narativitate beeth mahler

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I would like to thank Leo Treitler and Robert Bailey, who in the early stages of work for this articleoffered their valuable comments and advice, and to Janet Levy for her encouragement andsupport. For the final version I am grateful to the anonymous readers and, especially, to NicholasCook for their meaningful questions and suggestions; and to David Metzer for his attentive andconstructive reading.

1 Hayden White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, On Narrative , ed. W. J. Thomas Mitchell (Chicago, IL, and London, 1981), 1–23 (p. 1).

2 Leo Treitler, ‘What Kind of Story is History?’, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1989), 157–75 (p. 173).

3 Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’, Image–Music–Text ,trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), 79–124 (p. 79).

Music and Narrative Revisited:Degrees of Narrativity in Beethoven

and Mahler

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Narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general

human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing intotelling , the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimil-able to structures of meaning that are generally human.

Hayden White1

Music history is possible only insofar as the historian is able to show theplace of individual works in history by revealing the history contained

within the works themselves, that is, by reading the historical nature of works from their internal constitution.

Leo Treitler2

DURING the last two decades musicologists have drawn upon ideas devel-oped in literary criticism within the relatively new field of narratology.The justification for such applications has been the belief that thenarrative mode of thought is a common trait of most human cultures which amounts to a natural impulse to impose a certain kind of orderupon the perception and representation of the world. If, as RolandBarthes has observed, ‘narrative is international, transhistorical, trans-cultural: it is simply there like life itself’,3 and since music is one of thecultural expressions of life, it makes sense to assume that music toomight share with other cultural manifestations some basic character-istics by means of which people fashion their experiences. Hayden White’s broad definition quoted at the beginning of this article –‘narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of generalhuman concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing intotelling ’ – certainly allows a place for music among cultural artefacts that internalize in some way various kinds of narrative patterns.

Journal of the Royal Musical Association , 126 (2001) © Royal Musical Association


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As with many theories, the formal definitions of narrative vary widely even within the fields in which the concept originated, such as literary fiction, film and history. Despite that variety, there seems to be general

consensus on three minimal conditions for narrativity: that narrativeentails (1) a ‘representation’ or ‘recounting’ (2) of at least two real orfictional events or situations in a time sequence (3) by at least one –actual or implied – narrator.4 One more specific requirement is com-monly stipulated. Seymour Chatman (among many others) postulatesas ‘fundamental to narrative regardless of the medium’ the presenceof a ‘deep structure’ characterized by two independent time structur-ings: the ‘time sequence of plot events’, which he calls ‘story-time’, and‘the time of the presentation of those events in the text’, which he calls

‘discourse-time’. Thus for him (and for others) the global narrativeeffect of a text emerges from the tension created between those twodifferent time orders: the causal and chronological order and time-span of the events in the ‘story’ (that is, of the events considered inde-pendently of the actual text) and the temporal order and actualreading time in which these events are ‘told’ or ‘presented’ in the dis-course (that is, the ways in which the events actually unfold in thetext).5 The more specific applicability of these conditions to the defi-nition, presence and functioning of narrative, however, may differ dras-

tically from one narratologist to another.The necessity of the double-time structuring model as a condition fornarrativity has been challenged by many literary critics. While recog-nizing as essential for narrative the interaction of ‘story’, ‘discourse’and a third-dimension ‘narrating’, Genette focuses his analysis on ‘dis-course’, as he believes that the ‘narrative text . . . has no other tempo-rality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading’.6

Citing Genette, Shlomit Rimmon-Kenan adds that ‘both story-time andtext [discourse]-time may in fact be no more than pseudo temporal’,7

while according to Nelson Goodman ‘most of the time the reorderingaccomplished by the “discourse” does not basically change the narra-tive: . . . narrative reordered in any way at all is still narrative’.8 As forBarbara Herrnstein Smith, she questions other theorists’ implicationthat ‘prior to and independent of the narrative in question there

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4 See, for example, Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln, NE, 1987), 58; and idem ,Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin, New York and Amsterdam, 1982), 4.

5 See, for example, Seymour Chatman, ‘What Novels Can Do that Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)’, On Narrative , ed. Mitchell, 117–36 (p. 118), and his book on narrative, Story and Discourse:

Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1978); Shlomit Rimmon-Kenan,Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London and New York, 1989), 44: ‘time in narrative fictioncan be defined as the relations of chronology between story and text [i.e. discourse]’; GérardGenette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method , trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY, 1980), 33(quoting Christian Metz: ‘one of the functions of narrative is to invent one time scheme in termsof another time scheme’); and so on. As is well known, the terms ‘story’ and ‘discourse’ are trans-formations of the Russian Formalists’ original distinction between ‘fabula’ and ‘sjužet’.

6 Genette, Narrative Discourse , 34.7 Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction , 44.8 Nelson Goodman, ‘Twisted Tales; or Story, Study, and Symphony’, On Narrative , ed. Mitchell,

99–115 (p. 111). Goodman, however, recognizes and gives examples of cases in which ‘not every narrative will survive every reordering’ (ibid .).


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existed some particular determinate set of events in some particulardeterminate (untwisted) order or sequence’. Instead she proposes that the ‘basic stories . . . of narratives are often not abstract, disembodied,

or subsumed entities, but quite manifest, material, and particularretellings . . . of those narratives, constructed, as all versions are, by someone in particular, on some occasion, for some purpose, and inaccord with some relevant set of principles’.9 In other words, she mini-mizes the role of the double-time structuring in the production of narrative, giving priority to the conditions under which any narrativeis produced and perceived. And whereas for Frank Kermode story anddiscourse manifest themselves in narrative as two intertwined processes(‘the presentation of a fable and its progressive interpretation (which

of course alters it)’), for Paul Ricoeur narrative function is inextricably linked with temporality, which indeed constitutes the ‘ultimate refer-ent’ in the narrative activity.10 In so far as the discourse ‘elicits a con-figuration from a succession’ or ‘makes the succession of events intosignificant wholes’ unfolding between beginnings and endings, thusinvolving the concept of recollection, narrative discourse (or ‘the timeof fable-and-theme’ as Ricoeur calls it) is more deeply temporal thanthe mere chronological succession of events (or ‘episodic narrative’).

The concept of ‘narrator’s voice’ or ‘point of view’ has similarly been

seen as essential by some theorists and questioned by others. WhileGenette accords a very important role to ‘Voice’,11 Mieke Bal considersthat the difference in perspective or ‘focalization’ (the name she givesto ‘vision’ or ‘point of view’) between ‘a first-person narrative and athird-person narrative’ is minimal, and that the signs which signal theswitches of focalization from one level to another ‘can remainimplicit’.12 Referring to ‘the presence (or absence) of the narrating voice’, Karol Berger suggests that ‘those presented worlds from whicha personage is absent [certain still-life paintings and, implicitly, music]and artistic presentations in general encourage a fortiori the illusionof a human presence behind the work’s rhetoric’.13

Needless to say, depending on the models of narratology that musi-cologists have adopted, the approaches to, and definitions of, music asnarrative are just as diverse. For example, to define the ‘narrative quality’in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Anthony Newcomb has devised a concep-tion that combines Ricoeur’s notion of ‘narrative activity’, the RussianFormalists’ idea of ‘plot archetype’ and the musical features which Adorno found responsible for the novel-like quality of Mahler’s music,

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9 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories’, On Narrative , ed.Mitchell, 209–32 (pp. 224, 213–14).

10 Frank Kermode, ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’, On Narrative , ed. Mitchell, 79–97 (p. 82),and Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative Time’, ibid ., 165–86 (pp. 174–5). Both arguments are much morecomplex, but I have selected here minimal information related to the topic of the double-timestructuring.

11 See his chapter entitled ‘Voice’ in Narrative Discourse , 212–62.12 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto, 1985; 2nd edn, 1997),

142–3, 157–8.13 See Karol Berger, ‘ Diegesis and Mimesis : The Poetic Modes and the Matter of Artistic Presen-

tation’, Journal of Musicology , 12 (1994), 407–33 (pp. 431–2).


