Nattiez Can One Speak

Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?
Author(s): Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Katharine Ellis

Source: Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 115, No. 2 (1990), pp. 240-257
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Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?
JEAN-JACQUES NATTIEZ
THE question of musical narrativity, while by no means new, is making a

comeback as the order of the day in the field of musicological thought. In
May 1988 a conference on the theme 'Music and the Verbal Arts: Inter-
actions' was held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. A
fortnight later, a group of musicologists and literary theorists was invited
to the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford to assess, in the course of four
intense round-table discussions, whether it is legitimate to recognize a
narrative dimension in music.' In November of the same year, the annual
conference of the American Musicological Society in Baltimore presented
a session entitled 'Text and Narrative', chaired by Carolyn Abbate, and,
at the instigation of Joseph Kerman, a session devoted to Edward T.
Cone's The Composer's Voice.2 A number of articles deal with the subject
in our specialized periodicals: I am thinking in particular of the studies
published in 19th-Century Music by Anthony Newcomb - 'Once More
"Between Absolute and Programme Music": Schumann's Second Sym-
phony'3 and 'Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strate-
gies'4 - or, on the French-speaking side of musicology, of Marta Grabocz's
article 'La sonate en si mineur de Liszt: une strategie narrative complexe'5
and the essays of the Finnish semiologist Eero Tarasti.6 No doubt a good
many articles will emerge from the above conferences. And we are await-
ing the appearance of Carolyn Abbate's book Unsung Voices: Narrative
in Nineteenth-Century Music.7
This whole current of thought attempts, in a positive or critical man-
ner, to take seriously an intuition of common sense: through the work, the
composer speaks to us. And, a priori, we all feel that Levi-Strauss touches
on something true when, at the end of L'homme nu, he states:
I am particularly grateful to Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb for inviting me to this sym-
posium. Without the list of papers provided for this occasion, and exchanges with the other par-
ticipants, I would not have been in a position to prepare the present article, of which the first version
was the subject of the Keynote Address at the Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association
on 7 April 1989 in London. I sent this text personally to Newcomb to obtain some feedback regard-
ing my criticisms of his approach, and I am grateful to him for the kindly and constructive reception
which he gave them. My gratitude should also go to Carolyn Abbate, Francois Delalande and Jean
Molino for their pertinent advice. The present version takes account of their observations.
2 Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974.
19th-Century Music, 7 (1984), 233-50.
4 Ibid., 11 (1987), 164-74. See also 'Strategies narratives et perception de la musique du debut
du dix-neuvieme siecle', Contrechamps, 10 (1989), 12-24.
Analyse musicale, 8 (1987), 64-70.
6 'Pour une narratologie de Chopin', International Review of Aesthetics and Sociology of Music,
15 (1984), 53-75; 'Une analyse semiotique: la mise en evidence d'un parcours narratif', Analyse
musicale, 16 (1989), 67-74.
7 Princeton University Press, forthcoming.
CAN ONE SPEAK OF NARRATIVITY IN MUSIC? 241
The musical work, which is a myth coded in sounds instea

interpretative grid, a matrix of relationships which filte
experience, acts as a substitute for it and provides the com
contradictions can be overcome and difficulties resolv
able that there should be any musical work that does not
and tend towards its resolution - this word being un
sense, consistent with its meaning in musical terminolog
And, in connection with Ravel's Boldro:

Like a myth, even a work the construction of which at
transparent as to need no comment is telling simultaneo
ferent levels a very complex story for which it has to f
I shall not conceal the fact that, until a few years a

notion of musical story-telling or narration as just an
which human language, with its meagre means, has t
attempt to define the specificity of the unfolding of
soon as a certain number of excellent authors in the
musical criticism take this metaphor seriously, even
sistant to semantic approximations has to say to him
smoke without fire. He thus agrees to examine why t
narration' is seducing the finest minds and to assess
a new root of orientation for the analysis and und
After all, it is because, in the early seventies, it
linguistic models could bring something fruitful to m
my first works, I compared musicAl structures w
Semiology can equally be tempted to pit the unfold
literary narrative. I shall attempt here to clarify my
To the extent that the notion of narrative is in the f

with verbal practices, it would seem necessary to beg
define what a literary narrative is. As you can imagin
from one theory to another. Without adhering neces
of his propositions, I shall take as a point of departur
Seymour Chatman in his now classic work, Story and
Structure in Fiction and Film." According to him
where both events and existents occur'.12 For exampl
at five o'clock.' In this example there is indeed an 'ex
and an 'event' (what she did in the late afternoon). A
8 Claude Levi-Strauss, L'homme nu (Paris, 1971), trans. John and

