2. The issue of narrativity in instrumental music

2.0 Introduction and definition

This chapter aims to offer insight into the specific challenges and opportunities of instrumental music and theatre in family performances, with a focus on narrativity as a key element. Identifying narrative elements in music can form the basis for strategies that promote the seamless integration of instrumental music and theatre.

Narrative comes from the Latin word 'narrare' meaning to tell (DBNL, 2012c). It denotes the narrative nature of a text: narrativity is the specific feature (parameter) or set of features that makes something a story. Simplifying, one could say that narrativity consists in the interplay of four characteristics:

1. A narrator/musician reports to the reader or listener (communication);
2. about a sufficiently recognizable and interesting series of events (relevance);
3. which are interconnected by logical-causal (coherence);
4. and chronological relationships (temporal progression).

So, it seems that music will tell an interesting series of events by musical parameters such as the inversion of a motive, or the arrival of a cadence, or a modulation from D to G. Another option is that music will somehow tell an interesting series of events by non-musical events. To find objects of musical narrative, it is useful to give a brief idea of the musical perception of the ordinary but musically sensitive and practiced listener. First, there's the basic level where listeners recognize tones like pitches, durations, and timbres. Next, there's a level where listeners perceive rhythms, motives, phrases, melodies, and harmonies, considering these as the building blocks of music. This level involves hearing the motion in music rather than just succession or alteration. Another level focuses on the gestures or actions perceived in the music, imagining the music "doing" something. Noting that the term "musical gesture," is not the same as the actual gestures of performers. Lastly, there's a level where listeners grasp the states of mind behind the gestures or actions, known as the expressive level of musical understanding. Assuming this rough picture of musical experience, what then are the possible narrative objects of music? They would seem, at a minimum, to be these:

1. Gestures: refers to the movements and actions expressed in the music. It can encompass rhythmic patterns, melodic movements, dynamic contrasts, and other expressive elements that shape and convey meaning in the music.
2. Actions: refers to the events or occurrences implied or suggested by the music. These actions can range from simple movements to complex scenarios, depending on the context and interpretation of the listener.
3. Expressions: refers to the emotions, feelings, and moods expressed by the music. It encompasses the various expressive qualities of the music, such as joy, sadness, fear, excitement, etc., which can resonate with the listener on a deeper level.
4. Mental states: refers to the inner mental states, thoughts, and perceptions evoked or implied by the music. It involves the listener's subjective experience and how the music can influence their thoughts, imagination, and memories.

When we compare these characteristics with the central features of narrativity, we must note that these are much more implicit. They cannot clearly indicate the past or future or reflect on the relevance of the story. Therefore, the limited musical framework of a big amount of listeners requires explicit narration as compensation to understand the story. For this problem, they can add other features to it, such as a narrative voice or a narrative perspective.

Narrative structures are also common in various fields such as science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, law and the arts. This has led to the view that narrativity is considered a universal cognitive mechanism through which we construct, articulate and communicate knowledge about reality. Being aware that a concept like narrativity is always a subject that is changing. That means that there are various definitions of narrativity and that taking these different forms into account can throw new light on the disputed narrativity in music. Also the terminology of narrativity is used in different contexts.

To explore relevance, we first highlight the narrative elements in the fields of music and theatre separately. Narrative elements are the formal building blocks of a story or concept. Afterwards, the common elements and important differences in narrativity in music and theatre are reviewed.

2.1 Exploring narrativity in instrumental music

Human beings interpret narratively

When listeners talk about their listening experiences, they often refer to music as if it were a narrative. Logical, cause the humans interpret narratively. But can music actually tell a story? Can music be narrative? Traditionally, narrativity is associated with verbal and visual texts, and the mere possibility of musical narrativity is highly debated. The titles of different instrumental pieces for example already implies that the pieces have the stories in itself. The concept of narrativity is complex and versatile, as well as the different approaches from various disciplines and philosophical perspectives. It still remains a dynamic area of research and discussion within the broader context of art, culture and human expression. These differences lead to proponents and opponents of narrativity in music.

Proponents

Anthony Newcomb and Gregory Karl, for instance, focus on the concept of musical plot. Carolyn Abbate, on the other hand, emphasizes the notion of voice in those exceptional instances where she does acknowledge that music can be narrative. According to Dell’Antonio, is structural listening a manner of musical comprehension through the reconstruction of the composer’s intentions. Philosopher Vincent Meelberg also stands by that meaning of musical comprehension. In his article ‘ongrijpbare begrijpelijkheid’, he delves deeper into Mieke Bal's narrative theory to discover and understand narrativity in atonal music. (Meelberg, 2008c)

According to Bal’s theory, one way to structure music is to narrativize it, meaning to consider it as a story. Bal is a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist and professor Emirata in Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam. In her narrative theory, a story is defined as a representation of temporal development. It is a sequence of logically and chronologically related events that are told - represented. This implies that when a musical piece can be seen as a story, the musical events in this piece are somehow logically and chronologically organized. By successfully narrativizing a musical piece, the listener can grasp the music, as it is structured in a specific, namely a logical and chronological, manner.