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specifically the composer’s loosening of formal schemata and the behav-iour of his themes as ‘characters’. For Newcomb, ‘the narrative quality of Mahler’s music comes most powerfully from the intersection of

formal paradigm, thematic recurrence and transformation, and . . . plot archetype’, which together reproduce a ‘quest paradigm’ characteristicof the Romantic Bildungsroman .14 Fred Maus, on the other hand, sees thenarrative quality of music from a perceiver’s point of view, likening thesuccession of ‘musical events as a series of fictional actions’ to the activity of following actions in a play or a novel.15 And Robert Samuels regardsmusical narration as a semiotic enterprise most effective at enhancinghermeneutically the ‘analytical project’ when it is constructed at the‘intersection of different levels of reference and different sorts of

codes’.16 His view of the musical discourse in the context of a generaltextuality enables him to state that ‘a musical text . . . is not a meresequence of sounds any more than a literary work is a sequence of words’, and thus it can be included among all other discourses.17

Very influential for the questioning of the validity of narratologicalapproaches to music is Carolyn Abbate’s book Unsung Voices , where sherejects musical narrative as a result of mere listening in terms of plot paradigm, event-sequence or reordering. More specifically, in her criti-cism that music lacks the ability to narrate because it ‘does not have a

past tense’ she joins Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s position that narrative fea-tures, rather than residing in the musical work, emerge from our own‘narrative impulse’, so that ‘in itself , . . . music is not a narrative and any description of its formal structures in terms of narrativity is nothing but superfluous metaphor’.18 Instead, Abbate narrows down the ‘signs of narrative in music’ to ‘rather a voice with a characteristic way of speak-ing’, and thus limits the music’s ability to narrate to rare ‘momentsthat can be identified by their bizarre and disruptive effect’.19 And

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14 Anthony Newcomb, ‘Narrative Archetypes in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony’, Music and Text: Critical Inquiries , ed. Steven Paul Scher (Cambridge, 1992), 118–36 (pp. 118–19). For Adorno’sformulation, see Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik (Frankfurt am Main,1960), 100–1; see also the entire Chapter 4, ‘Roman’ (pp. 85–111), and Chapter 8, ‘Der langeBlick’, esp. pp. 200–16; trans. Edmund Jephcott as Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (Chicago, 1992).

15 Fred Everett Maus, ‘Music as Narrative’, Indiana Theory Review , 12 (1991), 1–34 (p. 14). Healso provides a good discussion of the problems surrounding the notions of ‘story’ and ‘discourse’as applied to music; see esp. pp. 21–4.

16 Robert Samuels, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A Study in Musical Semiotics (Cambridge, 1995), 155.17 Robert Samuels, ‘Music as Text: Mahler, Schumann and Issues in Analysis’, Theory, Analysis

and Meaning in Music , ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge, 1994), 152–63 (p. 153).18 Carolyn Abbate, ‘What the Sorcerer Said’, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the

Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 30–60 (p. 52). Jean-Jacques Nattiez, ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?’, trans. Katharine Ellis, Journal of the Royal Musical Association , 115 (1990),240–57 (p. 257); originally published as ‘Peut-on parler de narrativité en musique?’, Canadian University Music Review: Alternative Musicologies/Les musicologies alternatives , 10 (1990), 68–91.Samuels ‘flatly contradict[s] one of Carolyn Abbate’s best-known and most productive observations that music “seems not to have a past tense” ’ by citing Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which Adorno hears ‘in the past tense’. See Samuels, ‘Music as Text’, 154. The past tense as essential fornarrativity has also been questioned by certain literary critics. Prince observes that ‘the preterit in a fictional narrative is not primarily an indicator of time’, since the ‘past tense in which theevents are narrated is transposed by the reader into a fictive present’ (cited from Mendilow). SeePrince, Narratology , 28–9.

19 Abbate, ‘What the Sorcerer Said’, 48, and ‘Music’s Voices’, Unsung Voices , 3–29 (p. 29).


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Lawrence Kramer shares with her the view that narrative in music con-sists of unusual, ‘disruptive’ processes rather than ‘normative’ ones,and can be found only in musical works that ‘explicitly call attention to

their own contingent, historical, rhetorical character’.20 While by no means comprehensive, the above sampling should give

a sense both of the diversity of approaches to music narrativity and of the problems that each approach may involve. These interrogations of the ‘dangerous liaisons’ (as Lawrence Kramer calls them)21 betweenmusic and narrative have prompted scholars to question and articulatetheir positions more carefully. A summary of the major warnings raisedby narrative interpretations of music would include: first, that musiclacks the semantic basis of the other disciplines (such as literature or

film) in which narrative has been theorized (e.g. Samuels, Nattiez);22second, that the few structural principles contributing to narrative that music might have in common with other disciplines (time sequence,accumulation of tension and resolution, etc.) are not sufficient for thecondition of music’s narrativity (e.g. Abbate, Maus); and third, that thestory/discourse tension and a ‘narrator’s voice’ or ‘point of view’ whichdefine narrative are absent in music (e.g. Maus).

Many of these objections have been neutralized or softened by otherscholars’ views. Leo Treitler and Fred Maus, for example, each in his

own way, have defended music’s capability of conveying ideas relatedto non-musical states and events. Since the language we use in our so-called purely musical analyses is already imbued with metaphors andtropes describing musical phenomena in terms similar to those of everyday actions, the gap between music communicating ‘intrinsic’ or‘intramusical’ ideas and ‘extramusical’ (including ‘narrative’) ones isnot as significant as it may seem.23 Moreover, many scholars agree that any narrative interpretation of a text – literary, historical or visual – isa ‘construction’ requiring a ‘narrative frame of mind’.24 Therefore, thecriticism that a narrative interpretation of a musical text is only afigment of our ‘narrative impulse’ does not necessarily demonstratemusic’s non-narrativity any more, or less, than that of any other field.Ultimately, this questioning brings a more informed acknowledgment of the disciplinary boundaries of narrative, to which the musical nar-ratological enterprise was originally conceived as an antidote. By turning back full circle, we must acknowledge the differences, yet makethem work profitably for both fields: rather than prove similarities, wecan validate attempts to study those differences, and thus legitimate


20 Lawrence Kramer, ‘“As if a voice were in them”: Music, Narrative, and Deconstruction’,Music as Cultural Practice 1800–1900 (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1990), 176–213 (p. 189).

21 Lawrence Kramer, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: The Literary Text in Musical Criticism’, 19th Century Music , 13 (1989–90), 159–67.

22 Nattiez, ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?’, 244.23 See Maus, ‘Music as Narrative’, and Leo Treitler, ‘Language and the Interpretation of

Music’, Music and Meaning , ed. Jenefer Robinson (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1997), 23–56 (esp.pp. 45–50).

24 See, for example, Samuels, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony , 135, but also Hayden White, ‘The Valueof Narrativity’, and Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Litera- ture (Chicago, IL, 1988).


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further inquiries into them. The major question that remains to beanswered for each case of narrative reading of music is whether an ana-lytical methodology based on the analogy between music and narrative

would bring significantly more interesting results than what conventional music analysis has already been doing for instrumental music– seeing musical events as part of a motivated musical plot. As Abbateasks: if any ‘event-sequence’ or ‘any text that induces mental compari-sons with a paradigm’ can be defined as a narrative, or, in other words,if all music is narrative, what is the value of a ‘critical methodology that generates such uniformity and becomes a mere machine for namingany and all music?’25 Similarly leading questions, such as Maus’s ‘What are the shared qualities that attract music scholars to certain works as

examples of “musical narrative”?’ or, in other words, ‘What are the con-ditions under which we need to invoke narrativity in our analyses, orunder which our “narrative impulse” is stronger?’ remain pertinent today. And these questions, in turn, need to be answered in a historicalcontext. Thus we would accomplish what Leo Treitler has recom-mended in the quotation cited at the beginning of this article, ‘reveal-ing the history contained within the works themselves, that is, . . .reading the historical nature of works from their internal constitution’.Or, as Lawrence Kramer has put it: ‘To speak credibly of narratogra-

phy in music we need to relate musical processes to specific, historically pertinent writing practices.’26

This study brings yet another attempt to analyse potential narrativequalities of music. My approach is based on two premises. First, sinceliterary narratological theories are just as much interpretative criticalextrapolations about texts as are our attempts to talk about music innarrative or cultural terms, the demonstration of music’s narrativity through an analogy with literary narrative is legitimate. And, second,inquiries into the narratological properties of music must be steepedas deeply as possible in questions specific to our discipline, that is, they must translate inspiring questions from other disciplines into questionsthat only we can ask and answer. Therefore, it is not necessary to apply these theories wholesale; rather, it is only by understanding how musicnarrative is similar to, and different from, other kinds of narrativestructures, and how various musics differ in their degree of narrativity,that we can profitably develop new ways of discussing musical discoursespecific to our discipline.

