Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Jean-Jacques Nattiez*
University of Montreal
Abstract
After describing the main features of the literary narrative and demonstrating
its analogy with music, the author underlines the necessity not to consider a
priori a musical production as a narrative. He analyses the intonation of musical
contours as a form of proto-narrative which he later explains from the
standpoint of Daniel Stern’s developmental psychology. It is then emphasized
that music should be considered as a proto-narrative and the authors suggests a
criticism of the so-called narratological musicology.
Keywords
Narratological Musicology, Developmental Psychology, Semiology, Intonation,
Narrative, Proto-Narrative.
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Within a narrative, actions and events follow one another so that at every
moment the listener or the reader asks himself/herself: What happens next?
[...] We are finally satisfied only if the story leads to a conclusion that is
consistent with our expectations and gives a sense of closure. The listener
and the reader are thus driven by curiosity, surprised by unexpected events,
caught by the tension of suspense and, finally, appeased by the outcome.
(Molino, Lafhail-Molino, 2003: 42−43)
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Es muss sein” (Must it be? It must be) – to recognize from the outset
that we are dealing with a question, suggested by the ascending fourth,
followed by a double response evoked by the descending fourths. And
from there, the rest of the movement can be interpreted as the
transposition of a musical dialogue. We do not know what is said, but
Beethoven depicts the change, as if we captured the inflections through a
wall or we listened to a conversation in a language we do not know.
Thus, here, the voices of the quartet have the character of what
Edward Cone called, speaking about the dialogue of the oboe and
English horn in the “Scène aux champs” (Scene in the Fields) of
Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony, “virtual characters,” or more precisely,
“virtual agents” (Cone 1974: 88). Obviously, the most important word
here is “virtual.” The bassoon song in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf can
become the grandfather character, but only when enlightened by a verbal
text that assigns it a denotative meaning. Undoubtedly, this same virtual
dimension determines the traditional vocabulary of the analysis of the
fugue to use terms such as subject, answer, exposition, discussion and
summary and, equally, it explains the high number of theorists in the
Baroque period, including Mattheson (1739) in particular, trying to find
in the music of his time the different moments of a rhetorical discourse.
He thus matches the introduction, not always present, to the exordium,
the narrative and the divisio to the exposition, the confirmatio and the
confutatio to the development, and, finally, the peroratio to the summary
and the coda. In a recent work, Mihaela Corduban reviewed the first
book of the Well-Tempered Clavier starting from the rhetoric terminology
used at the time (Corduban, 2011).
These cases of intonation imitation are not unique. Nettl (1958)
suggested that the first syllable stress in Czech explains the stress pattern
of the Czech composers’ musical phrase. Robert Hall (1956) attempted
to find the influence of English intonation on Elgar’s music. He argues:
“In British and American English, the end of a declarative sentence is
characterized by a falling intonation, from a relatively high tone to a
relatively low tone. This is also what happens in Wh-questions (e.g.,
Where are you going?). But in questions that do not begin with an
interrogative pronoun (e.g., Are you coming?), American English and
most European languages use a marked rising intonation, whereas British
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English uses the same falling intonation like in Where are you going?”
Turning to the music of Elgar, Hall argues that – statement that should
obviously be statistically verified - “a large number of themes present a
predominantly downward trend; think, for example, of the main motives
of Falstaff, of the initial theme of the Introduction and Allegro, of the first
subject of the Second Symphony, to mention only a few.” “No wonder,” he
further concludes, “that the English have the feeling there is something
special in Elgar, something of their own that the non-British are unable
to appreciate” (Hall 1953: 6).
If there is here a possible explanation for the analogy between music
and the pace of discourse, this analysis also reminds us that it can be
restricted to a particular culture. By means of a specific process, a
language can leave its marks on the music of the same society. By using
the only text known to have remained unchanged throughout the history
of Western music, Thrasybulos Georgiades (1954) showed how each age
treated the canonical words of the Mass, and how, by comparison, the
style of each country has been influenced by the structures, especially
rhythmic and stress-related, of the corresponding language. More
importantly, he demonstrated that instrumental music, by gradually
growing apart from the vocal music, dominant until the Baroque period,
had kept track of the languages with which they had been in contact for
at least ten centuries.
