Music and Narrative

Abstract

This special issue has its origins in a paper session at the 6th Biennial International Conference on Music since 1900, at Keele University in July 2009. One of the conference's sub-themes was 'Music and Narrative' and co-organiser Nicholas Reyland convened and chaired a session titled 'Narrative theory, narrative film music: new perspectives', which generated an inordinate amount of animated discussion amongst its participants. The five of us involved (Nicholas Reyland, Annette Davison, Guido Heldt, Miguel Mera, and myself) agreed to meet again to develop these 'new perspectives' further, and at a subsequent 'Film Music and Narrative' study day hosted by Annette Davison at the University of Edinburgh in June 2011, we were joined by colleagues from other departments in presenting updated or new papers: from film studies, Daniel Yacavone and Ian Garwood; and from literature, Nick Davis. It was particularly gratifying to see that the questions that were being asked by musicologists were of interest to scholars working on film generally or in the field of narratology, though it also served to highlight the difficulties in labelling the discourse to which we were all contributing: was this film musicology, musicological film studies (to invoke a distinction that William H. Rosar [2009] has been particularly keen to make), screen music studies, or something else entirely? Whatever the problems in classifying the discourse, the interdisciplinary nature of the study day generated further lively discussion - to which a number of other attendees made prominent contributions - and eventually resulted in the essays presented here (where other publication plans have allowed). These demonstrate something of the 'new perspectives' that Reyland's initial Keele session sought, challenging prevailing ideas about the relationship between music encountered in film and narrative theory, or interrogating more closely what might appear to be obvious and inviolable associations between music and narrative. In so doing, they represent a number of views or approaches, offering us a snapshot of a discourse that is arguably entering an exciting period of change as scholars grapple with the legacy of the first generation of academically rooted film music scholarship, and seek to carve out their own discursive space (Bloomian rhetoric duly noted). The essays are presented in an order that reflects broadly the extent to which theorising is of prime concern to their arguments; thus, the latter essays invoke rather more case studies in exploring the application of narrative theory to film music.In his article, Nick Davis explores the distinction made in much theorising of narrative between 'story' and 'discourse', and its usual application to film music - in which music that is interpreted as part of a narrating act (discourse) is distinguished from that which is part of a narrated world (story). This can be considered another expression of the diegetic/non-diegetic split with which film music scholarship is familiar. Davis, however, seeks to challenge this distinction, and invokes the visual analogy of the Klein bottle - which, although experienced phenomenologically as possessing an inside and outside, is nevertheless a single continuous surface - to suggest that splitting 'story' from 'discourse' is analytically unhelpful. Acknowledging that although music does not narrate in film, it does play a crucial role in narrativity's construction, Davis thus proceeds to articulate two families of narrativity tropes in which music may play a role: metaleptic tropes, which acknowledge the existence of a wider world in which the narrating act is situated; and tropes that produce and exploit forms of cognitive dissonance (between the storyworld created and that in which the narrative is narratedreceived, for example). He explores these using scenes from Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947), and The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010). In a final example, he examines the calypso performances of I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), noting that as in Herzog's documentary, music is experienced phenomenologically as discourse, yet at the same time it is not supplemental to story but in fact highly productive of it - just as the single surface of the Klein bottle does not distinguish between inside and outside. …