Role of temporality, imagination and expectations

Since music is a temporal cultural expression, Meelberg argues that, it seems reasonable to argue that many pieces of music have such potential. Temporality is, after all, an important aspect of narrativity. Moreover, many musical compositions involve the presentation of musical material undergoing a certain development. Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) supports this idea and outline how listeners unconsciously detect patterns in tonal music, emphasizing certain notes/chords to recognize a piece's structure. This ability enables them to compare improvisations on a theme, comprehend the composition's overall structure, and dissect its parts, determining transitions and key notes in melodies. This cognitive process parallels how readers instinctively parse texts, distinguishing between main ideas and supporting details, organizing them into paragraphs, sentences, and phrases. If a listener or reader fails to discern the important components of the whole, they are unable to comprehend the structure and may disengage. In short, a story in music is nothing more than a representation of temporal development. However, sometimes, even after listening, you still might not know what the story is about. This is challenging to determine because, unlike linguistic stories, music lacks clear referential qualities. So, if a listener fails to discern the important components of the whole, they are unable to comprehend the structure and may disengage. For example the word 'tree' refers more or less unambiguously to the concept of a 'tree,' and therefore, language users proficient in Dutch can understand this word. On the other hand, an A-minor chord does not have a clear reference. This chord may be labeled as 'sad' in some musical contexts, but this is far from universally applicable. Moreover, a connotation like 'sad' is by no means as specific as the concept 'tree' to which the word 'tree' refers.

Music operates within the system of prediction, where there is a sequence of events, and occasionally, there is a slight deviation from expectations. This is linked to our reward system, which is sensitive not only to the reward itself but also to the anticipation of it. Through years of exposure to music, both children and adults develop a prediction of how music is structured. This could involve standard chord progressions or melodies consisting of notes from a specific scale. A skilled composer intentionally includes occasional 'violations' of these regularities in their pieces. It is precisely these deviations that stimulate our reward system. However, maintaining a balance between predictability and surprise is crucial, as emphasized by Robert Zatorre (Van Der Grient & Van Der Grient, 2022c). It shouldn't be excessively surprising, which is why creating beautiful music is so challenging. Zatorre is a cognitive neuroscientist whose laboratory studies the neural substrate for auditory cognition, with special emphasis on two complex and characteristically human skills: speech and music.

Due to prior exposure to music and the static information derived from it, everyone possesses a different frame of reference. Because of this frame of reference, some listeners are unable to understand and structure important components of music that is outside the frame of reference. As a result, they drop out and the frame of reference remains static. This explains why people have varying preferences for different types of music. Research by Zatorre indicates that when we listen to a song, our brain processes the melody and lyrics in different ways in the various hemispheres. The sound contains temporal cues related to changes in time, such as rhythm, and spectral cues, which pertain to the frequencies or pitches in the sound.

The referential power of music as narrative as musical representation

Music cannot explicitly refer to extramusical phenomena, as language can, which may limit its capacity to fulfill the most basic function of a story. Music is self-referential, while verbal stories can do nothing but refer to something outside themselves. Critics who use these arguments to support their rejection of musical narrativity assume a very specific and limited conception of narrativity.

Some listeners (as told at the beginning) are able to hear gestures and expression in instrumental music, but is that enough to say that the music represents those things? Sadly, no. Because artistic representation will be most clearly illustrated by pictorial representation (intentional understanding). For a painting to represent a tree, it must certainly show a tree, but the painter of the painting must have actually intended it that way. Artistic expressiveness, on the other hand, is not a strong intentional concept, nor is the content of gestures; a piece of music can express an emotion or embody musical gestures without the composer having intended those gestures or that emotion to be heard in it, and in some cases even without the composer having foreseen or expected that intention.  Looking at it that way, the relationship between music and the gestures and expressions it makes us hear may be suggestive rather than representational.

Evidently, verbal stories form the paradigm to which all stories, or otherwise, are expected to adhere. In other words, they are unwilling to consider narrativity on a meta-level where it is no longer strictly dependent on its medium specificity. Critics rejecting musical narrativity cannot, or do not want to, detach the theory from the medium. Their idea of narrativity is not medium-independent.