The word that writers who recognise music as showing a kind of
“narration en creux”, of virtual narration, spontaneously use, is that of
gesture (even if the name is only an approximation), undoubtedly because,
as Combarieu argued in the early twentieth century, “music moves us
because it encourages us to move.” Also, in his recent book on musical
semantics, Ole Kühl renamed by the term “gesture” what is, most often
than not, nothing more than a musical unit, similar to motives and
phrases, but considered from the point of view of their expressive
dimension (Kühl, 2008: chapter VIII). “Mahler’s gesture is that of the
epic” writes Adorno (1976: 95), even though “the epic music is
forbidden to describe the world it is aimed at” (ibid., 108). In this
context, it seems relevant to explain the universal success of Ravel’s
Bolero, not only by the simplicity of its repetitive structure, but also by its
ability to evoke the irresistible rise of desire to the orgasmic climax of the
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is established at the same time with the first coo (ibid., 37) and various
vocalizations (ibid., 58). The observation of suction allowed seeing how
infants become interested in the human voice and prefer it to other types
of sounds (ibid., 40). We notice intentional vocal cries before three
weeks and, between two and six months, sound productions, many of
which are not part of their native tongue (Imberty, 2004: 509) and which
can already be considered musical. But above all, what is characteristic of
this initial period, the infant is able to “transfer perceptual experience
from one sensory modality to another” (Stern 1985: 47), as Stern argues,
especially between touch and vision. The experiments seem to show that
this amodality is innate and not acquired. Infants are also able to respond
in the same way to sound and light intensity signals, as well as to auditory
temporal patterns and visually presented temporal patterns, as early as
the age of three weeks (ibid., 48-49): “Infants thus appear to have a
general and innate ability, which can be called amodal perception, to take
information received in a sensory modality and somehow translate it into
another sensory modality” (ibid., 51). The infant creates abstract
representations of shapes, intensities and time figures. “They are
predesigned to forge certain integrations” (ibid., 52). Key result: “Some
properties of people and things, such as shape, intensity level, motion,
number and rhythm are experienced directly as global, amodal perceptual
qualities” (ibid., 54). Stern concludes that this is how “vitality affects”
arise, which are characterized by dynamic and kinetic terms such as
“asurging,” “fading away”, “fleeting,” “explosive” “crescendo,”
“decrescendo,” “bursting,” “drawn out” (ibid., 54). Extension beyond
infancy: “Abstract dance and music are examples par excellence of the
expressiveness of vitality affects” born throughout this period (ibid., 56).
Kühl draws the highly relevant conclusion that this may, in part, explain
the lack of lexical differences between dance, music and drama in some
cultures (Kühl, 2008: 61).
From the point of view at stake, there are two aspects established
before the age of two or three months: from a poietic perspective, it “is
the ultimate reservoir that can be dipped into for all creative experience”
(Stern, 1985: 67), and, from an aesthesic perspective, “it also acts as the
source for ongoing affective appraisals events” (ibid.). It is not
surprising, then, if the infant is already in possession of an amodal
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Gestalt gathering the auditory, visual and motion patterns, and, as the list
of terms collected by Stein proves it, that the words used by the
participants in the musical perception experiments reported by the works
of Robert Francès (1958) and Michel Imberty (1979) in their attempt to
identify the content of musical semantics, are revealed by these
modalities, since, as they both demonstrate, semantization is based on an
analogy between patterns of tension and relaxation, the spatio-temporal
perception of music and muscle, postural and gestural reactions. We
identify here the origins of the narrative potentialities of music.
The later stages of the interpersonal domain development will
establish other symbolic forms that make music what it is. After the first
two or three months, the infant directs vocalizations at other persons
(Stern, 1985: 72). Music becomes thus a social phenomenon, offered to
an audience and perceived by other participants different from the
creators. The infant also becomes aware of the origin of the sound
sources (ibid., 82) which, according to the Canadian composer Murray
Schafer, could be called schyzophonia inherent to music practice and
listening. This is also the age when the infant begins to move within a
“basic temporal structure” and becomes aware of the existence of time
(ibid., 84), an essential factor for both the production and the perception
of music. It is the moment when the infant understands there is a
relationship between two events that share the same temporal structure
(ibid., 85): this is actually the birth of music proto-narrativity. I identify
here the birth of a sense of rhythm and the affects connected to it since
that basic temporal structure is common to all the stimuli (auditory,
visual, tactile, proprioceptive). Researchers also found an intensity
structure common to the loudness of vocalization and to the movements
that accompany it, and that the infant feels in the chest, arm muscles and
vocal cords (ibid., 87). These findings led Imberty to assert that in the
first two to five months, the infant perceives musical units on the basis
of proximity and similarity, and that between four and six months it is
aware of the structure of the musical phrase (Imberty, 2004: 510). This
common structure contributes to ensuring that semantic responses
borrow their vocabulary from various modes of perception, auditory,
tactile and proprioceptive.