Naked Man (London, 1981), 659-60.
9 Ibid., 666 (my italics).
10 See 'Situation de la simiologie musicale', Musique enjeu, 5 (Nov
modules linguistiques pour l'analyse musicale', ibid., 10 (March 1973), 3
semiologie de la musique (Paris, 1975), part II.
" Ithaca, 1978.
2 Story and Discourse, 113. I do not altogether agree with Chatman's statement because I am not
sure that the 'event' and the 'existent' constitute the minimum ingredients for a narrative. He writes:
'There cannot be events without existents. And though it is true that a text can have existents without
events (a portrait, a descriptive essay), no one would think of calling it a narrative' (p. 113). I am not
so sure, for in the description of a person or a landscape there is someone who speaks - the writer
- and, among the infinity of things which can be said about this person or landscape, he has made a
selection. For us, he reconstructs a world and indeed relates to us his own experience of it.
242 JEAN-JACQUES NATTIEZ
instituted between 'existents' and 'events': 'One cannot account for events
without recognizing the existence of things causing or being affected by
those events."' In a narrative there exist simultaneously a linear dimen-
sion - events happen at different moments in time - and relations o
cause and effect between these different events. And Chatman pinpoints
something which will prove important for my comparison with musi
'Causation may be explicit or implicit.'"4 If I read in a detective nove
'The duchess left at five o'clock. At quarter past five her husband w
found dead in the nearby park', I am tempted to create a ielation o
causality between the departure of the duchess and the death of her hus
band, a relation which is purely hypothetical and which creates precisely
the interest of the plot.
From this there emerge two levels of the narrative's existence between
which, for the purposes of the present study, it is worth distinguishing
(1) When I read the sentence: 'The duchess left at five o'clock', I do not need
a title in order to realize that I am dealing with a narrative. By contrast, when
I hear the opening of L'apprenti sorcier, I need to know that it is a symphonic
poem in order to approach the work in a narrative frame of mind. Certai
images may occur to me, but I have to approach the piece with a particula
listening strategy if I am to construct a narrative from it. The demonstratio
of this is crude: if music could, of itself, be a narrative to the extent that
human language can, it would speak directly to us and there would be no dif-
ference between language and music.
(2) But narrative is not just written into the letter of the story. The text is stil
a narrative in another sense: it has been imagined by the writer or the story
teller; it is reconstructed by the reader. This is precisely the point at which
there may be an analogy between literary narrative and music. Titles such as
L'apprenti sorcier or Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe, or the autobiographic
narrative which accompanies the Symphonie fantastique, indicate that there
is an intention on the part of the composer to follow through a sequence of
events and to put 'existents' forward. But only when the listener decides to
link the succession of sound events according to a plot does he build up the
musical work as a narrative. And it is at once because the concept of narrativ
was born with literature, oral and written, and because there is a clear onto-
logical difference between literary narrative and musical 'narrative', that we
cannot tackle the question of narrativity in music without taking literary nar-
rative as a point of reference.
In opposition to this starting position one could put that of Paul

Ricoeur who, in Temps et recit,"1 saw in human action and historica
events an intrinsically semantic dimension. He thematized this way of see-
ing things by analysing, in an article which is widely read in the USA
the similarities between human action and text."16 But the argument of
Temps et rdcit merits closer inspection. Ricoeur recognizes that 'we d
" Ibid., 34.

,4 Ibid., 45.
" Paris, 1983; trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer as Time and Narrative, i
(Chicago, 1984).
'6 Paul Ricoeur, 'The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text', Social
Research, 38 (1971), 529-62; original French text published in Du texte a l'action, Essais
d'hermineutique, 2 (Paris, 1986), 183-211.
not have access to the temporal dramas of existen

about them by others or by ourselves'.17 He ascr
what he terms 'a prenarrative quality of exper
everyday experience, are we not inclined to se
episodes of our lives "(as yet) untold" stories, s
told, stories that offer anchorage points for n
events constitute for him 'a story in its nascent
rativity', a 'potential story'.20 This narrative pot
and of history is due, of course, to the fact that
time. But all this clearly indicates that a narrative
ing, only when a temporal series of objects and e
metalinguistic discourse.
With Carolyn Abbate, I believe that narrative
story, but also an act, that which Molino terms t
is not surprising that here I come across th
characteristic of his semiological theory and whi
At the moment when the novelist writes the story
whether or not she is guilty. But the only thing
'trace' of his intentions - the published text - fr
structs his own causal relations, which may or
those conceived by the writer. This mechanism is
comic strip, since - and this is a part of its charm
reader fills the narrative void which exists betwee
this process which operates when we hear music
taneously narrative mode of listening. I shall
possible musical narrativity within the framewor
ception and attempt to define what constitutes t
which music gives rise.
If so many composers have chosen to write music

rived from literary ones, it is no doubt because th
semantic possibilities of music. In fact, short of
formalist conception of music as Hanslick did, it
purely sonorous configurations, independent of
do indeed have a power of evocation. Studies in ex
from Frances to Imberty,22 show empirically
associate images, feelings and impressions with
the percentage of responses obtained, while there
is a convergence of opinion regarding the expe
know that music is capable of three major types
spatio-temporal, the kinetic and the affective.23
17 Time and Narrative, i, 74.

18 Ibid. (my italics).
19 Ibid. (my italics).
20 Ibid., 114 (my italics).
21 'Qu'est-ce qu'un recit?', unpublished paper presented to th
Literature, University of Montreal, on 6 March 1975.
22 Robert Frances, La perception de la musique (Paris, 1958);
musique (Paris, 1979) and Les e6ritures du temps (Paris, 1981).
23 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Musicologie ginerale et simiologie (
translation (Princeton University Press) is forthcoming.
Musical 'discourse' is placed in time. It

