Adapting Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘curious’ poetry: approaches to musical narrativization in my recent composition ‘The Land of Nod’

Abstract

Abstract In this article, I present and critically examine the ways in which I conceived my recent musical composition, ‘The Land of Nod’ (from At Night for clarinet quintet), as an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem of the same name, with close reference to Marie-Laure Ryan’s theoretical frameworks for the analysis of transmedia narratology and ‘storyworlds’, and Byron Almén’s A Theory of Musical Narrative. As a relatively rare example of scholarship that intersects the fields of adaptation, music theory, and practice (as) research, I situate this work within its wider disciplinary context, and consider the possible benefits that such interdisciplinarity and methodological eclecticism can offer, especially for creative practitioners in music.