To demonstrate the potential of application of narrative models tomusic, I have chosen to compare two case-studies – the first move-

ments of Beethoven’s Sixth (‘Pastoral’) Symphony and of Mahler’sNinth Symphony, both in ‘sonata form’ – as representing, respectively,the differences between Classical and late Romantic narrative

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25 Abbate, Unsung Voices , xi.26 Lawrence Kramer, ‘Musical Narratology: A Theoretical Outline’, Classical Music and Post-

modern Knowledge (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 98–121 (p. 101).


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capabilities.27 In spite of (or in opposition to) the known programmaticmeanings associated with both works (Beethoven’s overt, Mahler’sspeculatively imposed), I look at these movements as pure instrumental

music, unencumbered by texts, programmes, biography or narrativesexplicitly or elusively provided by the composers or by critics. This focushelps to establish criteria for defining higher or lesser degrees of nar-rativity in these musical works. To ‘relate musical processes to specific,historically pertinent writing practices’ (as Kramer puts it), I start withan evaluation of the ‘background changes in musical practice’ duringthe nineteenth century, suggesting that a purely musical basis is gener-ally responsible for the increasingly narrative condition of Romanticinstrumental music, with Mahler’s as an extreme case. Subsequently, I

organize the two main large sections of the article according to the nar-ratological concepts of ‘story’ and ‘discourse’. Under the heading‘Story’, I abstract from the two works the ‘musical events’ themselvesand analyse their meanings from the simplest to the more complex –from explicit to implicit – semiotic levels (morphological, syntactic andsemantic) as a demonstration of what makes them ‘events’. And under‘Discourse’, I examine the particular mode of unfolding (the presen-tation) of these events within the ‘musical formal discourse’ of therespective movements and the capabilities of the ‘discourse’ itself to

produce meanings through ‘gestural and intertextual connotations’and through ‘temporal manipulations’. The discussion will locate thedegrees of narrativity in the two pieces in the interaction between thesemantic capabilities of the ‘events’ of the ‘story’ and the ‘discursive’techniques employed by the two composers. This approach situates theorigins of meaning in musical processes based in the musical featuresanchored in the historical context, consciously leaving behind some of the older premisses of music story-making from which we are moreremoved.28 Ultimately, one of the principal aims of this study is todemonstrate that narrative interpretations of music are triggered not only by what Jean-Jacques Nattiez calls the ‘narrative impulse’, but alsoby the special qualities of the music itself.29 This narrative-based model will show aspects of music ignored by ‘conventional’ analysis, and willallow musical works to reach the hermeneutic textual opening that willbetter inscribe them among other cultural discourses of their time.


27 My choice of the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony as representative of Classical stylistic features shouldnot imply a statement about Beethoven’s style in general, since, of course, other of his symphoniessuch as the Third or the Fifth are closer to the Romantic ideal. Implicit in my choice is the idea

that if narrative characteristics were to appear in a Classical symphonic piece, they would most likely show themselves at their strongest in a programmatic piece. Although I do not consider theprogramme here, the piece serves better than others my purpose of illustrating how the differ-ences in musical characteristics between the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony’s Classical features and Mahler’sNinth influence the different degrees of their narrativity. Particular pieces by Mozart or Haydnmight present higher degrees of narrativity than the piece I have chosen, but these other casesshould be studied on their own.

28 Such premisses include biographical, psychological and contextual situations that might enter into narrative interpretations of music.

29 Nattiez, ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?’, 245. As mentioned above, he believes that narrative interpretations of music are artificial constructions of the critics, ‘superfluousmetaphors’ triggered by what he identifies as their ‘narrative impulse’. See also note 18 above.


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BACKGROUND: NINETEENTH-CENTURY MUSICAL PRACTICE

As some scholars have pointed out, in nineteenth-century instrumental

music the role played in the production of meaning by the local surfacedetail becomes gradually more important than that of the underlyingtonal argument. In Rose Subotnik’s words, ‘essentially nonimplica-tional musical parameters . . . other than harmony, such as melody,dynamics, and timbre’ establish ‘a series of analogous structures, what seem to be other, autonomous layers of meaning. . . . This emphasis onthe broad structure, or total, concrete configurations . . . helps toobscure the temporal connections of tonal argument and to limit thelatter as a source of meaning.’30 This shift of emphasis can be attrib-uted to changes in two main musical domains: the nature of the the-matic materials and the ways in which they are combined to form amusical discourse.

In later Romantic instrumental works, for example, the number of thematic and motivic materials used increases, and the relationshipsbetween these materials take over some of the structural role played inClassical music by the tonal syntax.31 Moreover, in line with the nine-teenth-century broadening of stylistic interests, these materials areoften highly referential and thus more heterogeneous. This is particu-larly the case with Mahler, in whose works the overt use of allusions and

borrowings from various low and high genres, as well as of ‘topics’ fromolder and newer music, engenders multiple levels of referentiality,resulting in an unprecedented semantic saturation in which notions of topics, gestures, character, rhetoric and genre become essential for thedefinition of those materials.32 This referentiality also leads to astronger differentiation, and thus to a higher morphological and

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30 Rose Rosengard Subotnik, ‘Romantic Music as Post-Kantian Critique: Classicism, Romanti-cism, and the Concept of Semiotic Universe’, On Criticizing Music: Five Philosophical Perspectives , ed.Kingsley Price (Baltimore, MD, 1981), 74–98 (pp. 84–5). In a different context, Leonard B. Meyerhas made a similar observation. He distinguishes between ‘primary parameters’, which he calls‘syntactic’ because they depend on syntactic constraints (melody, rhythm, harmony), and‘secondary parameters’, which he calls ‘statistical’ because they can have only a ‘statistical’ charac-terization (dynamic level, tempo, texture, timbre, rate of activity, register, etc.). Thus he writes:‘As rejection of convention led to a weakening of syntax . . . secondary parameters became moreand more important for the generation of musical processes and the articulation of closure.’ Seehis Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Philadelphia, PA, 1989), 14–16. Also relevant ishis following statement: ‘Complementing the trend toward syntactically weakened harmonic andtonal relationships was an increase in the relative importance of secondary parameters in theshaping of musical process and the articulation of musical form’ (p. 303).

31 Leonard Meyer has also recognized this: ‘The increasing importance of motivic relationships

during the nineteenth century was in part a response to a gradual attenuation of the structuringprovided by tonal syntax.’ See ibid ., 271.

32 This is not to say that music prior to Mahler’s was semantically empty. Kofi Agawu has shownan unsuspected richness and variety of topics in, for example, Mozart’s instrumental music. Seehis Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, NJ, 1991). Also, as James Webster observes: ‘In the eighteenth century, these “gestural” aspects of music were understoodas part of a more general quality that has since become unfamiliar to us: that of rhetoric . . . . [E]very instrumental work was composed and understood within a context of genre, Affekt , and “topoi”(topics), which in principle enabled its ideas and gestures to be located within a network of traditional associations, including dance types and distinctions of social status.’ See James Webster, Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style (Cambridge, 1991), 125. For otheranalyses of the variety of topics present in Mozart’s, Beethoven’s and Haydn’s music, see Leonard


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semantic individuality of the units of meaning. Hence, the definitionsand functions of themes and motives are affected more than before by their semantic, rather than syntactic, import.33

Concerning their mode of unfolding, these new types of materialsentail new connective techniques that compensate for the decline of conventional syntax and supplement the lack of traditional tonal plots. Although the large-scale structural pillars may still be articulated by recognizable conventional formal and tonal outlines, their importanceis often undermined by the diversified import of information carriedby the events filling the spaces in between. The multitude of thematicbuilding-blocks cannot be contained within the older boundaries; they create their own freer formal patterns, which sometimes contradict the

expected coincidences of form and content. The typical functioning of sections as ‘thematic’ or ‘developmental’ often becomes blurred,because of changes in the methods of both thematic exposition anddevelopmental procedure. On the other hand, the developing variation which traditionally underpinned developmental and transitional sec-tions is now transformed, as Dahlhaus has shown, by Brahms, Liszt and Wagner ‘into a means of introducing thematic material’,34 which in turnis then often worked out through varied repetition or thematic trans-formation. Much more than the ‘developmental variation’ which had

constituted the principal means of development early in the nineteenthcentury, varied repetition highlights semantic individuality: unlike theformer’s syntactic fragmentation, which removes from the materialstheir original semantic affiliations, the latter’s operation through therecurrence of thematic materials as wholes subjected to character trans-formations depends on, and reinforces, the semantic dimension. It ison the basis of these processes of thematic transformation that pro-gramme music has achieved some of its primary semantic goals.