Finally, during the first nine months, the mother-child relationship is
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dyadic relationships between the mother and the infant, saw the basis of
these relationships in a jazz performance (Gratier, 2008). A study by
Stephen Malloch also focuses on the musical organization of the timbre
relationships in the vocalisations of the mother and infant. This time, the
measures confirm the research, in both cases, of contrast effects. All this,
Malloch argues, contributes to create, between mother and child, “the
narrative structure of their companionship” (1999−2000: 45), although,
once again, it would be better to speak of proto-narrative, especially as
the author defines the narrative as allowing two persons to “share the
sense of time passing and to create and share emotional envelopes that
evolve through this shared time” (ibid.)
This musical expression constitutes my focus: just like in the music we
know, imitation is subject to change and Stern did not hesitate to speak
of a “theme-and-variation” form insofar as each new vocalization is
likely to be different (Stern, 1985: 139). The infant reproduces by
imitation and transformation the components of the mother’s “baby
talk”: segmentation procedures, repetition, syntactic simplicity, slow
tempo, and simplification and amplification of the melodic contours’
expressive patterns, using five or six prototypes of intonation curves,
which determines Imberty to argue, following Stern’s views, that the
repetition of these patterns “creates a regularity that allows the subject to
anticipate the evolution of time” (Imberty, 2004: 511−513). This is
probably the source not only of the repetition-transformation
mechanism described by Ruwet’s paradigmatic technique, but also of the
implication-realization relationship analysed by Meyer (Imberty, 2005:
187-189). All these processes contribute to the development, in the six
months infant, of a sense of the other based on intentional
communication.
Everything is thus in place for the development of what will be later
called by various authors the musical proto-narrative allowing for
harmonious attunement between the mother and the child (Ibid.: 199-
202), resorting to intensity, timing and shape parameters that must be
remembered as transmodal (Stern 1985: 146, 148, 153−154). “Most
human behaviour, Stern writes, consist of kinetic shapes – that is,
configurations that change in time – and vocalisations are one of the
most pervasive kinetic shapes involved in attunements” (ibid., 154). The
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embedded in time, with time on the X-axis and the intensity of the
expectation on the Y-axis. In addition, it is particularly noteworthy that,
although in this presentation of Stern’s view, I went from the concept of
protonarrative in infants to finally discussing musical protonarrative, in
fact, in his presentation, music is the one that served as a model and
based on which he discussed the protonarrative envelope: “One of the
biggest surprises of recent research on infants has been to discover that
infants do not need words nor symbols to represent different sound,
visual or tactile patterns, as it was previously believed” (Stern, 1998: 170).
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works have the great merit of updating the research initiated by Leonard
Ratner (1980) and continued by Robert Hatten (1994) and Raymond
Monelle (2000), who demonstrate the existence of a certain
organisational level of the work consisting of units bearing feelings or
topic figures different from the traditional elementary structures such as
the degree of the scale used, the melodic-rhythmic or harmonic
structures, phraseology or the big formal sections. These investigations
parallel those initiated by Boris Asafiev and József Ujfalussy, presented
and discussed by Grabócz (2009). I reproduce here the definition of
“topos” suggested by Monelle and which I consider particularly
clarifying: “We assimilate topics to fragments of melody or rhythm, to
conventional forms or even to timbre aspects or harmony which shape
the elements of social or cultural life and, consequently, to themes such
as virility, countryside, innocence, grievance, etc.” (Monelle, 2007: 178)
or, as he states elsewhere, “A figure becomes a topos when its evocation
becomes conventional” (Monelle, 2001: 105). This is not the place to
enter into details regarding the epistemological context authors usually
place themselves in, oscillating between the most classical hermeneutics
and the preoccupations of the diverse semiotic paradigms, nor to discuss
the methods they use for defining the music units considered as topoi
and for identifying the meaning associated to them. It is enough for the
time being to underline the great merit of the concept of topos and to
signal the existence of symbolic configuration classes (as defined by
Piaget and Cassirer) at the disposal of composers during quite a long
period of time, for example, the topos of “ranz des vaches” (or of the
shepherd’s air) mentioned by Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de musique, as
