
University of Maryland

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18
Many thanks to Greg Currie for helpful comments on a draft of this essay.
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