preparations, expectations, resolutions,
tax, it is without doubt Leonard Meyer w
ventory of what one might call techniq
to speak of musical narrative on account
tical and temporal dimension of music
Literary narrative, also, is made of e
What did she do? She went out. Where to? I am not told. When did she
leave? 'At five o'clock'. To do what? I shall get to know later. But here, in
principle, there are no ambiguities as to the identity of the actors and th
nature of their actions. Linguistic syntax, as we know, rests principally on
a subject and a predicate, and there is no doubt that the predicate tell
me what is affirmed regarding the first term. Between the two there is
logical connection.
Sometimes in different terms, numerous literary theorists have distin
guished between story and discourse in narrative.24 This dichotomy per-
mits a clarification of the comparison. The content of a narrative, th
story which is told, can be 'unglued' from its linguistic support in order to
be taken on by another medium, another kind of discourse, film or comi
strip. It can even be recognizable as such: in all three cases I am told the
story of the duchess.25 The break with the symphonic poem is sharper.
We cannot translate it. We can summarize or translate the narrative b
which the composer was inspired, which is quite a different matter.
In music, connections are situated at the level of the discourse, rather
than the level of the story. I may well hear a march in Mahler's Secon
Symphony and imagine that it concerns a group of men, but I don't know
which men. The march can come closer and then recede, and two proces-
sions even, as in Ives's Three Places in New England, may cross, but I
don't know where they have come from or where they are heading. Listen
ing to Till Eulenspiegel, and with the help of the title, I can readily agree
that it concerns the life and death of a character. I certainly hear that h
moves, jumps, etc. But what exactly does he do? I don't know. 'Music has
no past tense', as Carolyn Abbate so rightly observes. It can evoke the pas
by means of quotations or various stylistic borrowings. But it cannot
relate what action took place in time.26 Literary narrative is invention,
lying. Music does not lie, because of necessity the task of linking thes
phantoms of characters to suggestions of action will fall to me, the
listener: it is not within the semiological possibilities of music to link a
subject to a predicate. This is why a good number of 'narrative' ap-
proaches to music, judging by what I have read and heard these last
months, seem to me to retreat into metaphorical illusion: what use is it t
talk of Schenkerian narration, of musical metaphors and metonymies
when, in the discourse of music, it is only a question of a play of forms
and the reactions which they provoke? If, in listening to music, I am
24 For example, Chatman, Story and Discourse, 9.

25 I shall leave aside the question of why the adaptation of a known novel for a film never trul
restores all that we have read: I recognize the story, but it is not really the same narrative.
26 Unsung Voices, chap. 1.
tempted by the 'narrative impulse', it is indee

the strictly musical discourse, I recognize returns
tions, but of what, I do not know. Thus I have a
words what the music does not say because it
nature to say it to me. It is, to take up Adorn
referring to Mahler, 'a narrative which relates n
No doubt it is for this reason that the wor
writings of authors who recognize in music a sort
is 'gesture'. 'The Mahlerian gesture is that of the
even if 'it remains forbidden for epic music to de
sees'.29 For his part, Edward Cone writes:
If music is a language at all, it is a language of gest

pauses, of startings and stoppings, of rises and
slackness, of accentuations. .... Instrumental utteran
bal content, goes so far as to constitute what mi
pure symbolic gesture.3
And in this perspective I would be quite happy
success of Ravel's Bolero in terms not of the sim
structure, but of its capacity to evoke the irr
culminating in the orgasmic outburst of the tro
Cone's book The Composer's Voice makes sen
forget that the concepts which he uses - 'person
instrumental music, 'verbally unspecified' an
'The elements of music - notes, chords, moti
referents', he writes once again.32 But there is sti
from narrative metaphor to an ontological illusio
narrative, it could itself be narrative. It is this fi
tion which makes all the difference between liter
'discourse'.
Historical facts do not in themselves constitute a narrative. They are
taken over by a narrative which gives them their sense. As Paul Veyne has
admirably demonstrated,33 I can quite easily state that events have taken
place - there has been a battle, a treaty has been finalized, frontiers have
been changed - but strictly speaking there is only a historical interpreta-
tion when I am able, in constructing a plot, to establish between the
events a relation of causality which explains them, which is in fact to link
the remembered events through the logic of a narrative. If this is so, it is
because the events are like neutral objects placed in time and which, as
such, seek elaborate interpretation in a narration.
But no more in history than in music do these neutral objects per se
constitute a narrative. It cannot be overemphasized that the narrative
27 Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, 'Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik', Gesammelte

Schriften, xiii, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedmann (Frankfurt, 1971), 149-319 (p. 225).
28 Ibid., 209.
29 Ibid., 218.
30 The Composer's Voice, 164.
" Ibid., 94.
32 Ibid., 161.
" Comment on ecrit I'histoire (Paris, 1971).
constructed about them occupies

the facts or events which, to take
not narrate, but rather, 'narrativi
Leonardo da Vinci observed that
and make it able to tell stories'. M
on a wall give rise not to an idea,
rative.'35 In the case of two initial
the walker will read there the m
tells us: 'John loves Mary', or 'Mar
other', 'Here, John met Mary', or
etc. The freedom of interpretatio
rative exists only on a potential lev
whom the story is told or a project
by he who perceives the two word
them, a story.'36
Exactly as with the constituent
scratched on a wall do not in them
the result of a narrative 'thread' a
more in those who read them. T
cient for -this. In the trace,
(1) a minimum of two objects, of wh

(2) these two objects must be place
order for us to be encouraged to e
To illustrate this mechanism in t
discuss an experiment which I con
in Montreal among 300 first- and
ranged from 11 to 14. They had
prenti sorcier without being giv
music tells a story. What is it?' Th
to write their account in the form
listened to the symphonic poem, i
children had reinvented the Goethe ballad as it would have been had a
monkey, given a typewriter, written Milton's Paradise Lost. The objective
was to see what narrative the pupils projected onto the music.
Of the 300 responses obtained, 47 were dismissed because the child did
not retain anything more than a general impression in the form of a
sentence, or because he said simply that he liked or disliked the work. For
the purposes of analysis, the narratives were stripped down to a normalized
summary which would facilitate comparisons. For example:
In the street, someone is walking. Suddenly the cavalry arrive. There is the
sound of drums. There is a fight. The cavalry start off again quicker and
quicker, and one can hear the sound of their hooves. Then everything stops.
4 Hayden White, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality', On Narrative, ed.
W. J. Thomas Mitchell (Chicago, 1981), 1-23 (p. 2).
" 'Qu'est-ce qu'un recit?'
36 Ibid.
7 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, 'Y a-t-il une diegese musicale?', Musik und Verstehen, ed. Peter Faltin
and Hans-Peter Reinecke (Cologne, 1973), 247-57.
Rest. There is smoke on the other side of the hill. Battle: the blood flows on
and on. There are many dead, except one. He recovers his calm. But suddenly
something snaps, and he kills himself.
Or:
Night, in a toyshop. Everything is quiet. Suddenly, a toy wakes up. A tin

