Reality or Hyper-reality? Music in Táin Bó Fraích

The purpose of this paper was born to argue around the concept of Intermediality, which poses the thesis about the adaptation of two different media conformed by two different semiotic systems, as ‘twin arts’. Getting deeper to the main hypothesis, I got much closer to the specific combination of music art into literature language, basing the topic onto studies from researchers as Werner Wolf and Emily Petermann whom called this juxtaposition by the name Musicalization of fiction. The introduction of sound (or music) into narrative text is made by imitation or, at least, the evocation of one media into the other, but it is essential to consider the role of the reader into this process in which it must be aware and enough open-minded to ‘dis-cover’ the intermediality, even when it does not have any previous knowledge in musical notation or transcription. Imitation leaves some derived evidences we can appreciate while reading a text, from explicit obviousness such a structural or contextual usages to implicit and more intratextual background.

Mind & Language, 2004

In this paper I address the issue of narrativity in music. The central question is the extent to which pure instrumental music in the classical tradition can or should be understood as narrative, that is, as narrating a story of some kind. I am interested in the varying potential and aptness for narrative construal of different sorts of instrumental music, and in what the content of such narratives might plausibly be thought to be. But ultimately I explore, at greater length, an alternative way of construing musical process, namely, as dramatic rather than narrative in nature, following the lead of two musicologists, Anthony Newcomb and Fred Maus. After a comparison of the respective merits of narrative and dramatic construals of music, the paper concludes with an illustrative reading, in dramatic mode, of part of the opening movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 845.

Dissertation (University of Virginia), 2011

The foundation of this dissertation is the notion that the variety of ways in which listeners experience the agency of musical performers is analogous to the variety of ways in which readers experience narrators in works of fiction. I find this way of thinking preferable to more common approaches based on perceived similarities between musical performance and the interpretation of literary texts, which I see as a recurrent conceptual glitch in many discursive approaches to performance that often stands in the way of speaking to listeners‘ experiences in meaningful ways. I suggest that narrative studies, itself a busy interdisciplinary project, offers a rich theoretical vocabulary with the potential to help bring the criticism and analysis of recorded musical performances into line with listeners‘ experiences of them. The body of the dissertation consists of three sample analyses of musical performances in various genres, using a theoretical model of musical performer as narrator. The first case study begins with the project of exploring and explaining differences between several performances of an individual piece of instrumental classical music, Franz Schubert‘s Wanderer Fantasy. In the following chapter, I analyze several recordings of jazz pianist Jaki Byard, suggesting that Byard‘s marginal position in mainstream jazz criticism may result from the way his music seems to flout several narrative discourses thought to be fundamental to analytical engagement with jazz performance. The final case study focuses on the music of the Icelandic pop singer Björk, whose distinctive narrative agency I find to be resonant with Mikhail Bakhtin‘s writing on literary narration. In these three case studies, I argue not for any particular "hearing" of these recordings, but rather for an interdisciplinary approach I find to be responsive to a wider variety of listening experiences than many more common theoretical discussions. I hope to open up a space between several preexisting theoretical discourses in which it is possible to craft theoretical solutions specific to individual listeners‘ experiences of individual musical performances and to demonstrate that narrative theory can be a therapeutic and regenerative resource in the continuing project of developing new and useful ways of discussing musical performance.

2007

Recent scholarship challenges the notion of musical narrative by attempting to establish a parallel with literary narrative. In calling attention to the absence of a narrating voice, the inability of music to narrate in the past tense, and inconsistencies about agency, criticism on musical narrative erroneously sought to equate music with language based on epistemological correspondences rather than structural ones. Mark Wingate's award-winning piece Klang, Kar, und Melodie, serves as a point of departure to: 1) rethink and clarify linguistic terminology and methodologies while adapting these to musical analysis; 2) propose a taxonomy that helps identify the features that contribute to the perception of narrative qualities in music; 3) establish an inter-disciplinary and inter-analytical approach applicable to musique concrète. This article concludes by introducing the narrative cube: a three-dimensional model that evaluates, comparatively, the musical parameters that generate narrative interpretations.

University of Newcastle, 2013

2008

This thesis examines the notion of 'music-theatre as music' in its relation to myth. It is provided as an indispensable tool of critical commentary for the accompanying performances (that are included in the submission in DVD documentation) and as an in-depth analysis of the issues that relate to the concepts at hand. In the context of this project, the term 'music-theatre as music' is understood as a music-theatre that derives musical strategies of organisation in the composition of 'all theatrical means' (Lehmann 2006: 91) from music-centric conceptual models. Initially based on the connection that Levi-Strauss draws between myth and music, the research explores alternative ways that the affinity between the two domains can be used in the creation of 'music-theatre as music' performances. In the first performance Clastocysm (2007), the project examines practically the idea of structuring and performing mythical fragments based on the notion of the &...

Exploration of "narrative" as a way of understanding non-programmatic classical instrumental music. Surveys other approaches from the time (up to 1991); develops the position stated in author's "Music as Drama."

Violence: An International Journal, 2020

This article addresses the possibility that Western classical music might be used as a source of hope for a post-conflict future by considering a literary depiction of music and conflict resolution. As a case study, Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo is identified as a “musico-literary novel,” and established within the framework of Stephen Benson’s “literary music” and Hazel Smith’s methodological development of musico-literary studies through extended interdisciplinarity. The novel features three Sarajevan citizens who hear a cellist play in the rubble-strewn streets, and their music-listening experiences motivate them to work toward a post-conflict future. To consider the potential insights and blind spots surrounding ideas about music’s potential power in this narrative, the soundscape of the novel is identified to establish the significance of sound, music, and active listening in the text; parallels are highlighted between the ending of The Cellist of Sarajevo and Micha...