well as by Grétry, Beethoven, Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt, Schumann and
Wagner. Thus, the notion of topos seems a remarkable contribution to
the poietic dimension of musical semantics, supplementing the work of
experimental psychologists (Francès, Imberty) who expressly situate
themselves on the side of aesthesics (and who are inconveniently and
totally ignored by narrative musicologists…).8
It would be appropriate to initiate a detailed study in order to establish
the role of the “narrativity” in the exact sense of the word that narrative
musicologists believe to identify in music and in what it consists from a
musicological point of view. They seem to be, once more, prudent, and
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alla breve, alla zoppa, amoroso, aria, bourrée, brillant style, cadenza,
sensibility, fanfare, fantasy, French overture, gavotte, hunt style, learned
style, Mannheim rocket, march, minuet, musette, ombra, opera buffa,
pastoral, recitative, sarabande, sigh motif, singing style, Sturm und Drang
and Turkish music (Agawu, 1991: 30),
but he points out that: “We have not yet succeeded in demonstrating,
except in an extremely trivial manner, that music has the power to retell”
(1991: 36). Nevertheless, later on, in his book Music as Discourse (Agawu
2009), he gives in, on the subject of Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler, to
the narrative temptation indicated in the title,9 and he is not the only one
to do so. I refer here to the contributions made by Lawrence Kramer,
Anthony Newcomb and Leo Treitler.
I would like to insist on the narratological works applied to “pure”
instrumental music. As regards my reluctance to speak of musical
“narrative,” Grabócz writes that “What connects all these applications of
different models is not the desire to see a ‘story retold in music,’ as
assumed by Nattiez, but to find the rules, the strategies organising the
signifiers” (2009: 27). Does this mean I do not know how to read?! Eero
Tarasti states in his Sémiotique musicale [Musical Semiotics] that “by
narrativity in music [we understand] the ‘structural’ narrativity according
to which every musical composition developing in time and which
transforms a thing into something different must be considered as being
narrative”10 (Tarasti 1996: 406). In the anthology Sens et signification en
musique, edited by Grabócz, he entitles once more his contribution
“Music as narrative art.” He mentions, in the first paragraph, that “Music
constitutes a narrative art in its own right”,11 while Grabócz herself, when
referring to Beethoven’s Leonore Ouverture no. 3, talks about “discursive
syntax” (Grabócz 2009: 191). Thus, does music bear or not a narrative?!
These two authors would surely contradict me in an attempt to correct
me or to diversify their position. According to Tarasti, “The semiotic
approach that I wish to develop in this article does not claim to
demonstrate that music is capable of enouncing specific narratives, but it
rather exposes why music structures can be associated with narratives”12
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(Tarasti, 2007: 209). This is quite different since there is no longer music
which would be in itself a “narrative art.” According to Grabócz, “We
call “musical narrativity” the concatenation of topics” (Grabócz 2009:
28). But what gives narrative meaning to this syntagmatic organisation of
topoi ? Certainly not just this succession, unless a musical piece is
capable, in itself, to tell us: “I am the Guardian Angel, the Muse, and the
Madonna!” A concatenation of moments does not speak in itself. In fact,
in either case, music triggers the enunciation of the narrative from the part
of the listeners or ... of the musicologists who resort to the metalinguistic
categories of general narratology. If music narratologists seem to play a
double game, this is because they have not recognised the protonarrative
(and not the narrative) nature of music.
The works of Grabócz and Tarasti point to three great difficulties.
On the one hand, these researchers seem to consider that, if it is
possible to apply (assuming this is the case, I will return to this matter)
the models of literary narratology to “pure” instrumental music, this
would be proof that music is a “narrative art.” It is almost as if, since it
was possible starting with the 1960s to apply to music the models of
phonology, of the paradigmatic analysis and the generative grammar, I
concluded from this methodologically successful expansion that music
would be a language in the sense of verbal language.
Second, it is quite amazing that researchers who claim to belong to
the field of semiotics have ignored one of its fundamental principles: any
symbolic form or any system of signs (verbal language, music, myth, and
cinema) has specific semiotic properties, and we cannot thus mistake the
subject of the semiotic investigation and the metalanguage that attempts
to explain it. As Hjelmslev argues, human language is the only one able
to “speak” all systems of non-verbal signs.