In addition to these syntactic changes, new processes and strategiesparticipate in the musical discourse. Pieces are characterized by theexistence of several – often antagonistic – discourses, each definedmore by gestural parameters (Meyer’s ‘secondary’ and Subotnik’s‘nonimplicational’ musical parameters) than by the overall harmonicscheme.35 The various temporal orders concurrently unfolding


———Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form and Style (New York, 1980); Wye J. Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (Chicago, IL, 1983); and Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Marked- ness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 1994). The difference, as Isee it, between Mahler’s and Classical music’s referentiality is that while most topics in Classical

music are an intrinsic part of the contemporary vocabulary, and therefore their recognition andinterpretation are most often direct and univalent, some of the topics used by Mahler are ana-chronistic within the prevalent contemporary musical styles, so that their relationship with theircontext is more complex and thus generates multivalent levels of semantic meanings.

33 Although these characteristics are most valid for Mahler’s music, the origins of these changescan be observed earlier in the century, for example in Beethoven’s late works and in the musicof Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner.

34 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music , trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, CA, 1989),256.

35 Leonard Meyer uses the distinction between ‘scripts’ and ‘plans’ to characterize the differ-ence between Classical and Romantic discourse. Script is a structure which forms an intercon-nected whole, in which the individual parts are very dependent on one another. Plans, on the


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encourage polysemic interpretations of the musical discourse itself. Onthe whole, in Subotnik’s words, ‘once tonality ceases to function as auniversal norm, music clearly loses its capacity to project itself as a semi-

otically autonomous structure. . . . The romantic musical work seemsto shift from an abstractly logical to an empirical, and in many ways lin-guistic, ideal of meaning.’36 In other words, the more individualizedand semantically articulated the materials become, and the freer they remain from specifically musical forms, the more ‘natural’ or ‘closer tomore general mental patterns’ (among which are narrative patterns)the music is likely to sound.

NARRATIVE INTERPRETATION: ‘STORY ’ AND ‘DISCOURSE’

In light of the above discussion I propose that the two musical cat-egories that changed during the nineteenth century – the nature of themusical materials and their way of unfolding – can be said to corre-spond to the most commonly posited basic dichotomy necessary for aliterary narrative: the ‘story’ (variously called ‘fabula’, ‘histoire’ or ‘thenarrated’) and the ‘discourse’ (variably called ‘sujet’, ‘récit’ or ‘the nar-rating’).37 According to most narratologists, ‘story’ designates thecontent (the signified) of the narrative, or the narrated events

abstracted from their disposition in the text and reconstructed in theirchronological order. To abstract the ‘story’ from a narrative means toisolate the events from the discourse in which they actually occur andto describe them as ‘nondiscursive, nontextual given[s], something

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———other hand, are ‘repositories for general information that will connect events that cannot beconnected by use of an available script or by a standard causal chain expansion’. He then uses theopposition between the Classical (syntactic) ‘scripts’, based on primary (learnt, conventional)parameters of music, and Romantic (statistical) ‘plans’, based on secondary parameters which‘shape experience with minimal dependence on learned rules and conventions’. See Meyer, Style and Music , 245, 208–9. According to this view, the syntactic script of sonata form stipulates tonaland functional relationships more than plans do. On the contrary, in Romantic music forms andprocesses are increasingly shaped by secondary parameters and, therefore, are based on plans,not on scripts (p. 246). When plans are preferred, script constraints become burdensome and,therefore, non-coincidence between the ‘statistical’ and syntactic’ climax is a characteristic of Romantic music (p. 308).

36 Subotnik, ‘Romantic Music as Post-Kantian Critique’, 82, 84. In what I see as an argument akin to Subotnik’s observation of a ‘shift’ to a ‘linguistic ideal of musical meaning’, Daniel K. L.Chua traces the origins of the turn of ‘music into language’ to the end of the sixteenth century in the shift of music from the ‘quadrivium to the trivium, that is, from the immutable structure

of medieval cosmos to the linguistic relativity of rhetoric, grammar and dialectics’. This, in turn,he states, led the ‘Romantics to reverse the process by turning language into music’, thus estab-lishing the new ontology of instrumental (absolute) music. It was the ‘stylistic relativity inherent in the trivium’ and the ‘heterogeneous form of discourse’ of instrumental music that promptedFriedrich Schlegel’s analogy between ‘the method of the novel’ and ‘that of instrumental music’.See Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), 34–5, 68–72.

37 This dichotomy originates in the work of the Russian Formalists. For various definitions see,for example, Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (The Hague, 1965); SeymourChatman, Story and Discourse ; Genette, Narrative Discourse ; Prince, Narratology and A Dictionary of Narratology ; Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY,1981), esp. Chapter 9, ‘Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Literature’, 169–87; Rimmon-Kenan,Narrative Fiction ; and Bal, Narratology .


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which exists prior to, and independently of, narrative presentation, and which the narrative then reports’.38 The ‘discourse’ consists of themeans (the signifier) by which the content is communicated in the

actual text, that is, the mode of unfolding of the events, or ‘the rep-resentation of these events in the process of “telling” ’.39 As mentionedearlier, some critics view the narrative signification of a text as depend-ing on the tension created between the temporal aspects of its story (the events of which it is made) and those of the discourse or unfold-ing in which the events are embedded in that particular text.

Accepting for now at face value the proposed analogy between musicand literary narration, we may say that the same is true for music: boththe nature of the materials and the type of discourse used by a com-

poser will determine how the piece will sound, and will contribute tothe differentiation of one piece from another in terms of their narra-tivity. But how can the musical materials and their sequence in thepiece be closer to, or further away from, the narrative categories of story and discourse? For, following Abbate’s and Nattiez’s warnings, it is not enough just to call (as we often do) metaphorically the musicalmaterials ‘musical events’, and the sequence of their unfolding in the work ‘discourse’. A thorough examination of Beethoven’s and Mahler’smaterials from their simplest morphological structure to their more

complex semantic levels of meaning, and of the ways in which they unfold in the two sonata-form movements, will demonstrate that,according to this analogy, Mahler’s piece has a higher degree of nar-rativity than Beethoven’s.

STORY

A description of the thematic materials of a musical piece parallels inmany ways a similar abstraction of the ‘events’ of a ‘story’ from theactual narrative in which they are embedded. Such a parallel is evenmore persuasive in music if we recognize the multi-levelled semioticmeanings of the musical materials, starting from the most basic –morphological – level and proceeding to the next – what I call syntac-tic and semantic – levels. Note that here we are moving vertically or par-adigmatically from one level of meaning to another within each event,and we are not accounting (yet) for the horizontal or syntagmatic tem-poral unfolding of events. A brief comparison between the types of materials used by Beethoven in the first movement of his ‘Pastoral’Symphony (as representative of the Classical type) and those used by

Mahler in the first movement of his Ninth Symphony (a late Romantic


38 Culler, The Pursuit of Signs , 171. An example of events in the ‘story’ would be: mother killsfather; mother is arrested; son commits suicide. It can be argued that composers themselvesconceive thematic materials as the basic events from which they build a narrative, as often they sketch those materials and then work out how to present them in sequence.

39 Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction , 3. One example of discursive emplotting of the previousevents would be: ‘Right before the son committed suicide, his uncle told him that his mother wasin prison because she had killed his father.’