soldier pays court to a doll. But a puppet arrives, and it's an unending
struggle. The soldier and the doll go far away, but they are followed. They
run more than ever and get rid of their attacker. At dawn, the shopkeeper
returns and finds the objects in place.
And lastly:
A man is walking peacefully along the road when suddenly some dogs appear.
His quiet walk continues, then he starts running as far as a tree. The dogs go
farther away and the man comes down. He sets off again. Once more he is
surprised by the dogs; he hides in an old shack. He is pursued all the way
home. The dogs go away.
A reading of all the responses reveals the cultural conditioning of the
narratives. Given that a single narrative could be placed in more than one
of the categories which follow, we find:
103 adventure stories (a young boy's journey, a mountain climb, etc.),
36 war stories (revolutions, armed conflicts),
28 animal stories,
26 stories of chivalry and the Middle Ages (princes and princesses),
21 'suspense' stories (espionage, detective, burglary),
17 sentimental stories,
14 biographical stories (from birth to death, the life of Beethoven(!), etc.),
13 evocations of pure music (the story describes instruments or suggests that
one is at the concert),
6 fantasy stories,
4 evocations of dance and ballets.
The examination of the 253 responses leads to the following observatio
(1) It allows us to know in which sections the child actively made a choic
The constructed narrative is an indication of the intuitive formal anal
which the child has made of the symphonic poem through the bias of his
rative verbalization. Thus, throughout the stories, we can distinguish:
a first section up to the arrival of the apprentice: 179 responses;

a transitional section, from this arrival up to but not including the mar
of the broom: 60 responses;
a central section consisting of two crescendos: 232 (of these 232 response
24 noticed the two periods of the section);
a 'crashing descent' which is supposed to translate the 'death' of the broo
56 responses;
a period of calm before the return of the broom theme on two bassoons
41 responses;
the return of the central section with the two bassoons: 138 responses;
the death of the two brooms after the intervention of the master sorcerer:
18 responses;
the return of the first section: 175 responses;
the final chord: 49 responses.
From the detail, we can note:
(a) that the caesura between the two periods of the central section is much
less well identified than these sections themselves;
(b) that if these initial and final sections held attention in the same pro-
portion, only nine responses explicitly established a relationship of
identity between them;
(c) that, in general, thematic identification is weak: the narratives do not
seem to attribute to a person a characterizing theme: the 'magic for-
mulas' of the trombones are not highlighted specifically, although the
pupils are aware of the 'collapse' passages, especially after the first part
of the central section;
(d) that the final chord which, in the argument, seems not to have any
particular significance, is made the object of a clear semantic inter-
pretation in a fair number of cases, no doubt because of its position
and the contrast with the return of the calm initial section.
(2) The inquiry demonstrates above all that, when invited to listen in a nar-
rative manner, the children made sense after the event of the succession of
sound events by imagining subject-predicate relationships which, by itself,
the music cannot make explicit. Going beyond the detail of the narratives ob-
tained, and in so far as four fifths of the responses noted only the first section,
a central event (which neglects the breaking in two of the broom) and the
final section, it is the pattern 'calm/chase/calm' which emerges from the ex-
periment. It is explained, as the analyses of Frances would lead one to expect,
by the kinetic and dynamic aspects of musical substance. Beyond any nar-
rative constructed after the event, this paradigmatic constant of the responses
leaves us, in semantic terms, an image of the effect produced by the music on
the listeners.
These observations would seem to bring an experimental justification

to Anthony Newcomb's narrative approach to Schumann's instrumental
music: listening to a work, we recognize the evocation of actions, tensions
and dynamisms analogous to those for which the literary work is a vehicle.
But, faced with these fine studies, I am both admiring and critical. Ad-
miring because, stimulated by narratological research, Newcomb tries to
take account of a level of musical organization which is not that of syntac-
tic and formal organization, but that of functional elements which ar-
ticulate the work on a higher plane. Critical, because I am not sure, as he
affirms, that the series of these functional events constitutes a narrative in
the strict sense of the word.
His basic premiss is that what he calls the narrative level responds, in
numerous pieces of a historically delimited group, to a 'plot archetype'.
Those of the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies of Beethoven, similarly that of
the Second Symphony of Schumann, would correspond to the 'narrative'
succession of two affective states: 'suffering, followed by healing or
redemption'. This approach would thus allow the opportunity of a new
level of meaning:
The conception of music as a composed novel, as a psychologically true course

of ideas, was and is an important avenue to the understanding of much
nineteenth-century music: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for example, was so
understood by at least some listeners from the outset

basis of some symphonies an evolving pattern of me
Russian formalists and the structuralists find one of
the basis of novels and tales. 38
Now, while our experiment regarding Dukas indeed seems to confirm