Contrast with opponents

This is why theorists like Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990) and Werner Wolf (2002) argue that music cannot be narrative. Language has a more or less specific content, which, although open to various interpretations, is at least clearly referential. Music lacks this property. Indeed, verbal stories can represent phenomena, ideas, and perspectives that cannot be represented in the same direct manner by music. A verbal story can convey a character's thoughts, posit an unreliable narrator, or retell historical events. Music, lacking the referential qualities of language, is incapable of doing so. Therefore, music cannot be narrative. Although much music seems like a story due to its temporal and linear nature, because a musical 'story' would lack content, it is not a true story.

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‘Music and language are played off against each other: language communicates reasoning and is reciprocal and music is not. Musical meaning is therefore a paradox in which there is an absolute meaning on the one hand that is unprovable on the other. 'Music means nothing and yet it means everything'. (Yankélévitch)

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Comparison of verbal stories

The definition of a story that Meelberg employs, a story being the representation of a temporal development, indeed includes the element of referentiality since a story must represent a temporal development, referring to such a development. In music, temporal developments can be represented, and listeners can perceive certain tensions and relaxations in the music.

Tension and relaxation in music

Music generates tension and relaxation by suggesting that musical events lead to other events. Musical events trigger subsequent musical events. However, there is no actual causality here but a representation of causality. In a tonal musical piece, there is no physical necessity for a dominant chord to resolve to the tonic. The listener expects the resolution due to musical conventions and precedents they are familiar with. So, the listener interprets the dominant as if it wants to resolve to the tonic. In other words, the dominant chord is a representation of musical tension, not a musical phenomenon that is inherently tense, even though its physical structure is as stable as any other identical musical sound. The same applies to tension and relaxation generated by musical parameters such as rhythm and dynamics.

Tension doesn't necessarily reside in the tones themselves, unlike, for example, stretching a rubber band, but is created through the interaction between the music and the listener, who has certain expectations regarding the music they are listening to. This brings us back to Zatorre's perspectives. Music can evoke a sense of tension and relaxation because a musical event seems to be the cause of a subsequent event. The listener is, in a way, 'programmed' by the music to have specific expectations for this music. Tension and relaxation, the building blocks of temporal development in music, are not physically present in the music but are represented by it. The music refers to tension and relaxation.

This is also the case in verbal stories, where causal connections between events also play a crucial role. A verbal story consists of representations of events. It is this collection of representations that is conveyed to the reader. These stories also represent causality between events instead of presenting actual causality. In a story, for instance, where it is told that a boy falls from a tree, there is no physical necessity for this boy to actually land on the ground. The words forming this story do not physically and necessarily cause it. The reader may expect the boy to reach the ground, but it does not have to happen necessarily. Actual, physical causality does not exist in verbal stories, just as it does not in music. Musical causality and related phenomena like linearity, purposefulness, and development are not inherent in the music itself; they are represented by the music. This means that music, and musical stories, refer to phenomena that exist outside of the music itself. What a musical story is about is the temporal development heard in the music. The meaning of this development is not explicitly expressed by the music. Still, since the musical story does refer to something beyond the musical sounds themselves, namely precisely this temporal development caused by the play of tension and relaxation, this story has content.

2.2 Exploring narrativity in theatre

Within theatre an evolution has slowly taken place, dramatic theatre became postdramatic theatre in which different theatrical elements are no longer arranged in a particular hierarchy, but where different elements stand side by side. Text is for instance, no longer the most important theatrical element, whereas within the dramatic theatre the text was actually seen as the most important, telling a story was paramount. Different characters such as text, image, music and space stand side by side each other, but that does not mean they are not in conflict. Theatre scholar Hans Thies Lehmann speaks in this case of parataxis, a term indicating that elements stand side by side without a certain hierarchy. Like Wagner's theory of the Gesammtkunstwerk: an ideal interplay of all the arts. The elements go into dialogue with each other than just being present next to each other. Within postdramatic theatre, this ideal has become more real than ever before. Theatre is no longer a story, but it has become an experience become one in which people are immersed in different components such as music, images, text, both presented live on stage and through digital media presented (Van den Kieboom, 2008).

The essence of narrativity in theater lies in the explicit storytelling that often takes center stage. (Image and Narrative - article, z.d.-c). Manfred Jahn’s expansive definition of a narrative as ‘anything, in the widest possible sense, that tells or represents a story’. A narrative thus exceeds the terrain of the exclusively verbally narrated texts and functions as a container concept for all modes of signification. Traditional 'narrative narratology' limits itself to the construction of different narrative units into a story, as if a story were a self-contained unit, independent of the surrounding world. Jahn emphasizes that the interaction between the performance and the audience is an intrinsic element of the theatrical text. Unlike larger productions where text may play a peripheral role in narrativity, in theater, stories are enacted and performed. The dynamics between speech and audience participation are fundamental components, integral to the textual construction.