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work) will serve as a starting-place for the illustration of how the differ-ences in the nature of the thematic events between the two composers’ works contribute to different narrative discourses in the respective

pieces.40In both movements the first themes are clearly related to the smaller

cells appearing in the first bars of the respective symphonies. But therelationship between cells, motives and themes is different in each case.In Beethoven (see Example 1), the cells and motives appear from the very beginning within theme 1 and as part of, or belonging to, thetheme. Cells a–g are of a wide variety and, although related, are clearly defined through stable primary parameters of interval content, rhythmand/or implied harmony, or through combinations of those par-

ameters. Once defined, these features characterize the respective cellsevery time they are used, and give them a stable structural definition, whether they are incorporated within motives and themes or usedseparately as fragmented materials for transitions or developmental working out.41 Cell a, for example, is defined through both contourand rhythm, and it preserves this morphological definition whether it is used as part of the theme or sequentially as part of the transition at bars 54ff. Cell b seems to have a mostly rhythmic definition, as does cellc, whereas both cell d and its appendix, e, preserve their intervals and

rhythm when they reappear in the development section. The definitionat the level of the cell is projected onto the larger-unit levels of motivesand themes, whose similarly clear, unambiguous (most often symmet-rical) morphological features remain stable. It is perhaps because of the variety of possibilities presented by such morphologically stable(and thus easily recognizable) yet versatile small entities that thematerials of the symphony’s theme 1 are the only ones used in thedevelopment section, in contrast with the materials of theme 2, basedmostly on cell h, which is less distinguishable morphologically and,perhaps for this reason, meaningful only in the context of theme 2 asa whole, not for developmental purposes (see also Table 1).

The relationship between, and interdependence of, these materials,particularly as exemplified by theme 1, embodies Schoenberg’s notionof ‘developing variation’.42 Schoenberg suggests that the relationshipbetween cells, motives and themes presupposes a development orgrowth of the basic cells into motives and themes through ‘developing variation’, which in turn requires the themes to assume furtherdevelopments, elaborations or solutions, without which they are not

204 VERA MICZNIK

40 For other general comparisons between the nature of Beethoven’s and Mahler’s music, seePaul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Meisenheim, 1921; repr. Tutzing, 1969), 11–23; and Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik , 87ff.

41 Adorno situates the ‘classical conception of the symphony’ with its ‘well defined, well circum-scribed diversity’ in the concern for economy originating in the Aristotelian and Cartesianrationalism. See Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik , 100.

42 Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition , ed. Gerald Strang and LeonardStein (Boston, MA, and London, 1967), 8ff. For further discussions of the principle of develop-ing variation, see Walter Frisch, Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1984), and Michael Musgrave’s review of the same book in Journal of the American Musicological Society , 38 (1985), 631.


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fulfilled. In other words, in Beethoven neither the themes nor themotives are self-determined: the themes are ‘bound to the conse-quences which have to be drawn’ from the implications suggested by thecells and motives,43 and the cells and motives are always perceived asparts of the larger units within which they were originally embedded.


43 Schoenberg, Fundamentals , 103.

100

etc.

i

72

67

theme 2

8va

h

41

g

7

cresc.

f c

1 a b

c d

e

a

b Allegro ma non troppo

theme 1

Example 1. Beethoven, Symphony no. 6, first movement, themes 1and 2, showing motives.


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206 VERA MICZNIK

T A B L E 1

B E E T H O V E N , S

Y M P H O N Y N

O . 6 , F

I R S T M O V E M E N T : O V E

R A L L F O R M A L A N D T O N A L O

U T L I N E

b a r n o s .

1

2 9

5 4

6 7

1 0 0

1 3 9

1 5 1

1 6 3

1 9 1

2 0 9

2 3 7

2 7 9

3 1 2

3 4 6

3 7 2

4 1 4

4 2 1

4 4 0

5 1 2

t h e m e s

t h . 1

t h . 1

t r a n s .

t h . 2

c l o s i n g

[ t h . l m a t e r i a l s ]

t h . 1

t h . 1

t r a n s . t h . 2

c l o s i n g c o d a

m o t i v e s

a b c d e f c

a b c d e g a

h

i e

a b

a b

c

c

a b c

c

a b f

a b c d

e f c

a b c d

e g a

h

i e

a

a b c e

e c a / e

n a r r a t i v e c o n t e n t /

p a s t o r a l t o p i c ;

f u l l e r

l y r i c a l

c r o w d s

c y c l i c r e p e t i t i v e g r a d u a l i n t e n s i fi c a t i o n

s ,

p a s t o r a l

f u l l e r

l y r i c a l

r e l a x e d c o n t e n t m e n t

f u n c t i o n

d a n c e

t o p i c

g o a w a y

n a t u r e , o n o m a t o p o e i c c u c k o o s o u n d s

t o p i c

t o p i c

k e y

F m a j o r

v i – V

/ V

C m a j o r

V / F V / B

B

D

G

E

A – V

/ F

F

V / B

B

F

‘ s o n a t a f o r m ’

e x p o s i t i o n

d e v e l o p m e n t

r e t r a n s .

r e c a p i t u l a t i o n

• •


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While both themes and motives display strong morphological and syn-tactic definitions, semantic autonomy occurs only at the level of thethemes, not of the motives. This can be seen in the Beethoven

example, where throughout the ‘developing variations’ the motivicfragments retain their morphological and syntactic individuality without, however, changing their character, and it is only in the reca-pitulation, when they get reassembled in the theme, that the wholeregains its broader, semantic meaning. The new synthesis provided by the themes in the recapitulation, however, would have not achieved afulfilment of the themes’ promises, as it were, had the themes not beenbroken down and shown the potentials of their component parts, from which they eventually rose again. Thus a great part of the fulfilment of

the promise of the themes, or, in other words, the musical dramaticargument in such a piece, depends not so much on the acquisition of new characters or meanings by the cells and motives as on the syntac-tic working out and resolution of the implications of the themes, whichgain dramatic dimensions through the situations provided by the tonalplot.44 This is why the tonal plot in Classical music can be said to bethe main provider of narrative design.

The main materials of the first movement of Mahler’s Ninth Sym-phony show quite a different morphological definition. Mahler uses a

larger amount of thematic material, which can be divided into twotypes: three basic (longer) themes and several distinct (shorter)motives (see Examples 2 and 3). While, as in Beethoven, the materialsare organically interrelated, their relationship is realized here throughfreer, less obvious connections: the cells shared by the main themes andmotives are amorphous, non-rhythmicized intervals originating in theintroduction (see, for example, the pervading descending majorsecond, and the ascending third in motive X and theme a). Still unlikeClassical themes, the smaller motivic units from which Mahler’s themesspin out do not have fixed definitions, but contain only basic interval-lic cells in various orderings. Theme a, for example, proceeds from thedescending major second f ' –e' and expands upwards through theminor third f ' –a' , then to the fourth b' (all of which are also present in motive X). While this pattern within the themes reproduces theprocess of accumulation from small cells to ever larger units from thedeveloping variation principle, the amorphous nature of the constitu-tive parts and their unpredictable, free combinations within the themescontradict a traditional clear-cut, unequivocal structural definition.Even the apparently regular rhythmic patterning of the theme in bars

7–11 breaks off after bar 11, and the motivic combinations unfold inasymmetrical, freer, spinning-out gestures, which render difficult further symmetrical divisions of the theme’s continuation up to thefirst imperfect cadence at bar 17.


44 This corresponds to Meyer’s ‘script’.


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A similar situation characterizes the second theme (theme b; see

Example 2), as well as future appearances of the themes within the move-ment: general shapes remain recognizable, yet details of the motiviccombinations vary each time. As Adorno puts it, while the ‘generalprofile of the Mahlerian themes stays generally intact’, the smallest elements are so variable and unstable that the themes become ‘forms with mobile motivic content’.45 In addition, since most of the time thethemes are not broken down and developed in the conventional sense

208 VERA MICZNIK

45 Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik , 117, 118.

Example 2. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, themes a–c.

58

cresc.

2 2

etc.

theme c

54

2 2 2

cresc.

33

cresc.

2

theme b

29

dim.

2

cresc.

133

2 2

theme a

7

2

2

2 2


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but return episodically as slightly transformed refrains (always at thesame pitch-level – theme a in D major, theme b always with the samepitches), they never lose their semantic identity. Unlike Beethoven’sthemes, Mahler’s do not project or gain fulfilment by being reassembledafter having been dismantled. They are and remain autonomous and


Example 3. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, motives X, Y,M, W.

W

(B ): I 6/4 V

96

8

2 2 2

2

vln, fl.

B : vii/ii V V 3 9

M

92

2 2

W

D: I

trp.

/V 6/4 (V)

44

8

2

2

M'

i (D min.)

vlns

39

3

2

2 2

2

X

Y

hp

hn3

4


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independent throughout, they exist in and for themselves, and they aretransformed into other versions of their own selves rather than into partsof themselves.46 Through their component units, which vary in size and

content, never remain exactly alike and are freely combined, the themesgain a rhapsodic, improvisatory quality, which contributes to theirsemantic individualization and clearly distinguishes them from the moreformal, syntactic individuality that Classical themes project.