that, beyond the projection onto a work of an explicit narrative plot, the
listeners perceived what Newcomb calls 'functional events'," I am not
certain that it is legitimate to speak of narrative.
The paradigmatic constant 'calm/chase/calm', in fact, is inferred
from the real narratives constructed by the listeners. It allows us to know
which aspects of the general form, semantically translated, have been
perceived. But what it quite fails to tell us is who is calm and why, who is
chasing whom, and why calmness returns. As Abbate and White insist,40
the listener, alongside the historian and, on the second level which I
distinguished at the outset, the reader, is a 'gap-filler'. The narrative,
strictly speaking, is not in the music, but in the plot imagined and con-
structed by the listeners from functional objects.
In order to examine musical narrativity, Newcomb compares his
method with that of structuralist narratology.41 Thus, if one refers to
Vladimir Propp's Morphologie du conte,42 one can see that the various
moments of the fantasy story are reduced to a succession of canonic
actions: 'One member of the family goes away from the house', 'A ban is
imposed upon the hero', 'The ban is transgressed', etc. Propp reduces this
chain of formulas to a series of functions expressed by a single word:
'going away', 'prohibition', 'transgression', 'interrogation', etc. They seem
comparable with our 'calm/chase/calm' in L'apprenti sorcier and with
the interpretation of Beethoven's and Schumann's symphonies which I
have just mentioned. But while the functions which Propp has separated
out show the nature of the paradigmatic axes common to narratives in a
single genre, whereas my paradigmatic constant informs us of a fact of
perception, Newcomb's transposition in fact tells us that, for the listener,
any 'narrative' instrumental work is not in itself a narrative, but the struc-
tural analysis in music of an absent narrative.
What is more, if, in the sequence 'suffering-redemption', we easily
recognize a romantic schema, it is in no way comparable to the chain of
functions identified by Propp in a rigorously delimited genre, the fantasy
story, where these functions can undergo obliterations, substitutions, per-
mutations. The couple 'suffering-redemption' constitutes a characteriza-
tion which is so general that one may well wonder whether we are in the
8 'Once More "Between Absolute and Programme Music"', 234.

9 'Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies', 165.
40 Abbate, Unsung Voices; White, 'The Value of Narrativity', 9-11.
41 See also his 'Strategies narratives et perception de la musique', 13-15. In a personal com-
munication, Newcomb has indicated to me that he now considers the reference to Propp as
erroneous, but, in so far as his conception of musical narrativity still rests on the notion of 'plot
archetype', we must wait for the further development of his research in order to ascertain exactly
what epistemological status he accords to these two notions.
42 Paris, 1970.
presence, properly speaking, of a nar

rather a question of a cultural trait
same way that, among the Japanese
rapid and violent action' is less a lite
of behaviour, a cultural scheme and
schema is something very differen
than, a narrative structure.
If I insist on this difference, it is
metaphor risks overshadowing a f
logical functioning of music. I do
moments of Beethoven's symphon
'redemption', that the sequence
dramatic rather than a formalist lo
I mean to say is that the narrative li
these tonalities is not and cannot
whereas the link between 'the duche
embedded in the syntax of the sent
Treitler's position according to whic
can be reconstituted only through t
However, I would be doubtless more
the facts permit - between
(1) what Beethoven's narrative inten

(2) how it was understood by his con
specialist listeners who are critics),
(3) how this same succession is viewe
(4) the nature of the different mode
categories of listener, for these narr
If literature can act as one of these
shall attempt to demonstrate in the c
the only one: poetry, philosophy, th
not necessarily as bearers of narrati
voir of philosophical, ideological a
particular epoch.
In short, I do not think that it is i
strumental works to the reductive m
ratives that we shall succeed in defin
level of signification in a given ep
pletely right in differentiating, wh
symbolic form which is music. It is
between symbolic forms and the tra
epoch which, from a semiological po
consider.
Clearly it is impossible, within the limited framework of this article, to

present a complete theory of these relationships. On the other hand,
43 '"To Worship that Celestial Sound": Motives for Analysis', Journal of Musicology, 1 (1982),
153-70; repr. in Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), chap. 2.
'coming down again' to the level of more immedi

music and narrative, I should like to bring up a f
mediations.
Any perception of music triggers off the establishment of a link
between the work and the experience of the listener. If one feels that
music tells a story which is left untold to us, it is perhaps because, seman-
tically speaking, music is capable of various forms of imitation, and that,
among them, it is possible for it to imitate the outward appearance of a
literary narrative.
For a long time now linguists have gravitated towards what they have
called the 'musical elements' of human language. Music and language
have in common the fact that they are constituted of sound objects. In
language as in music, there are rhythms and accents, durations of notes
and syllables, and it is no coincidence that, in Greek, the word 'mousik6'
designated lyric poetry, that is, something which was simultaneously what
we would today call music and poetry; it is not impossible to explain the
rhythmic and metrical dimension of modern lyric poetry by its indis-
soluble links, in its origins, with music.44 But there is more.
In language, with the exception of tone languages, the vowels do not
have fixed pitches, but rather a linking together of syllables created from
the intonation contours (the prosodemes) to which certain phoneticians
- I am thinking in particular of Pierre Delattre45 - have devoted special-
ized studies. This much is conclusive: music and language share the linear-
ity of discourse and the use of sound objects. Music is capable of imitating
the intonation contour of a narrative.
With Beethoven's String Quartet op. 135, it is not necessary to have read
the motto which heads the finale, 'Muss es sein? Es muss sein', in order to
recognize from the outset that we are in the presence of a question, sug-
gested by the ascending fourth, followed by a double response, evoked by
the descending fourths. And from then on, the remainder of the move-
ment can be interpreted as musical transposition of a dialogue. We do
not know what is said, but Beethoven depicts the character of the ex-
change, rather as if we catch the inflections of it from the other side of a
wall or as if we are hearing a conversation in a language which we do not
know.
The voices of the quartet have thus the character of what Cone, refer-
ring to the dialogue between the oboe and cor anglais in the 'Scene aux
champs' of the Symphoniefantastique, calls 'virtual characters', or, more
precisely in his terminology, 'virtual agents'.46 Clearly it is the word 'vir-
tual' which seems to me to be the most important here. Doubtless, it is for
this same reason that the traditional vocabulary for the analysis of a fugue
uses terms such as 'subject', 'answer', 'exposition', 'discussion' and 'sum-
mary'. 'It suggests', says Cone, 'the model of a conversation on an
4 Jean Molino and Joelle Tamine, Introduction a l'analyse de la podsie, i (Paris, 1987).
4 'Les dix intonations de base du francais', French Review, 40 (1966), 1-14; 'La nuance de sens
par l'intonation', ibid., 41 (1967), 326-39; 'L'intonation par les oppositions', Lefranvais moderne
(December 1969), 6-13.
46 The Composer's Voice, 88.
announced topic.'47 To use Abbate