In recent years, a trend of solitary speeches in theater, like monologues or soliloquies, has gained popularity (Petitjean, 2019c). These lengthy verbal expressions embody key principles of dramatic plays, maintaining unity of plot, ordered progression of actions, chronological development, and explicit causality. Contrary to a strictly chronological development, these solitary speeches often exhibit polyphonic qualities, incorporating multiple characters into the narrative. This shift reflects a broader trend aligning theater more closely with the narrative structure found in novels.

Aristotle's triadic structure, encompassing a beginning, middle, and end, serves as the foundation for understanding narratives in theater. This structure, also reflected in Campbell's separation, initiation, and return, emphasizes the essential elements Aristotle identified for good drama. These include plot, theme, characters, dialogue, music/rhythm, and spectacle, each contributing to the overall narrative experience in theater.

Building on Aristotle's foundations, Robert McKee, author, lecturer and story consultant, delves into what makes a story compelling. His narrative structure encompasses an equilibrium at the story's outset, an event disrupting this balance, a need to restore equilibrium, a struggle to achieve balance, and the resolution of success or failure in this struggle. This structure provides a blueprint for crafting engaging and impactful narratives in theater.

The distinction between mimesis (imitation) and diegesis (story) in Plato's contrast adds nuance to theater narrativity. (Nünning & Sommer, z.d.). Mimesis involves the direct presentation of actions, while diegesis entails storytelling through narration. Ansgar Nünning introduces the concepts of mimetic and diegetic narrativity, highlighting the difference between representing events and the verbal transmission of narrative content. Diegetic narrativity presupposes a speaker, a proposition, and a communicative situation, while mimetic narrativity focuses on the representation of temporal and/or causal sequences without these prerequisites. The concept of mimesis is therefore said to have originated in the world of music and dance and then later passed into a theory of theatre and other art forms. (DBNL, 1990) In music, repetition of movements and rhythms is used. The same movement is repeated in some different way. In and through this repetition, something like music is created.  Besides the repetition of the same movements, motifs and measures in a slightly different way, the piece of music as a whole can also be repeated or re-enacted, even in a different place and under different circumstances. This principle of repetition and variation also applies to theatre, where actors recreate characters and situations according to a prescribed scenario. This is a representation of possible acts and dialogues. Not only do the actors mimic and represent something, but also the plot, intrigue or narrative is mimetic. A 'set' of events is staged. Usually, those events did not actually happen, but belong to the possible.

Narrativity in theatre today

Roel Meijvis's (2023b) is writer of essays and articles and theatre maker. His essay positions narrativity as a 'key to' understanding, emphasizing its revival in the theater landscape. This renewed attention to narrativity aligns with a shift among theater-makers towards individual values, where stories are told with a purpose and a desire for reflection. The essay prompts questions about the evolving nature of narrativity in theater and its potential contrast with the increasing narrativity in music, sparking a broader exploration of narrative trends across artistic mediums. 

2.4 Conclusion

In conclusion, examining narrativity in instrumental music and theater reveals intriguing parallels and differences in how stories are conveyed and experienced. Both forms of communication consist of the interplay of four characteristics: communication, relevance, coherence and temporal progression. The features of musical narrative are much more implicit than the central features of narrativity. Therefore, the listener's limited musical framework and perception requires explicit narration as a compensation to understand the story. Narrative structures occur in different domains, thus narrativity is considered a universal cognitive mechanism by which we construct, articulate and communicate knowledge about reality.

The possibility of musical narrativity is highly controversial and not medium-independent. This has led to proponents and opponents of narrativity in music. A narrative in music is nothing more than a representation of development over time: a temporal cultural expression according to Meelberg. Tension and relaxation, the building blocks of temporal development in music, are not physically present in music but are suggested by it. Because music has no clear referential qualities, listeners cannot structure and understand complex music that falls outside their frame of reference. As a result, they drop out and the frame of reference remains static. Verbal narratives can explicitly represent extra-musical phenomena. Music cannot and therefore we call it self-referential. It is thus suggestive rather than representative.

With the evolution to postdramatic theater, text is no longer seen as the main theatrical element in explicitly telling a story. Traditional "narrative narratology" was limited to the construction of various narrative units into a linear story. Temporality embodies the important principles of drama: unity of plot, ordered progression of actions, chronological development and explicit causality. The distinction between mimesis (imitation) and diegesis (narrative) in Plato's contrast adds nuance to theatrical narrative.

Both musicians and theater makers are experts in their own form of narrativity, but the success of creating a performance lies in the ability to leverage the strengths of each discipline and fuse them into a cohesive whole. Thus, it requires an integrated approach in which both disciplines complement each other to create an effective narrative experience. Finally, narrativity is a universal cognitive mechanism by which we construct, articulate and communicate knowledge about what we perceive through music and theater.

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