Third, the general narratology models, especially those of Tzvetan
Todorov and Algirdas Greimas, are they applicable to music? It would
be furthermore necessary to establish whether they are still adequate to
analyse the literary narrative. I would like to mention here Francis
Rastier’s testimony, co-author together with Greimas of the historical
article “Les jeux des contraintes sémiotiques” (Greimas - Rastier, 1970),
who, during the first Congress of the International Association of
Semiotics held in January 1974 in Milan delivered a remarkable mea culpa.
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1
This article is a revised version of a lecture presented in Lausanne on
October 28, 2011, in the context of the colloquium « Rencontres de
narrativités : perspectives sur l’intrigue musicale » and of a paper read in
Nanterre on December 13, 2012, in honour of Michel Imberty.
2
Another example, a significant slogan of the musical chain Radio-Canada:
“Music, beyond words, tells a story.” (September 2011).
3
For convenient textbooks illustrating this trend, see Carone 2006 and
Grabócz 2007. For a review, see Grabócz, “Bref aperçu sur l’utilisation des
concepts de narrativité et de signification en musique” [Brief overview on the
use of the concepts of narrative and significance in music], in Grabócz 2009:
21−57.
4
My emphasis.
5
I emphasise this expression justifying the fact that we could speak of proto-
narrativity between mother and infant.
6
See Dahlhaus, 1997: 123−125.
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7
See, for instance, Imberty’s investigation regarding the perception of the story
at the basis of Debussy’s The Sunken Cathedral (Imberty, 1985: 153−158), as
well as my own research on the young listeners of Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice (Nattiez, 2010: 113−119).
8
But it is not too late to do it. A recent work, Cinquante ans de psychologie de la
musique. L’école de Robert Francès (Fifty Years of Music Psychology. The Robert
Francès School) (Guirard, 2010), underlines, in an equally critical perspective,
the importance and repercussions of Francès’ Perception of Music (La
perception de la musique) (1958). An article signed by Imberty relates studies on
music semantics to the developmental psychology works mentioned above.
Narrative musicology should urgently refer to the 975 pages of Handbook of
Music and Emotion (Juslin and Sloboda, 2010).
9
See, in particular, Agawu 2009: 102-106, 195-196, 239, 247, 259, 247, 255,
271-273, 278-279.
10
My emphasis.
11
My emphasis.
12
The author’s emphasis.
13
I need to recall the fact that, it is in this monument of epistemological
erudition and insight which is the Homo fabulator by Molino and Lafhail-Molino
(2003), that we may found a valuable antidote to the excesses of the
structuralist approaches to literature, provided of course we do not simply
decide to ignore them.
14
An elaborate critical approach to Greimas’s “semiotic square” by referring to
the methodology suggested by Grabócz and Tarasti should obviously be
undertaken. To understand the epistemological and critical perspective I
generally adhere to with respect to the structuralism of the literary and
mythological symbolic forms see Lévi-Strauss musicien (Nattiez 2008: Chapter 4
and 5).
15
The present version of this article has benefited from stimulating and
challenging discussions with Márta Grabócz, Françoise Revaz and Raphaël
Baroni, as well as the particularly fruitful personal communications by Jean
Molino and suggestions by Michel Imberty.
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Biographical Note
Jean-Jacques Nattiez is a musical semiotician and professor of Musicology at
the Université de Montréal. He is considered a prominent exponent of musical
semiotics as a distinct discipline. In 2009, he received the Golden Medal from
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the highest Canadian
distinction in these fields. In 2011, he was made Officer of the Order of
Canada “for his contributions to the development of musicology as a researcher,
professor and specialist of music semiotics” and in 2013, he received the “Ordre
des arts et des lettres” of the French Republic for “his contribution to the
knowledge of music”. In addition to his own thorough and characteristic
development of semiotic theory, he has given the field substance through his
influential teaching, organizational, editorial, and bibliographic endeavors. It is
due largely to his intellectual leadership that the semiotics of music is now
sustained by a very diverse and productive community of scholars. His main
works are: Fondements d'une sémiologie de la musique (1975), Proust as
Musician (1989), Music and Discourse (1990), Wagner Androgyne (1993), Le Combat de
Chronos et d’Orphée (1993), La Musique, la recherche et la vie (1999). He is the editor
of the five volumes of Musiques, une encyclopédie pour le XXIème siècle, published in
Italy (2001-2005) and in France (2003-2007).
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