hear 'the sound of voice of narrating
voices are talking about.
These cases of imitation of intona
gested that the accentuation of th
scheme of accentuation in the music
I know at least two studies (by Hall
find the intonations of English in t
A falling pitch, from relatively high t

a declarative sentence in both British a
tion beginning with an interrogative w
questions not beginning with an in
American English and most European l
tion, whereas British English has the s
are you going?
Turning to the music of Elgar, H

statistical verification - that here
predominantly falling trend; think,
motives of Falstaff, the introduct
Allegro, the first subject of the Sec
'No wonder', he concludes later, 'tha
peculiarly "all their own" about Elga
preciate.'" If we indeed have here a
between music and the semblance
equally that it can be restricted to a
cess, a language has left its mark i
We find an analogous idea with
which owes more to the personal i
patient scientific investigation, th
history of symbolic forms, music
structures it has embraced:
It would seem that the point at which music and mythology began to appear
as reversed images of each other coincided with the invention of the fugue.
... It is as if music and literature had shared the heritage of myth between
them. Music, in becoming modern with Frescobaldi and then Bach, took over
its form, whereas the novel, which came into being about the same time, ap-
propriated the deformalised residue of myth, and, being released from the
constraints of symmetry, found the means to develop as a free narrative."
47 Ibid., 113.
48 Unsung Voices.
49 Bruno Nettl, 'Relaciones entre la lengua y la musica en el folklore', Folklore Americas, 16
(1956), 1-11 (p. 2).
50 Robert H. Hall, 'Elgar and the Intonation of British English', The Gramophone, 31 (1953),
6-7; Jean Callaghan, 'Did Elgar Speak English? Language and National Music Style: Comparative
Semiotic Analysis', unpublished paper presented to the Annual Conference of the Australian
Musicological Society, Melbourne, September 1975.
" 'Elgar and the Intonation of British English', 6.
52 The Naked Man, 652-3.
While one can have reservations regarding this vision, L

thesis rests on a conception of the relationships between
guage which is not without interest:
In separating off from language, music has retained the ne
its formal structure and semiotic function: there would be no music if
language had not preceded it and if music did not continue to depend on it,
as it were, through a privative connection.53
We have here, in fact, a profound intuition which German musicolog

has explored since 1954,54 and which American musicology has recent
taken up again,"55 without, apparently, there being the least connection
between the three researchers.
Using the only text which we know has remained unchanged
throughout the whole history of music, Georgiades showed in effect how
each epoch treated the canonic words of the Mass, and how, by com-
parison, the style of each country was influenced by the structures, in par-
ticular those concerning rhythm and accentuation, of the corresponding
language. But above all, he demonstrated that instrumental musics, in
becoming increasingly emancipated from the vocal music dominant until
the Baroque, conserved the mark of the languages with which they had
been in contact for at least ten centuries. Norton has briefly conjured up
an analogous hypothesis under the evocative term 'linguistic preforma-
tion',56 which he develops in particular when he attempts to demonstrate
that the structure of sonata form is, in his opinion, analogous to the dif-
ferent moments of the rhetorical dispositio which Mattheson took up for
his own ends in 1739. Thus, the introduction corresponds to the exor-
dium, not always present; the exposition to the narratio and the divisio:
the development to the confirmatio and the confutatio; the recapitula-
tion and the coda to the peroratio." In this perspective, music is not,
strictly speaking, language or narrative but a specific symbolic form
which has, among other possibilities, the semiological capacity of imitat-
ing the allure of a narrative, a narrative style or mode, whose character
Abbate has captured perfectly in the expression 'a mode of narrating'.58
If this is so, it becomes legitimate to place oneself on the side of composi-

tional strategies and to see how the composer can partake of literary
narrative.
I had direct experience of this when the Quebecois composer Denys
Boulliane played me his symphonic work Le cactus rieur et la demoiselle
quisouffrait d'une soif insatiable (The Laughing Cactus and the Maiden
who Suffered from Unquenchable Thirst). Hearing this piece, con-
structed from a succession of developments which are constantly inter-
rupted, I immediately thought of Italo Calvino's novel Se una notte
" Ibid., 647.

4 Thrasybulos Georgiades, Musik und Sprache (Heidelberg, 1954).
5 Richard Norton, Tonality in Western Culture (University Park, PA, 1984).
56 Ibid., 65-71.
7 Ibid., 202-5.
8 Unsung Voices.
d'inverno un viaggiatore (If on a W

read shortly before. I said as mu
confirmed that he was inspired by
of this work.
This contemporary example demonstrates, in case anyone doubted it,
that it is possible for a composer to be inspired musically by a literary
style. And for my part, I have no trouble following Newcomb when he
suggests that Schumann was able to draw some of his ideas relating to
musical form from the form of Jean Paul's novels."5 The testimonies he
cites of critics of the era and the statements of Schumann himself fully
justify his analysis. These same elements, indicative of the Zeitgeist,
render altogether credible the idea that, in Carnaval, Schumann was in-
fluenced by the technique of Witz, 'the faculty by which subtle under-
lying connections are discovered in a surface of apparent incoherence, of
extreme discontinuity'.60 With the 'dancing letters', Schumann used 'a
single little cell of pitches . . to build up melodies that were superficially
different in rhythm, overall melodic contour, character, tempo, and so
on',6' the cell ensuring the subliminal connection between the constituent
parts of the work.
The point at which I have more difficulty following Newcomb is when
he terms a 'narrative game' the fact that Schumann plays with the formal
customs established at the end of the eighteenth century, by the Beethov-
enian quartet in particular. His analysis of the finale of the String
Quartet op. 41 no. 3 is perfectly convincing from the musical point of
view: 'In both refrain and movement as a whole the functions of the suc-
cessive events turn out not to be what they seemed to be when first en-
countered, and not what they should be according to the paradigmatic
plot.'62 But on account of the existence of a paradigmatic convention of
successions and transformations at work in a rondo, has he then the right
to speak of the Schumannesque 'narrative thread', of 'the narrative con-
ventions of the rondo'?
The question is not academic, for if we wish to understand not only the
specificity of music as a symbolic form but also the possible relationships
between the unfolding of music and literary narrative, it is important to
make a clear distinction between:
on the one hand, the fact, .quite legitimate in the framework of a poietics,
that a composer creates by starting from a 'conventional matrix', a potential
model established by the compositional practice current in a particular
epoch, which the innovator overturns and surpasses until he creates, by his
own influence, a new norm;
and, on the other hand, the idea that a formal innovation could appear under
the influence of a mode of literary narrative, Witz in the particular case of
Carnaval.
" 'Once More "Between Absolute and Programme Music"', 240.

