This study presents an attempt to pin down the potential narrative qualities of instrumental, wordless music. Comparing as case-studies two pieces in sonata form–the first movements of Beethoven's ‘Pastoral’ Symphony (as representative of Classical narrative possibilities) and of Mahler's Ninth Symphony (as representative of its composer's idiosyncratic treatment of those in the late nineteenth century) –I propose a ‘narrative’ analysis of their musical features, applying the notions of ‘story’, ‘discourse’ and other concepts from the literary theory of, for example, Genette, Prince and Barthes. An analysis at three semiotic levels (morphological, syntactic and semantic), corresponding to denotative/connotative levels of meaning, shows that Mahler's materials qualify better as narrative ‘events’ on account of their greater number, their individuality and their rich semantic connotations. Through analysis of the ‘discursive techniques’ of the two pieces I show that a weaker degree of narrativity correspond...

Four. Musical Narratology: A Theoretical Outline

Music and Narrative Revisited: Degrees of Narrativity in Beethoven and Mahler

The article is a discussion of Goran Kapetanovic's work Sažeti prikaz neumitnog i tragicnog toka sudbine koji je krhko bice Male Sirene odveo u potpunu propast (A Brief Account of the Inexorable and Tragic Course of Destiny that Led the Fragile Being of the Little Mermaid to Total Disaster). This multilayered postmodernist work from the closing decade of the 20th century is discussed here from several perspectives: as a postmodernist intertext, as a drama (tragedy), and as hypertext in relation to Stravinsky's Petrushka, which Kapetanovic used as the model and hypotext for his own piece.

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Four. Musical Narratology: A Theoretical Outline

Citations

Music and Narrative Revisited: Degrees of Narrativity in Beethoven and Mahler

The Little Mermaid: By Goran Kapetanović as a postmodernist tragedy

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