Also drastically contrasting with the economy of materials inBeethoven, in Mahler a large number of independent motives usedalong with the themes but not originating in them play important struc-tural functional roles (see X, Y, M and W in Example 3). These motivesare not strictly derived from the fragmentation of the themes, that is,

they are not parts of the themes and do not appear as such within them.Though organically connected with the themes by sharing with themmany of the amorphous cells and contours mentioned above (especi-ally the descending major-second appoggiatura), these motives act asseparate, self-contained, well-individualized entities, which coexist inparallel with, or are superimposed upon, the themes, and interact withthem as independent partners. Whereas the intervallic content of somemotives (X and Y) is more stable than that of others (M and W) they still remain always individualized, especially in terms of secondary par-

ameters (contour, rhythmic outline, timbre, type of attack, texture), which in turn endow them with specific syntactic functions. This stableassociation of a minimal set of characteristics with a typical functioningof a motive renders these materials syntactically and semantically moreautonomous and self-contained. As we shall see, unlike in Beethoven,much of the plot of the movement depends on various levels of inter-play among the main themes and these motives as hierarchically equalunits of meaning.

In many traditional analyses the description of thematic materials would stop at the morphological or syntactic musical levels of definitionreached at this point. However here I consider musical formations asmulti-levelled signs, which signify beyond their morphological and syn-tactic definitions at a level that I call ‘semantic’. This will enable us tosee that to the morphological difference between Beethoven’s andMahler’s materials corresponds also a strong semantic differentiation. While it is rather difficult to show how music can convey semantic input or, in other words, how musical formations can represent or stand forideas other than musical, there exist more or less recognized codesaccording to which both composers and listeners associate by con-

vention certain musical ideas with extramusical concepts. These codesmay be syntactic, as part of a system of organization such as the tonalsystem, or semantic, on the basis of references to notions shared withexperiences outside music.

210 VERA MICZNIK

46 In this respect they resemble more Schoenberg’s definition of ‘melody’, which ‘extends itself by continuation rather than by elaboration’; ‘All these restrictions and limitations produce that independence and self-determination because of which a melody requires no addition, continuationor elaboration.’ Schoenberg, Fundamentals , 102.


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Roland Barthes’s concepts of denotation and connotation seemhelpful for bridging the gap between the musically specific (morpho-logical or syntactic) description and what may seem subjective readings

of semantic meanings. Barthes presents a two-level semiotic system: afirst level, at which relationships between the signified and signifier areone-to-one and explicit, and can be decoded through denotation, anda second level, at which the entire signs of the first system become thesignifiers, which get attached to various other signifieds, creating aninfinite chain of referential, associative meanings that can be said to lieimplicitly within the first, denotative level. These meanings (which Icall semantic) are connotative signs which, by moving through a seriesof signifying chains from the original sources to music, allow meanings

shared by music with other domains of reality to be transformed intomusical meanings. The understanding and interpretation of how thesemeanings originated, in turn, requires historical knowledge.47 ForBarthes, ‘connotation is the way into the polysemy of the classic text,to that limited plural on which the classic text is based’; ‘rescuing’ theconnotations of a text, finding their lost origins, is what makes it poss-ible to read its infinite meanings.48

Although Barthes’s theories about the importance of the connotativelevels of meaning apply mostly to language, literature, myth and other

signifying systems, the analogy with music is not far-fetched. The noun‘rose’ at the denotative level means for everyone the flower of that name; then syntactically it may act as a subject; and at the connotativelevel it may mean ‘blood’ to one person or ‘love’ or ‘optimism’ toanother. So may a waltz motive simply ‘be’ or ‘denote’ certain pitchesand rhythms; it may denote an ‘opening motive’ at a syntactic denota-tive level; but it may also suggest a whole gamut of additional functions,moods or dance associations at the connotative level.49 The endowment


47 For definitions of denotation and connotation in the sense used here see, for example,Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology , trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York, 1967),89–94; idem, S/Z: An Essay , trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1974), 6–11; and Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN, 1976), 54–7. I am adapting the sense of these terms by considering ‘denotative’ the most basic syntactic musical features that any trained musician wouldrecognize. It is not always possible to draw a strict delineation between the syntactic and semanticlevels, since some of the concepts we use in describing the specifically musical syntactic processesconsist anyway of metaphors or analogies to the outside world. While in some situations we must content ourselves with acknowledging the ambiguity, most important in defining the significationof the observed phenomenon is making a decision about the relative weight of the purely musicalcomponents (tonality, rhythm, melody, etc.) and the referential (‘extramusical’) ones. (On thissubject see, for example, Fred Everett Maus, ‘Music as Drama’, Music Theory Spectrum , 10 (1988),56–73.) For other views on semantic signification in music see, for example, Jean-Jacques Nattiez,

‘Y a-t-il une diégèse musicale?’, Musik und Verstehen , ed. Peter Faltin and Hans-Peter Reinecke(Cologne, 1973), 247–57; Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘Understanding Music’, On Criticizing Music , ed.Price, 55–73; and Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs , 23–5. Agawu’s concept of ‘introversive semiosis’(borrowed from Jacobson) would correspond to my morphological and syntactic (denotative)levels, while his ‘extroversive semiosis’ would correspond to my semantic (connotative) level.

48 Barthes, S/Z , 8.49 Music lacks denotation in the traditional sense of the word; it has mostly ‘syntactic’ denota-

tion. Charles Rosen also recognized this when he wrote: ‘Musical phonemes act directly without first being strained through an abstract system of denotation.’ See his ‘Art has its Reasons’, New York Review of Books , 17 June 1971, 38. However, I would disagree with Rosen when in the samereview he states that ‘what it [music] lacks is a vocabulary’. I hope that this will become clear inthe discussion below.


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of musical structures with ‘affects’, ‘characters’ or ‘topics’, for example,can easily be explained through this mechanism. Connotations are not just personal or subjective associations left at the discretion of the inter-

preter; rather, they are intrinsic meanings rooted in conventions. Eventhough they originate in what Chomsky calls the more subjective individual performance of the respective interpreter, they belong to aspecialized ideological and cultural system of competence which pre-cedes and generates the respective individual performance and, there-fore, they are accepted intersubjectively.50

To acknowledge connotative meanings does not mean that music sig-nifiers represent or stand for extramusical signifieds in a direct, deno-tative relationship. Although connotative meanings allow broader

readings of semantic signification in music, they very seldom amount to precise portrayals of reality (the closest to that are imitative ono-matopoeic sounds). For music, even when it relies on referential mean-ings, remains basically a self-referential system, in which the majority of connotations are shared intertextually, that is, through references of amusical text to other musical texts.51 The roots of topics, genres or styleborrowings can be traced back to their origins through the infinitechains of intertextual connotations. The reading of these kinds of con- ventionally grounded – intertextual – connotations enables us to

qualify the ‘semantic’ import of the materials described above. Adding now to Beethoven’s and Mahler’s thematic materials theircharacterization at the semantic level of meaning will complete thedescription of these materials as ‘events’ in the ‘story’ as part of our nar-ratological analysis, and will highlight the differences between themalready encountered at the morphological and syntactic levels. From thefirst bars of the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, most morphological/syntactic fea-tures such as the drone F–c in the violas and cellos, the simple theme ‘assweet and soft as the air of May itself’ (as Sir George Grove describedit),52 the instrumentation (first violins, then horn, and then, for therepeat of the theme, oboe), the rhythm, the predominance of majorkeys and the insistence on the subdominant harmony connotenotions of simplicity, folk-dance music, outdoors or countryside.53 Such

212 VERA MICZNIK

50 See Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley, CA, 1977), 89, 158. Chomsky’sconcepts of competence/performance coincide with those of langue/parole used by Saussure inhis linguistics.