60 'Strategies narratives et perception de la musique', 18.
6' Ibid.
62 Ibid., 20.
In his work, Newcomb does not confuse these tw

calling the first a 'narrative game', he risks dilu
influence of literature on Schumann in a mu
revealing as it is stimulating, but improperly an
narrative.
To these two factors I should like to add a third. Fragment 392 of th

Athenaeum says: 'Many musical compositions are nothing short of tran
lations of poems in the language of music.' But are they such because t
follow strictly the narrative structure of the literary account? Is it n
possible for music to take over a general idea put forward by a text?
If, in the case of Carnaval, Newcomb has established in a convin
manner the link with the spirit of Witz, it is possible to show that he
also directly inspired by a specific theme from Jean Paul's Flegeljahre
Musicological, biographical and historical research has of cou
elucidated the personal significance of the allusions to Asch, the h
town of Schumann's fiancee Ernestine; we know which of Jean Pa
characters - Walt and Vult - lie behind Eusebius and Florestan, tha
Chiarina is Clara and Estrella, Ernestine, etc. But why two composers i
this masked farandole? Generally we content ourselves with seein
homage to Chopin and Paganini, which is no doubt true if we refe
Schumann's criticism. But could there not be more to it?
Papillons was composed two years before Carnaval, and we know that
Schumann made the first ten pieces of this work correspond to ten para-
graphs of chapter 63 of Jean Paul's Flegeljahre, the masked ball.63
Elsewhere, Jacques Chailley has shown that there existed a sufficient
number of analogies between Jean Paul's text and the manifest content of
Carnaval to be able to affirm that this same chapter is also one of the
sources of inspiration for these piano pieces.64 It gives one a desire to
reread this text and to see if it does not explain the presence of the two
composers in a more organic way. The musical setting of the masked ball
seems actually to respond to a more profound aesthetic project.
Jean Paul writes:
A masked ball is perhaps the most sublime reality which life can invent in im-
itation of the play of poetry. Before the poet, all classes and all times are
equal; appearance is nothing but clothing, the interior all joy and sounds.
Thus men compose here the poetic form of themselves and of life .
Everything is praised in a single ethereal and joyous circle which is animated
by a magnificent - one might say 'prosodic' - movement: music, realm of
souls in the same way that the masks are the realm of bodies.65
This passage of the novel is important because it compares the object of

description in the novel with the poetic art itself and reverses the
customary perspective: in a masked ball, life is the imitation of art. And
here, this imitation calls upon two means: the clothes and the masks are
the poetic form of the body, the music the form of the soul. In setting to
63 Wolfgang Boetticher, Robert Schumann: Einfiihrung in Pers6nlichkeit und Werk (Berlin,

1941), 611-13.
64 Carnaval de Schumann (Paris, 1.971).
65 Quoted ibid., 31.
music Jean Paul's masked ball, Sch

ist's attempt to show, as one of his c
of humanity appears as nothing but
Jean Paul could only describe the ba
hear the voice of the souls hidden behind the masks.
In a letter of 17 April 1832 to his family, Schumann was anxious to
know whether, having read the final chapter of Flegeljahre, 'there is
perhaps correctly mirrored in the Papillons something of Wina's angelic
love, of Walt's poetic nature, and of Vult's lightning sharp soul'.66 There
is no reason to think that Carnaval, the great majority of whose pieces
carry the name of a character, does not respond to the same objective. In
his extensive study of Schumann's aesthetics, Lippman underlined the
importance, for the composer, of the concept of soul,67 and it is precisely
this which, according to Jean Paul, it is music's task to translate in a
masked ball.
In his critical practice, Schumann's poetic description, a mirror of the
effect on us of the work, was placed as an equivalent of the music.68 In h
compositional practice, the sounds make audible the soul of the fictional
characters. We can thus better understand why composers must figure i
this portrait gallery. Placed once again in relation to the statements of th
novelist, Carnaval, which ends with the March of the 'Davidsbiindler'
against the Philistines, is a kind of aesthetic manifesto, Schumann taking a
stand on the complementary relationships of music and literature: not
only is its structure inspired by literary Witz, but its intention is to make
heard the souls whose realm is music and which only the composer, as op-
posed to the novelist and because music is a transcendental art, has the
capacity to evoke.
I have developed this interpretive hypothesis by taking a passage from
the Flegeljahre. It seems to confirm one of Lippman's main conclusions:
'It will be literature that will appear as the basic formative force affecting
alike his music, his criticism and his aesthetic theory."' But in proposing
this hermeneutic from the side of poietics, I am well aware that I have
overstepped the point of departure which Newcomb provided in demon-
strating the analogy between the structures of Carnaval and the tech-
nique of Witz. I did not look in the Flegeljahre for a specific narrative
model for which the composer proposed a musical equivalent, but attemp-
ted to show that form and content (since here, the work clearly alludes to
people) follow together from an aesthetic project closely linked to the
teaching of the novelist Jean Paul. I do not claim that in Carnaval
Schumann tells us, note after note and piece by piece, that music is the
realm of souls. I am merely suggesting that, through the whole of this
work, this is what he wants to tell us, even if to understand it we must,
beyond hearing the work and thanks to historical hermeneutics, penetrate
the mysteries of his creative process.
66 Quoted in Edward A. Lippman, 'Theory and Practice in Schumann's Aesthetics', Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 17 (1964), 310-45 (p. 318).
67 Ibid., 319.
68 Ibid., 323.
69 Ibid., 342.
It will perhaps come as a disappointment that I hav

