Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music

Bibliographic Data

ID4408977
AuthorsJean-Jacques Nattiez (Université de Montréal, corresponding author)
Year1990
Volume115
Issue2
Pages240-257
Publication date1990-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the Royal Musical Association (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0269-0403 • E-ISSN: 1471-6933
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1093/jrma/115.2.240
OpenAlexW1990296251
LanguageEN
Citations received22
References cited2

The question of musical narrativity, while by no means new, is making a comeback as the order of the day in the field of musicological thought. In May 1988 a conference on the theme 'Music and the Verbal Arts: Interactions' was held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. A fortnight later, a group of musicologists and literary theorists was invited to the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford to assess, in the course of four intense round-table discussions, whether it is legitimate to recognize a narrative dimension in music. In November of the same year, the annual conference of the American Musicological Society in Baltimore presented a session entitled 'Text and Narrative', chaired by Carolyn Abbate, and, at the instigation of Joseph Kerman, a session devoted to Edward T. Cone's The Composer's Voice. A number of articles deal with the subject in our specialized periodicals: I am thinking in particular of the studies published in 19th-Century Music by Anthony Newcomb - 'Once More "Between Absolute and Programme Music": Schumann's Second Symphony' and 'Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies' - or, on the French-speaking side of musicology, of Marta Grabocz's article 'La sonate en si mineur de Liszt: une stratégie narrative complexe' and the essays of the Finnish semiologist Eero Tarasti. No doubt a good many articles will emerge from the above conferences. And we are awaiting the appearance of Carolyn Abbate's book Unsung Voices: Narrative in Nineteenth-Century Music

Art · Art history · Library science · Literature · Music education · Musical · Musicology · Narrative · Narrativity · Subject (documents) · Symphony · The arts · Theme (computing) · Visual arts · History · Music History and Culture · Music Technology and Sound Studies · Musicology and Musical Analysis

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