51 For definitions and applications of intertextuality, see, for example, Julia Kristeva, Semiotike: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Extraits) (Paris, 1968), 52–5; Michael Riffatterre, ‘IntertextualRepresentation: On Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse’, Critical Inquiry , 11 (1984), 141–62; Culler,

The Pursuit of Signs , 100–18.52 George Grove, Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies (3rd edn, London, 1898; repr. New York,

1962), 192–3.53 In fact, such associations are not ‘iconic’ or ‘isomorphic’, in the sense that the shapes of the

music do not correspond somehow to actual objects in nature (the closest Beethoven gets toiconic signs is through the birdcalls and the thunder and lightning imitated later in thesymphony). They, too, depend on a process of conventionalization, whose origins might be foundin older ‘pastoral’ music. The most immediate associations, then, are of music with other music;in other words, they are intertextual connotations. Beardsley, following Nelson Goodman,pointed out that music exemplifies properties rather than objects. See Beardsley, ‘Understand-ing Music’, 68, and Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indi-anapolis, IN, 1968), 52.


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connotations are associated by listeners familiar with eighteenth-century musical conventions with a whole musical tradition of rep-resentation captured in the notion of the ‘pastoral topic’, actually

explicitly suggested by Beethoven in his title.54 The phrase structure andthe fermata in the first rendition of the materials connote syntactically the action of question/answer, or a slow gathering of forces, which thenget properly on their way with the second, fuller and continuous ren-dition of the theme from bar 37 on. Yet the ‘pastoral topic’ basically con-tinues throughout the entire movement. (This scarcity of topics is not necessarily found in all Classical music.)55 In other words, the only predominant semantic area in the movement is ‘the pastoral’, with theexception of the second theme (bars 67ff.), which is more lyrical than

the first. Slight variations of this topic occur in the development section, with an emphasis on the dance character because of the insistence onthe rhythmic pattern of cell c, on which most of the development isbased. But even so, by virtue of its use as an isolated syntactical unit dis- jointed from its original context, and having become just a syntacticbuilding unit, cell c does not bring in any additional semantic conno-tations; it is its repetitive use governed by tonality – which are featuresof the discourse – that gives direction to the developmental tonal plot.

By contrast, matching their different morphological structure,

Mahler’s materials present an entirely different semantic definition(see again Examples 2 and 3). Each theme projects its own, well-defined semantic features. Theme a, a pianissimo, legato, lightweight 4/4 regular ‘pondering’ theme in an Andante comodo tempo, with itspretence at conventional balance buried underneath slightly exagger-ated embellishments and asymmetrical improvisatory gestures, and with the violin sound coming out of Viennese salon music, connotes aserene, passé atmosphere, nicely described by Diether de la Motte as‘Großmütterchen’.56 As de la Motte points out, one can even detect a‘trivial’, or naive, sense in this theme, especially in its consequent phrase (bars 18–25), where a more obvious symmetry is preserved, and where the variation technique verges on banality. These references toold-fashionedness bestow upon the theme a quality of reminiscence.The slow pace of unfolding in a gesture of gradual accretion and theimprovisatory quality are suggestive of speech, more exactly of ‘telling’or evoking, continuing the epic ‘once-upon-a-time’ tone of the intro-duction.57 And, moreover, to follow de la Motte’s observations, the fact


54 My understanding of the pastoral topic corresponds closely to that discussed by Hatten in

Musical Meaning in Beethoven , 91–111. For definitions of topics, see the references to Agawu, Ratnerand Webster, in note 32 above.

55 See in note 32 above references to the variety of topics in Classical music. For my purposehere I chose an extreme case where, probably for programmatic reasons, Beethoven insists ononly one topic. The wider variety of topics one might find, for example, in instrumental works of Mozart does not invalidate the points made here about narrative, even though the degree of narrativity in those works might, paradoxically, be higher than in this programmatic work.

56 Diether de la Motte, ‘Das komplizierte Einfache: Zum ersten Satz der 9. Sinfonie von Gustav Mahler’, Musik und Bildung , 3 (1978), 145–51 (pp. 145–6).

57 See also Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik , 201 (trans. Jephcott, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy , 155): ‘Telling of the past, the wholly epic voice is heard. It begins as if something were to be narrated, yet concealed.’


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that in its periodic returns the theme never comes back identically or,in other words, that each occurrence of the theme is a unique event reproduced only partially thereafter, accentuates the listener’s sense of

reconstituting past memories throughout the movement.58Theme b introduces a completely different semantic world: a world

of anxiety, contortion, imbalance, striving and musical dissonance,characteristic of late nineteenth-century art-music, related to that of Brahms, or even to Schoenbergian expressionism (see Example 2). It greatly resembles theme a in its principles of construction (similar cells,gradual accretion, presence of the major second), and the syntacticsimilarities between themes a and b play an essential role for the struc-tural unification of the piece; yet the respective semantic worlds

attached to each of the two themes remain highly contrasting, even intheir subsequent appearances, and even though each is slightly trans-formed every time. One semantic transformation of theme b is par-ticularly noticeable at its return in the recapitulation (at bar 372), where after four bars it takes off on its own into a slower, misterioso section of free dissonant counterpoint, losing its original aggressivenessand outlining a meditative, self-reflective state of mind (see Example 4).

The number of materials which play more or less important roles inthis movement is larger than in a typical first movement of a symphony,

and this underlines the variety of semantic fields. Even the more ‘inci-dental’ materials that Mahler introduces in a movement often simplis-tically designated as being in ‘sonata form’ have strong semanticdefinitions. Theme c, for example (see Example 2), acts at first as atonal intrusion of B major within the D major first-theme area.Morphologically it is characterized by a monotonous rhythmic move-ment in quavers, which towards the end wanders into remote harmonicareas, only to return abruptly to theme a in D major, thus confirmingits parenthetical role within the still predominant first-theme area. Thecombination of the mechanical movement and the aimless harmonicmeandering connotes a circular, undirected motion which perfectly corresponds with the futile detour this section accomplishes function-ally. More important, theme c introduces a new semantic idea differ-ent from any of the previous ones: in this and especially other guises,such as a related passage resembling a hurdy-gurdy tune (see Example8a below), it connotes a static, mechanical, disorientated, alienated world.

The unusually large number of independent motives which, as I havementioned, have a crucial participation in the unfolding of this move-

ment are very strongly characterized at the three semiotic (morpho-logical, syntactic and semantic) levels. Motive X and Y are first embedded in a six-bar introduction, which connotes intertextually anenigmatic broad semantic spectrum: it presents the quasi-incongruouscombination of an exotic pentatonic march rhythm (motive X plucked

214 VERA MICZNIK

58 Newcomb detects a similar quality: ‘The transformation of experience by memory is in fact one of the essential messages of narrative and of Mahler’s Ninth’. See his ‘Narrative Archetypes’,132.


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in the harp) with a familiar tonal Romantic horn call (Y), yet distortedby the stopping technique, all presented within a strong heterophonicsetup (see Example 5). The staggered repetitive opening As (cello andhorn) and the ritual march-like formulas of X and Y connote theannunciatory power of magic or ritual formulas, an effect equivalent to a rhetorical opening such as the ‘once upon a time’ of a tale, which


Example 4. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, misterioso vari-ation of theme b.

picc. fl.380

3 3 3

vln I solo

obs.

espress.

378

hns

Eng. hn

morendo

dim.

obs.fl.

376

Plötzlich bedeutend langsamer und leise

3 3 3 3

misterioso


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must have inspired its identification by Adorno with an epic gesturethat seems to announce from the outset: ‘Listen carefully! Now I amgoing to play something the like of which you have never heardbefore!’59

Even the descending major second f ' –e' (see Examples 2 and 3)takes on a special semantic significance: it is in itself an enigmatic event to which much of the semantic meaning of the movement owes tribute.From a strictly harmonic point of view, the voice-exchange resultingfrom the descent f ' –e' heard concomitantly with its transposed con-trapuntal inversion a –b , both supported by a V–I bass line, provides the

linear and harmonic paradigm that pervades the entire movement –the superimposition of tonic and dominant functions at every cadence(see Example 6). Yet the unsettling result of these contradictory func-tions, as well as of the long postponement of the resolution of the

^3–

^2

216 VERA MICZNIK

59 Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physionomik , 85 (Jephcott’s translation emended). DonaldMitchell ascribes a similar incantatory, ritualistic function to the opening musical gesture of Der Abschied in Das Lied von der Erde . See his Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 355.

Example 5. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, introduction.

pizz.

