Narrative

Abstract

Narrative music, enacts both a tale and its telling, like a film or a play. Fred Maus's discussion of music as drama in Beethoven's Op. 95, is certainly an example of a scholar thinking through the diegetic hypothesis, but the results are light years away in theoretical sophistication and critical nuance from Jrme-Joseph de Momigny's assertions about Handel's family drama. Scholars responding to objections to the idea of music as narrative have often advanced musics lack of linguistic specificity as a positive. To describe the world to which epic music alludes is denied to it: the music is as clear as it is cryptic. Chopin's G major Prelude, Op. 28, No. 3, the first example of transvaluation provided in Byron Almn's A Theory of Musical Narrative , offers a conflict that is subtle, its violence conceptual rather than visceral. Gesturally, the music's body language feels calmer, and so veering into G does not feel like another rupture.

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