this investigation with such negative conclusions.
I have tried, in fact, to show that in itself, and a
many linguistic utterances, music is not a narrative a
tion of its formal structures in terms of narrati
superfluous metaphor. But if one is tempted to do it
shares with literary narrative that fact that, within i
another: this linearity is thus an incitement to a nar
narrativizes music. Since it possesses a certain cap
evocation, it is possible for it to imitate the semb
without our ever knowing the content of the discour
of narrative modes can contribute to the transformation of musical
forms. But the composer is a being immersed in his or her culture. W
the specific means of music and without necessarily trying to 're
something', the composer can aim to present to us, in music, an attitu
which it is then the responsibility of historical and cultural exeges
interpret.
But if the borrowings from narratology remain largely metaphorical,
perhaps, in conclusion, it would be worth asking oneself why musicology
at the present time is tempted to treat music as narrative. In a work
devoted to State support for the composition of contemporary music, a
brilliant French sociologist, Pierre-Michel Menger, writes: 'Can we ex-
plain the obsession with tonal feeling among contemporary listeners by
analogy with the apparently ineradicable taste for narration and story-
telling in literary and cinematic creation?'70 I have discussed elsewhere"7
what I believe are Menger's a priori aesthetics and I shall not go over
them again here. But his comparison seems to be indicative of the current
climate. In the course of a recent colloquium at IRCAM (April 1988), the
Belgian musicologist Celestin Deliige remarked that works of the post-
Webern period have Eclat or Momente as titles. One cannot deny, today,
that the great majority of the public has not gone along with this; on the
contrary it is seduced by a return to the sense of continuity which Berio
manifested very early on, including works significantly entitled Sequenza
or Chemins, and which seems to me to govern a work such as Ripons, not
that Boulez makes the slightest concession to tonality.72 If I dare risk a
culturally based explanation of the narratological temptation of recent
musicology, I shall say that in this post-modernist period, musicians and
musicologists are joining together in an attempt to conceive music ac-
cording to what it has in common with literary narrative, according to
this fundamental dimension of linearity of which it will then be necessary
to ask whether it indeed constitutes, for all the symbolic forms placed in
time, a universal constant of human pleasure.
University of Montreal
translated by Katharine Ellis
70 Le paradoxe du musicien (Paris, 1983), 280.

7 'Le paradoxe du sociologue (esthetique et perception dans les travaux de P. M. Menger)', Con-
trechamps, 10 (1989), 140-67.
72 See, for a specific study of Repons from this standpoint, Nattiez, '"Repons" et la crise de la
"communication" musicale contemporaine', Inharmoniques, 2 (1987), 193-210.

Nattiez Can One Speak

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Nattiez Can One Speak

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Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?

Author(s): Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Katharine Ellis

THE question of musical narrativity, while by no means new, is making a

The musical work, which is a myth coded in sounds instea

And, in connection with Ravel's Boldro:

I shall not conceal the fact that, until a few years a

To the extent that the notion of narrative is in the f

8 Claude Levi-Strauss, L'homme nu (Paris, 1971), trans. John and

In opposition to this starting position one could put that of Paul

" Ibid., 34.

not have access to the temporal dramas of existen

If so many composers have chosen to write music

17 Time and Narrative, i, 74.

Musical 'discourse' is placed in time. It

24 For example, Chatman, Story and Discourse, 9.

tempted by the 'narrative impulse', it is indee

If music is a language at all, it is a language of gest

27 Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, 'Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik', Gesammelte

constructed about them occupies

(1) a minimum of two objects, of wh

Night, in a toyshop. Everything is quiet. Suddenly, a toy wakes up. A tin

The examination of the 253 responses leads to the following observatio

a first section up to the arrival of the apprentice: 179 responses;

From the detail, we can note:

These observations would seem to bring an experimental justification

The conception of music as a composed novel, as a psychologically true course

understood by at least some listeners from the outset

Now, while our experiment regarding Dukas indeed seems to confirm

8 'Once More "Between Absolute and Programme Music"', 234.

presence, properly speaking, of a nar

(1) what Beethoven's narrative inten

Clearly it is impossible, within the limited framework of this article, to

'coming down again' to the level of more immedi

announced topic.'47 To use Abbate

A falling pitch, from relatively high t

Turning to the music of Elgar, H

While one can have reservations regarding this vision, L

We have here, in fact, a profound intuition which German musicolog

If this is so, it becomes legitimate to place oneself on the side of composi-

" Ibid., 647.

d'inverno un viaggiatore (If on a W

" 'Once More "Between Absolute and Programme Music"', 240.

In his work, Newcomb does not confuse these tw

To these two factors I should like to add a third. Fragment 392 of th

This passage of the novel is important because it compares the object of

63 Wolfgang Boetticher, Robert Schumann: Einfiihrung in Pers6nlichkeit und Werk (Berlin,

music Jean Paul's masked ball, Sch

It will perhaps come as a disappointment that I hav

70 Le paradoxe du musicien (Paris, 1983), 280.

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