6 6 6

6 6

vln II

6

vlc.,hp

6

vla

Andante comodo

hns


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descent linearly to^1 until the last bar of the movement (even there

appearing in a different register), connotes a ‘longing’ similar to that of the last ‘ewig’ in Der Abschied from Das Lied von der Erde , which con-tributed to the interpretation of this movement as Mahler’s‘Farewell’.60

Motives X and Y (used separately throughout the movement) con-stantly convey their semantic associations. Motive X undergoes slight morphological transformations that temporarily change its semanticdefinition: its distorted intervals at the beginning of the development section (bars 108–16) bring the connotation of trouble or disturbance, while its ritual march quality is redefined in the retransition (bars327ff.) through the accented repeated pounding of its first four notes,accompanied by fortissimo trumpet signals, suggesting a funerealquality which Mahler dutifully marked in the score – ‘Wie ein schwererKonduct’. Motive Y, combining its signal quality with the fact that itspitches unabashedly proclaim the tonic (its opening fourth consists of the fifth and first scale degrees of a key), gains the semantic conno-tations of ‘victorious call’, ‘achievement’, ‘arrival’, which appropriately are always coupled with its syntactic function of securing every singlearrival at a new key.

The recognizable (yet malleable) morphological shapes of motivesM and W (in Example 3) give each a denotative identity but, most important, the shared secondary parameters of the motives (trumpet or horn timbre, strong syncopated rhythmic outline) trigger semantic

connotations associated in the context of post-Wagnerian rhetoric withsome versions of trumpet calls or horn signals. The signal connotationscoupled with the specific harmonic functions participate in the seman-tic functioning of each motive. Moreover, most of the time the two


60 For a detailed consideration of the conditions that entered into the formation of what I callthe ‘farewell myth’ of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, see my ‘The Farewell Story of Mahler’s NinthSymphony’, 19th Century Music , 20 (1996–7), 144–66.

Example 6. Mahler, Symphony no. 9, first movement, harmonic par-adigm.

hn

vlc.

hp

D: V 68

2I 5

69

3

vln 7


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motives M and W work as a pair, one following the other, and in tandemhave the function of ‘pushing forward’ or ‘leading to’ other events.

What I have done so far is to isolate the events of the ‘story’ from the

‘discourse’, just as if they ‘existed prior to and independently of narra-tive presentation’. In a blunt simplification, we could enumerate thecomponents of this movement’s musical ‘story’, that is, the events which the discourse unfolds (or recounts): a complex ritualisticannouncement implying both Western and non-Western (thus mod-ernistic) sonorities, yet in a context that suggests reminiscence ratherthan presentness; an old-fashioned Biedermeier world, contrasted witha modernistic, stormy, disturbed world; an erring, ultimately confusedand alienated world; and numerous signals (intertextually related to

Romantic symbols) leading from one world to another.It is this strong semantic and functional definition of materials in

Mahler that is responsible to a great extent for rendering them closerto the quality of ‘events’ in a narrative and thus for what we perceiveas the narrative quality of his music in general. For this definitionrenders Mahler’s materials (as opposed to Beethoven’s) compatible with two important characteristics of narrative events: ‘an event whichis individualized will contribute more to narrativity than one which isnot’, and ‘narrativity is a function of the discreteness and specificity of

the (sequence of) events presented’.61

Thus, the more numerous basicmaterials in Mahler by comparison with Beethoven, the diversity of themes and motives and their syntactic and semantic autonomy, as wellas the heterogeneous juxtaposition of the many worlds invoked (asopposed to the single world in the ‘Pastoral’), reinforce the degree of narrativity in Mahler.

To be sure, there is an essential difference between musical and verbal narrative events: musical events cannot fulfil the quality of verbalevents as ‘propositions’, or, more exactly, they are missing the ‘topic-comment structure’ of propositions about the world represented.62

While Mahler’s music can talk about (or suggest) the idea of a ‘Bie-dermeier’ world, it cannot make a proposition such as ‘The “Bieder-meier” world is powerful.’ This inability is probably best explained by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, when he states that ‘it is not within the semio-logical capabilities of music to link a subject to a predicate’.63 Thisdoes not prevent Mahler’s materials from uttering contents and theirtransformations other than the ones defined exclusively on musicalgrounds, but they are closer to the types of events called by GeraldPrince ‘stative’, that is to say, ones that ‘constitute a state’.64 Musical

materials having become signifying units with clear connotative mean-ings appear as presentations (or fictive retellings) of ‘states’ or ‘situ-ations’ of the real world. Moreover, since each ‘state’ or ‘situation’ is a

218 VERA MICZNIK

61 Prince, Narratology , 149.62 See ibid ., 61.63 Nattiez, ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?’, 244.64 See Prince, Narratology , 62–3: ‘Events can be defined as stative, when they constitute a state

. . ., or active, when they constitute an action. . . . The proportion of active and stative events in anarrative is an important characteristic of that narrative.’


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discrete, well-individualized unit, the change from one state to anotherreproduces the mechanism of ‘modification of states of affairs’ whichcharacterizes the creation of narrative events in fiction.65

The description of musical materials with all their multiple levels of meaning, including the semantic levels, offers a solution to the objec-tion that music cannot be narrative because it does not have meaningsas literature does: it has its own musical meanings which, hence, qualify its materials broadly speaking as ‘events’. But even though Mahler’smaterials are more likely to be perceived as ‘events’ than Beethoven’s,is strong semantic definition in itself a sufficient condition for narra-tivity? One can argue that Mozart’s materials are also rich in semanticconnotations, even though it might be more difficult to become fully

aware of them because we are so removed from the topics of his time.Here is where the literary notion of ‘discourse’ may help elucidate why,despite possibly similarly rich semantic definitions of musical ‘events’,Classical and Romantic styles might differ drastically in terms of their‘narrativity’.

DISCOURSE

Let us recall that the most general definition of ‘discourse’ given by

literary critics is ‘the expression, the means by which the content [the“story”] is communicated’ or ‘the verbal representation [of theseevents]’ in the act of telling.66 In the discourse, we are moving alongthe horizontal, temporal, syntagmatic unfolding of the multi-levelledevents abstracted in the story. Theories of narrative discourse, such asGenette’s, show not only that the ‘events’ of the story are carriers of narrative meanings, but also that the discursive strategies in themselvesproduce levels of meaning. The way in which events are embedded within the discourse (many or few, occurring quickly or slowly one afteranother, or with gaps in between) will articulate a faster- or slower-moving narrative, a greater or smaller degree of suspense, and so on,and thus will provide narrative means of signification that wouldusually not be noticed by other kinds of stylistic analysis. It is not diffi-cult to conceive that the strategy chosen by a writer of a novel decidinghow the events will follow one another and, therefore, what ultimateshape the narration will take is in many ways similar to the strategy of a composer deciding in which temporal order to use the thematicmaterials, how many times and according to which general plan.67


65 According to Gerald Prince’s A Dictionary of Narratology , there are two types of narrative state-ments with which the discourse states the ‘story’, corresponding to the stative and active events:stasis statements and process statements (pp. 77, 90).

66 Chatman, Story and Discourse , 19, and, for example, Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction , 3.Other definitions include: ‘the discursive presentation or narration of events’ (Culler, The Pursuit of Signs , 170); ‘the symbolic presentation of a sequence of events connected by subject matter andrelated by time’ and ‘a text which refers, or seems to refer, to some set of events outside itself’(Robert Scholes, ‘Afterthoughts’, On Narrative , ed. Mitchell, 200–8 (p. 205)); and ‘the represen-tation of at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence, neither of which presup-poses or entails the other’ (Prince, Narratology , 4).

67 I will deal later with the claim that the ‘causality’ and/or chronology linking the events of the ‘story’ in a literary narrative is lacking in music.


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While a composer’s strategy in a highly conventionalized system suchas tonality during the Classical period is to a large degree predeter-mined (cf. Meyer’s ‘script’ and my Beethoven example), a late-Roman-

tic composer like Mahler is more likely to present unusual, unexpecteddiscursive ‘narrative’ techniques to give direction and finality to apiece. Not only the nature of the events, but also the musical discourseitself becomes toward the end of the nineteenth century closer tonarrative or, as Subotnik has put it, closer to the ‘linguistic ideals of meaning’.

But what discursive characteristics make one narrative stronger thananother? According to Gerald Prince, the principles that give a passagea higher degree of narrativity than another include: more numerous

events, the coexistence of several time sequences (or the impression of time changes), the presence of conflict, a perceived complete structure with a beginning-middle-end sequence, more discrete fundamentalspecific states, and so on.68 A comparison between Beethoven andMahler will, again, illustrate how the differences between their discur-sive techniques contribute to a higher or lesser degree of

narativitate beeth mahler

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