Telling Tales: A Survey of Narratological Approaches to Music

Briefly stated, the narratological analysis of music adapts the theoretical tools of literary narrative theory as a means of investigating music that can be conceived as narrative in conception and/or reception. Of the various hermeneutic approaches to the study of music developed in the last half century or so, narratological analysis has gone further than many in navigating a path that draws on both cultural and structural contexts. Often defined in opposition to structuralism—the focus of which is on formal (or “purely musical”) relationships within works and styles—hermeneutics is concerned with the “meaning” of musical elements. Despite the apparent dichotomy, musical narratology and semiotics (the study of musical sign-systems) are frequently concerned with the manner in which meaning can be understood to arise from structural properties, and it is scholars working at the intersection of hermeneutics and structuralism who have produced many of the more striking accounts of music in recent years. Although the application of what might be broadly termed “narrative thinking” to the analysis of music can be seen to date as far back as the composer-theorist Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny in the early 1800s (see Le Huray 1990, 113–122; Almén 2008, 16–23), the modern investigation of music and narrative theory stems from scholars of the 1980s and 1990s. This generation is defined by Nicholas Reyland (2005, 139) as the first of two “waves” of musical-narratological engagement, “soon followed by the work of a second wave of scholars less persuaded of music’s narrative propensities.” To Reyland’s two we can add a recent “third wave” of scholars, who have sought to steer narrative approaches in new directions; this includes the consideration of post-tonal music, previously beyond the scope of narrative analysis. In the following review of musical applications of narrative theory, these three waves will be considered in turn, concentrating on the particular coordination of structural and hermeneutic approaches that has long been the focus of narrative analysis, before looking at the broader repertories to which contemporary narratology has turned.